January-February 1998 No. 4 $2 Internationalist PRI Death Squads and Counterinsurgency in Chiapas . Cardenas Popular Front Ties Workers to Capitalism Mexico Down With the Regime of Death - For Workers Revolution! See Page 3 .Jobless Sit-Ins, Minority Youth Fury Over Killer Cops Truckers Blockade France ................ 37 ' , ~ .< ~ New Repression Against Brazilian Trotskyists .......47 2 The Internationalist January-February 1998 Jn this issue ... WV Attacks Defense of Mexico: Down with the Regime of Brazilian Militants Death-For Workers Revolution ...... 3 The leadership of the International Communist League has reached a new low in its vendetta against the Liga Quarta-lntemacionalista do Brasil/ For Permanent Revolution Internationalist Group. This issue of The Internationalist reprints IG state­ in Mexico ........................................ 11 ments from July and September 1997 (see pages 58 and 67) taking apart the attempts by the !CL to stitch back together its patchwork of slanders and distortions after we had already refuted its lie that the LQB had brought the Another Invention by WV ................. 12 capitalist courts into the unions, when in fact Geraldo Ribeiro, the elected president of the Volta Redonda Municipal Workers Union, and his LQB com­ Victory to Tijuana Maquiladora rades were hit with no less than seven court actions, in retaliation for their Workers ........................................... 13 fight to get the cops out ofthe union. Now the Brazilian comrades have been hit by an eighth court suit (see appeal page 48). In this context, WV (No. 68 l, Latin America: Opportunist Left 2 January 1998) comes out with a sinister smear in an attempt to undermine Embraces the Cops ........................16 international solidarity with the class-struggle militants under attack. WV recycles the lies which we have already proven to be false, that Myra Tanner Weiss, Fighter come from the same pro-police elements and popular front city govern­ for Socialism .................................. 21 ment that launched this repression. Labor organizations around the world have protested the repression (see article page 50). Yet not only does the Defeat Racist Death Penalty in WV article s&y not a word in defense of the victims, it denounces our Massachusetts ............................... 29 campaign as "a cynical sham," sneers about our "'urgent' call" for soli­ darity, implies the repression is only "according to the IG," etc. It vilely So How About the NPAC attacks as "dangerous huslers" the targets of this repression, a largely Popular Front? ............................... 33 black group of working-class militants with decades of struggle, who have been fired from their jobs and hit by endless court and cop repres­ Truckers Blockade France ............ 37 sion for fighting class collaboration. We will refute the latest WV slanders, as we have every one of its past attacks, and show the sordid role the !CL leaders have played throughout Defend Salvador Phone Workers. 47 this period. Our response will be mailed to our subscribers and published in the next issue of The Internationalist. It will also be available on our web site New Repression Against Brazilian (www.internationalist.org), or can be obtained by writing to the Internation­ Trotskyists .................................. 48 alist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY l 0008. International Outcry Against Brazil Visit the Internationalist Group on the Internet Witchhunt ................................... 50 http://www.internationalist.org Now available on our site are: Brazil: Program of the Class • Founding Statement of the • Updates from the IG and LOB Struggle Caucus ........................ 54 Internationalist Group • Articles from Vanguarda Operaria • Articles from The Internation­ • Articles from El lnternacionalista alist No. 1, 2 and 3 • Marxist readings WVs Frenzied Slanders Can't Hide ICL Leaders' Brazil Betrayal ...... 58 7~ ICL Takes Slander Campaign to Internationalist Brazilian Labor Congress .......... 67 A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism for the Reforging of the Fourth International McCarthyite Witch hunt Against Bay Publication of the Internationalist Group • Area Labor Activists .................. 72 EDITORIAL BOARD: Jan Norden (editor), Abram Negrete, Buenaventura Santamaria, Marjorie Salzburg, Socorro Valero. Front page photo: Tzotzil Indian women resist Mexican army occupation of The Internationalist (ISSN 1091·2843) is published bimonthly, skipping July-August, by Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. Chenalh6, Chiapas, January 1998 Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614·8711 E·mail: [email protected] Subscription blank graphic based on a Subscriptions: US$10 for five issues. poster by V.A. Rodchenko, Books (1925) No.4 January-February 1998-" January~February 1998 The Internationalist 3 PRI Death Squads and Counterinsurgency in Chiapas Cardenas Popular Fro'nt Ties Workers to Capitalism Mexico Down with the Regime of Death­ For Workers Revolution! JANUARY 4-The Christmas eve