Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Americas

by David Finkel  |  Socialist Resistance no45  |  page 15

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

In a vicious act of class reprisal, leaders of the Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land (FPDT) in Atenco, Mexico, were each sentenced on 5 May to 67 years and 6 months jail for the events in Atenco in early May 2006. THE TIMING of the sentencing of Ignacio del Valle Medina, Felipe Alvarez (Left) Ignacio del Valle with Marcos: above, the heavyhanded crackdown in Atenco, a year ago.

Mexico City airport. Under previous president Vicente Fox of the right wing PAN party and now under neolibleral president Felipe Calderon, the number of political prisoners has gown to over 400. Deaths in social protests are becoming much more common too - at the highest level since the military repression against the Party of the Poor in Guerrero state in the early

This is the consequence of the neoliberalisation of Mexico since the late 1980s. Social inequality is growing rapidly - Mexico now has some of the richest people in the world and many of the poorest, especially in the countryside.

The Mexican bourgeoisie, dripping in narco superprofits and the profits from agribusiness and the maquiladora assembly plants, has responded with extreme violence to the explosion of social struggles.

The Atenco leaders now face what are in effect life sentences. A huge international campaign for their release and the release of all Mexican political prisoners is needed.