The fight for political democracy and social struggles view, that we were not in a position to get registration as a legal national political party. We opted for a fight to gain recognition as a national political association, as provided for by the law, which posed very restrictive conditions We gathered the 9,000 signatures that the government required. We handed in the
The following interview was given to Gerry Foley in Paris in February by
Patricio Margarito, a leader of peasant organizing work and electoral activity for the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, PRT, Revolutionary Workers Party, Mexican section of the Fourth International.
The interview has been translated and edited.
not had the opportunity to review the edited text.
Question. In its recent issues, Bandera
Socialista, your paper, has had a number of articles about election
PRT slates in Indian towns in particular and mass mobilizations by the local people to keep the government party from stealing the elections. (We transand published one of them in the January 16 issue of IV.) It seems evident that the breakthrough the PRT made in the July 1982 national elections is continuing to widen, to offer the means for reaching and mobilizing new sections of working people.
Could you explain how the PRT's election campaign work has developed?
Answer.
To start with, I think you have to put this work in its general context. In 1977, the government began to make a series of electoral reforms.
This was to include legalization of a whole number of parties both on the left and right, as well as a reform of the mass
The regime thought that the media.
big oil income it was getting then would provide a sufficient basis for modernizing the Mexican political system. In fact, it had become ossified in many respects and was entering into crisis.
These moves were also in response to an obvious reality. The left had grown
There was a real mass movestronger.
ment. And there was real mass discontent, reflected in a continuous series of workers struggles since 1972, a growing peasant movement and democratic struggles by the shantytown dwellers, the students, primary school teachers and highthis situation, the political reform envisaged widening the spectrum of legal political parties in Mexico. At the same time, it should be noted that the government found it very difficult to stick even to this course of limited reforms. From the outset, the reform was threatened by systematic attacks on the right to strike and to demonstrate. For example, at the time public consultations on the reform were underway, there was a massive invasion of the university campus by thousands of cops.
Since 1977, the PRT has argued that the political reform represented a concession to the workers, a recognition of the scope attained by the protest movement, but at the same time it was a trap laid by the government. The regime was trying to divert the social discontent into parliamentary channels.
We proposed a struggle to win legal status for all political organizations without conditions. We argued it should not be the government that decided whether addresses of more than twenty headquarters throughout the country. We demonstrated that we had been in existence for more than ten years.
Moreover, we campaigned for an electoral alliance with the Communist Party, which had not yet gone into the fusion process that produced the PSUM (United Socialist Party of Mexico). At the time the CP was continuing to call for a so-called left coalition, as it had been doing since 1976. This bloc included other Stalinist organizations. But it was also joined by the Liga Socialista, one of the ancestor groups of the PRT
Nonetheless, from the beginning the attitude of the CP toward the PRT was very sectarian. It rejected any electoral alliance with us, and its reasons constantly changed.
At the time, we were not yet in a position to conduct a campaign of our own on a national scale. Nonetheless, we carried out some important local campaigns, launching nonregistered candidacies, which prepared the party for subsequent electoral work. Then, in 1980, we decided to launch the struggle to get the PRT registered as a recognized party and to compel the government to open us the way for registration of new political organizations.
The government had refused to open the registry because it claimed that the full spectrum had already been given legal status. Supposedly, this full spectrum included the government party, the PRI,
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MEXICO.
dacy of a former CP general secretary, the 1.5 percent barrier, getting 3 to 4
Arnaldo Martinez Verdugo. So, the dis-percent of the which claims to be a middle-of-the-road party. In reality, it is a strictly bourgeois party.
Then to the right of the PRI there were the PAN (National Action Party) and PDM (Mexican Democratic Party), two distinctly right-wing parties.
On the left it had recognized the Mexican CP, the Socialist Workers Party and the People's Socialist Party. The last two parties had traditionally played a role of supporting the government. There was also the Partido Autentico de la Revolucion Mexicana, representing discontented veterans of the Mexican revolution. This was supposed to represent the full spectrum.