massacre in the rural munici­ Already, the government has used the slaughter as an excuse to pality of Chenalh6, in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas, flood the area with thousands of army troops, extending their was a military action of hideous mass extermination and a calcu­ occupation from the lowland rain forest region, the base of the lated provocation. The slaughter by a paramilitary death squad Zapatista rebels, to the Chiapas highlands. was intended to set the stage for a crackdown on the Zapatista The massacre in Chenalh6 is not an isolated atrocity, and National Liberation Army (EZLN) on the fourth anniversary of still less a case of feuding within the Indian population, as its New Year's Day uprising against the bloody regime that has Mexico's then interior minister cynically claimed. At whatever presided over Mexican capitalism without interruption since 1929. level it was planned and ordered, this was an act of capitalist state terrorism, including participation offorces armed and trained by the U.S. military as part of counterinsurgency operations. The professional kill­ ers will not be stopped by humanitar-ian appeals, lib­ eral editorials for Indian rights, or by removing a few officials. They cannot be defeated by peasant insur­ gents in remote regions, or by calls on the government to "negotiate" with the guerrillas. The fight must be taken to the cities, factories and the centers of power both in Mexico and the United States. l. Acting in broad daylight, on the morning of De- cember 22, a squad of about 60 uniformed men at­ tacked some 350 Tzotzil Indian refugees while they were praying for peace in the hamlet of Acteal in Chenalh6, Chiapas. For six hours or more, the murder­ ers went about the slaughter, executing the defenseless peasants with shots to the head and ·mutilating their bodies with machetes. Most ofthe victims were women (21) and children (15); none ofthe refugees were armed. A 13-year-old youth who survived recounted how he watched from hiding as the killers shot his father on the floor, slit the throat ofhis pregnant mother and then ripped the foetus from her belly with a knife. This hap­ pened in other cases as well. A total of 45 dead bodies were collected later, with another five reported miss­ ing while scores were horribly injured. Witnesses who escaped said that many of the murderers kept smiling as they carried out their heinous crime. Caught in a hail ofgunfire from gunmen positioned in a half-moon formation, the terrified women and chil­ Reuters dren fled from the wooden chapel in Acteal and lndtan mourners bury 45 refugees slain in December 22 scrambled down an embankment, with the killers in massacre in municipality of Chenalh6, Chiapas, Mexico. pursuit. When the women tried to hide, their children's 4 The Internationalist January-February 1998 cries gave them away. After the killing was over, the assassins that the army of U.S. mjlitary, CIA, DEA and other operatives methodically went from hut to hut, stripping cJothes from the get out of Mexico! An attack on the Indian insurgents and their bodies and looting possessions. The pools of blood on the floor supporters must be met by mobilizing the power of labor, in­ of the religious shrine and the rivulets that flowed into the river cluding strike action, to bring th_e country to a halt. are the symbol ofthe dirty war against the oppressed Indian popu­ The rows of coffins laboriously carried back up the hills lation in Mexico. This is a crime against humanity as religious by relatives of the victims to be buried in the killing grounds leaders and human rights groups have declared. But Chiapas is a of Chenalh6 are the grisly face of the New World Order of battlefield of a class war that extends around the globe, and it Yankee imperialism. Emboldened by counterrevolution in the will take the revolutionary mobilization of the power of the in­ Soviet Union and East Europe, the bosses and their govern­ ternational working class to avenge the dead and subject the kill­ ments want to jack up their profits by increasing the exploita~ ers to proletarian justice. ti on of working people worldwide. Today, Mayan Indian rebels As a result of an international outcry, Mexican president in Chiapas confront the same capitalist-imperialist enemy as Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Le6n hypocritically declared that embattled unionists in the United States and Europe. The anti­ the mass killing was a "cruel, absurd and unacceptable crimi­ Soviet Cold War is over, but the death squads that spearheaded nal act." Yet the massacre was the direct product of his gov­ it i.n Central America have reappeared in Mexico. To put an ernment, his party and his policies. As evidence mounted that end to the endless massacre, what is required is a fight for the killers were tied to the government political machine, the workers revolution, mobilizing the powerful, millions-strong Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the PRI mayor of Mexican proletariat, and extending across the borders to the· Chenalh6 was arrested along with 39 of his cohorts.