| Workers Vanguard No. 953
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26 February 2010
The closing date for news in this issue is 23 February 2010
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U.S. Beefs Up Racist Border Controls Mexico: Down With “Drug Wars” Militarization! For Workers Revolution on Both Sides of the Border! The massacre last month of 16 people, mostly teenagers, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, was just the latest bloody evidence of the “drug wars” that have claimed nearly 20,000 lives in that country since 2001. Last year, some 2,700 people were killed in Juárez alone, making this one of the most violent cities on the planet. Shootouts happen frequently in Mexican cities, many carried out in broad daylight, as drug cartels and their police adjuncts battle over control of the booming trade, which mainly supplies the U.S. market. The cartels often torture and decapitate rivals in the trade, placing their heads next to posters with threatening messages. Videos of such sadistic handiwork are regularly posted on YouTube. One man, nicknamed “El Pozolero” (the Stewmaker), admitted he had dissolved some 300 bodies in acid over ten years to dispose of them for the Tijuana Cartel.
The gruesome reality of narcoviolencia has provided President Felipe Calderón of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) a pretext to systematically reinforce the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state. Calderón has deployed some 45,000 army troops throughout the country, along with thousands of federal police. In many cities, including northern industrial centers like Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, the army assumed police powers.
If anything, the deployment of the military has led to an increase in the bloodletting along with intensified repression of the working class and the urban and rural poor. At stake in the drug wars is control of what is up to a $25 billion a year business (about the same as remittances from the U.S.) that plays a central role in the capitalist economy, directly involving an estimated 150,000 people and linked to some 78 percent of legal business activities, according to Proceso magazine (15 March 2009). Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has even made the Forbes magazine list of billionaires. And from the government ministries on down to the cops, Mexico’s capitalist state apparatus is thoroughly interpenetrated with the drug cartels.
(read on)
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