We waged a struggle to demonstrate that we represented a distinct current on the Mexican left, that we had a program of our own, that we had a real presence in the mass organizations, and a base nationwide sufficient to qualify for legal status even in the very restrictive framework of the electoral law. We mounted a very extensive campaign that included public demonstrations, rallies, mass propaganda in the streets and in the public markets, collecting signatures, getting support from intellectuals. It included a whole process of involving broader sectors of the population. This got us a big audience in the press, radio
Q. Where did your presidential cam-
We decided to back Rosario Ibarra de Piedra for president in April 1981, before we gained registration. We intended to propose her as a candidate of the left as a whole, to the workers and peasants movement, and we intended to continue to push this even if the PRT did not gain legal status.
Finally, in June 1981, the government agreed to open up a new period for registo win registration, although this was made additionally difficult because a number of important organizations on the left could not see the importance of - fighting for legal status.
We did not decide to launch Rosario's
At this point, we considered that the process of discussion had been exhausted and would not lead to a front with other organizations. The CP and its allies, then in the process of forming the PSUM, refused to even discuss Rosario and said nothing about her.
We had argued that the left should run struggles that were being waged in Mexico, a candidate of unity and struggle. And, in our opinion, as the chairperson of the Rosario clearly represented the unity and of a series of democratic struggles being waged by the Mexican
But the PSUM launched the candiInternational Viewpoint 7 May 1984 cussion was finished with them. But we were able to form a bloc with the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo, a small organization of Stalinist origin, some of whose leaders had been involved in guerrilla struggle, and the Organizacion Comunista Proletaria. We worked out some common programmatic points and agreed that each organization could campaign separately for its own program. We then divided up the slate of federal
The PRT itself distributed part of the money and media time that it got from the state as a legally recognized party to the other organizations.
We consider the results of the campaign very good. We were able to reach people through our rallies, tours, and TV and radio programs. The government elections board, although it connived at massive fraud, accorded us a half million votes in the presidential elections, 1.7 percent.
Q. Yes, but the independent estimmates were that you got about twice that. And then they started a campaign to squeeze you out of the electoral arena 500,000 votes in the presidential elections, they slashed this to 300,000 for the parliamentary elections. we would not have the right to a parliamentary fraction. The secretary of government administration confided to a journalist, Sara Lojea, that it was no great problem to grant us legal recognition but that giving us a parliamentary fraction cause too many problems. government then started systematically applying this line in subsequent elections.
In state elections where we exceeded vote, they changed the
Peasants attend PRT election rally (DR) electoral laws. This happened, for example, in Baja California, where we took second place in the capital of the state, behind the PRI but ahead even of the PAN, the traditional bourgeois opposition party.
But the PRI struck a deal with one of the factions of the PSUM and got an electoral law that set the threshold at 5 percent. In return, the PRI gave the PSUM a thousand votes in a very thinly populated area and therefore a deputy.
In the state of Veracruz, where you have to get 13 thousand votes, that is, 1.5 percent, to get a deputy, they conceded us only 8 thousand, despite the fact that there were more than 3,000 persons in our windup rally alone. In this very big state, which has more than 7 million inhabitants, we held hundreds of rallies with an attendance up to 1,500 to 2,000 persons. We calculate that more than 40,000 persons attended these rallies.
These cases reflect a clear intent to keep us off elected bodies Moreover, in some states where the PRT has a very small organization, such as Chihuahua and Durango, the percentages registered for us were very low, less than 1 percent. We think we made some mistakes. For example, we did not do enough to organize poll watchers and this facilitated vote fraud. But we don't think the official results reflect the reality, because our campaign got broad participation in some areas.
These results put our party on the alert. It became clear that the government's intention was to push down our percentages more and more, not just to keep us out of the state Chambers of Deputies but to prepare the way for declaring in 1985 that the PRT vote has
7
collapsed and for removing our legal
At the August 1983 Central Committee plenum, we decided to make one of the major axes of the party's activity the fight for defense of our legal status, by showing the frauds in various states, by showing that we are being systematically blocked from access to the press and
The elections in Baja California came
So, we were much better organized, and since the people could see what happened the commercial bourgeois press had a lot of articles about the fraud against the PRT. Because it was obvious that there had been a government operation to block Comrade Tito Pinera, who is already a very well-known person in this state.
Q. Is this government operation to cut back political rights limited to the
The PRI is facing more and more trouble at the polls, and vote stealing and bullying are the main methods it
In Durango and Chihuahua, for example, there was a big increase in the PAN vote. Because of a crisis within the Mexican bourgeoisie, a lot more money was channelled to the PAN. And some elements in the PRI even ran as PAN candidates because their own party would not register them. In other cases, PRI members worked for the PAN on the
So, in Chihuahua, the PAN won 11 municipal governments, including the main one, the government of Ciudad Juarez, which is on the border with the US. The PAN today governs the majority of the population of the state.
After Chihuahua, the next state election was in Baja California del Norte. And the president, Miguel de la Madrid, virtually took personal charge of this campaign. He travelled to Baja California del Norte to talk to businessmen. He offered them enormous economic benefits, preferential treatment, import permits, subsidies, all sorts of things, in order to undermine the PAN's bourgeois base. And he had a certain success.
At the same time, he decided to revert to the old PRI methods, which it had never entirely abandoned, but which in the previous period had been better covered up. That is, there was open electoral fraud, stealing ballot boxes, stuffing ballot boxes, preventing poll watchers from the various parties from getting into the polls, preventing nongovernmental organizations from monitoring the vote, keeping the media and the press from publishing the propaganda of the other parties. The PRI even used the army and the police to steal ballot boxes.
All this amounted to a serious cutting back of the political freedoms that had been opened up. It represented a very grave attack on the democratic freedoms of the Mexican people. In fact, it fits into the framework of a whole reaction-
8 ary offensive, the austerity policy that the government is instituting in response to the economic crisis. It means imposing phoney Executive Committees on the unions, jailing union leaders, persecuting the peasant organizations.
So, they have started to try to close the minimal space that was opened up for political democracy. In these conditions, we have organized ourselves much better. In December, participated in the municipal and state elections in Tamaulipas in the northeast of the country. In three cities, we ran quite large campaigns.
In Reinoso, we won a section that had split from the Partido Autentico de la Revolucion Mexicana, which lost its registration in 1982. In this area, we calculate that during the campaign there were more than 100 rallies, more than one a day, with an average crowd of between 500 and 800. And all this in a city of
In Tula, all the communal lands commissioners [comisariatos ejidales — representatives chosen by the peasants] decided to make an alliance with us, and asked the PRT to register their candidates. Finally, all these peasants decided to join the PRT. They have handed in a list of 4,500 members to form a municipal committee.
This campaign won a clear majority over the PRI. In the windup rally, we got a crowd of 7,000 peasants, in a township that has 14,000 inhabitants. The PRI got only 2,000. When the vote took place, we had 55 poll watchers, one for every polling station and four for stations in the central district.
Nonetheless, the government used various maneuvers to rig the vote. First of all, it shortened the period for handing in the legal credentials for poll watchers. Young and old alike support PRT (DR)
It refused to take them before the last day, and then it rejected seven of them, leaving us no time to appeal. That meant that at seven polling stations we could not monitor the vote.
Then it sent so-called auxiliary representatives of the State Election Board to all the polling stations to overrule all the other election bodies. They prevented other poll watchers from being accredited, and in this way they blocked us from another seven or eight polling stations.
At the end of the day, when it was clear that the vote was going for the PRI in some polling stations, they stole the ballot boxes and held the count outside the Municipal Elections Committee. So, they grossly inflated the PRI vote, giving the government party 5,800 votes, and the PRT only 2,790. We waged a very hard struggle against this fraud
There were a lot of mobilizations and even discussion of seizing the municipal government building. But since this was the people's first experience in electoral opposition, they came to the conclusion in representative assemblies that they were not yet ready to wage such a head-on struggle. They proposed the alternative of consolidating a people's organization that at the same time would serve as a basis for future struggles.
We think that the advance in the consciousness of the peasants and the consolidation of a peasant council has been fundamental. There has been an agreement that the peasants will not take their problems to the township board but to the council, which will represent them in dealings with the federal and local governments. So, what has been set up is a sort of parallel representative body that ignores the township government except in cases where dealing with it is
International Viewpoint 7 May 1984
absolutely unavoidable.
Similar experiments are being carried out in other townships in the state of
In the mountainous state of Guerrero, one of the poorest areas in the country, won the township of Copaltwenty people at its windup rally, and the PRT had more than 1,700. So, the government saw that it had no chance of township that includes a central district and nine villages. It has about 8,000
So, the government sent soldiers in to steal the ballot boxes in all the villages. nearest city, and finally they just declared that the PRI had won the elections.
The reaction of the people was very violent, very strong, very courageous. They have gone through the experience before of overthrowing township governments, seizing the township building. A People's Commune has been set up that
Mexico City shantytown dwellers face grinding poverty (DR) elected its own township board. This marks a process of very deepgoing selforganization in the township, and it also involves assemblies to back up this parallel township government. We think that this is going to be fundamental for developing new forms of organizing the peasant population.
Copalillo is mostly Nahuatl speaking [language of the Aztecs, still spoken by a sizeable minority in Mexico], and the development of forms of parallel government have been linked to the economic organization of the peasants, to the diente [Independent Revolutionary Peasant Coordinating Committee] and to the Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala.
Once again, it is not only the PRT that faces the problem of governmental election stealing. will not let go of any municipality, even to let it go to a petty bourgeois party like the PST that supports the government.
In January, we organized a public conference of all the parties to public-
It was attended by more than 200 journalists and was widely reported in the press and on TV. these parties were defending their own
But we think that it can be useful in defense of democratic rights in general to make alliances even with right-wing parties to show that the government is dismantling its own poltical
It is in these conditions that we are proposing to organize a campaign of mass affiliation, a new campaign of propaganda and agitation, to lay the ground for our campaign in the 1985 elections. In the meantime, we are going to face a fundamental challenge in the June elections in the state of Mexico, in which the majority of the country's population lives. This state includes whole sections of Mexico City, satellite cities with up to two million people, the whole industrial
Today we are making a very big effort to involve the whole party in this campaign, which will be decisive in many International Viewpoint 7 May 1984 respects for the 1985 campaign.
Q. It appears from Bandera Socialista that the biggest successes for the left so far in the local elections are Indian minor-
A. The local elections that the PRI is losing, not just to us but to the PSUM, are mainly in districts that are basically Indian. There is the example of Juchitan, which is the second largest city in the state of Oaxaca. This victory can be considered a triumph for the entire left, even though it was the PSUM that fielded the winning ticket.
population is Zapotec. women there wear the traditional dress. There has been a very important intellectual movement, azines in the Zapotec language, a recovery of the culture, of the tradition.
We went through a similar process in Copalillo, where Indian cultural element was important.
I think that two very important aspects combine in this process. peasant movement in Mexico has a continuous history of struggle for the land, for winning back local autonomy, and for recovery of the language and the indigen-
But also for ten years, almost twelve years, there has been an uninterrupted process of peasant struggles and a maturing of new forms of organizations. And one of the axes of this organization has been the struggle of the Indian peoples. Mexico has 154 different Indian regions where 154 different languages are spoken. Since the Spanish conquest, there has been a continual attempt to destroy the cultures of the Indian peoples. In the last century, even the liberals considered the survival of the Indian languages and cultures a fundamental obstacle to the advance of progress in Mexico.
The Mexican revolution itself developed a populist policy for eliminating the Indian cultures and languages through in-
That meant teaching them
Spanish, giving them roads and schools. Nonetheless, the situation of the 13 million Indians remains disastrous, they suffer the worst conditions of deprivation and brutal repression. And on top of this there is ethnic oppression, contempt, racism and a systematic effort to destroy their traditions, their language,
In these conditions, the Indian populations have maintained their own organiwhich are often subsurface. They recognize the official local governments, but more important for them is the Casa del Pueblo [People's House], residual forms of autonomous organization can merge in broader forms of organization in defending electoral vic-
The struggle for control of the township governments also interrelates directly the economic struggles of the In Juchitan, the fight for control of the city government is clearly linked to the fight for recovering 30,000 hectares of land now in the hands of the landlords and local strongmen.
In Copalillo, the fight for control of the township government is closely linked to the struggle of the Indians against the local economic gangsters who distribute to them the raw material for weaving hammocks, the main local in-
To assist this struggle also we have fostered the development of cooperatives for acquiring raw materials and selling all sorts of handmade products.
have also proposed in our mass meetings and in the course of our campaigns that the struggle for ethnic unity must be deepened, that is the struggle for recovering the local cultures. view that in countries such as ours, where there is such great diversity of cultures, a fundamental element of political pluralthe kind of socialism we are fighting for, is the revival of the various various forms of ethnic and local auton-
WESTERN EUROPE
the EDC. The only tangible result of this first attempt at common European defence was the assembly of the Western European Union (WEU) (1), which survived as a consultative parliamentary body, without much power up until a