Mexico - PRT (Revolutionnary Worker's Party)

In Mexico, we are about to see the end of the second six-year mandate of a government dominated by the Parti of National Action (Partido Acción Nacional PAN), a party with a bourgeois profile, reactionnary, very rightist and conservative, with strong links to the catholic clergy and foreign capital. Felipe Calderon's government, which took power with a big electoral fraud, relied on the deployment of military operations, a real militarization of the society and on a so called internal war with the pretext of the struggle against drug trafficking. This period gave birth to a climate of violence and of violation of civilian and even human rights. It clearly appeared as authoritarian and repressive, with a total of 50 000 murders at the end of 2006. During this government the economic situation has worsened, with more unemployment, high prices, devaluation, inflation, external debt, etc. Thus there is no possibility to look after and resolve social inequity, to improve public services for health, education, housing, food, rural areas etc.; even if we are been told without shame and with much pride that some of the richest men on earth are living in Mexico (like Carlos Slim, product of the looting and privatizations imposed by neo liberalism).

The economic crisis en our country generated new attacks against theworkers's historical conquests, obtained through the Federal Law on Employment (Ley Federal del Trabajo) that they want to reform now, with aspects like the suspension of pensions, attacking women in particular, eliminate collective conventions of workers, supress the trade unions (mostly the democratic ones) etc. The unemployment, sub-employment, the informal trade, the trafficking of women and girls and street work reveal a huge increase of a lumpen proletariat and the industrial army of reserve which is increasing in excessive proportions.

In this context, possibilities of organisation and political regrouping have emerged, on the one hand there is a call to create a Movement of National Regeneration (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional -Morena) lead by Andrés Manuel López Obrador[2] , former leader of the PRD, party from which he is each day more distant as he is drifting to the right. On the other hand there is also the proposal to create an National Organisation of the People and the Workers (Organización Nacional del Pueblo y de los Trabajadores OPT), on the initiative of the leadership of the Mexican Trade Union of Electricty Workers (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas SME) [3] which after two years of resistence, mobilizations, sit-ins and hungre strikes, as an answer to a presidiential decree that was making disappeartheir source of work ,Compañía de Luz y Fuerza del Centro. A proposal was made to create this new Workers Organization, which announces a struggle for power. Our party was also present in the foundation congress of this organization and it now participates to the leadership of this new workers' organization [4].

Today, more than ever, the call of an old internationalist and revolutionary communist is still echoing: workers of the world, unite!

[1] This party was formed from the ideological understanding and with militants and leaders of the PRI displaced by the neoliberals, along with members from the old militancy of the Mexican Communist Party which was dissolved within the PRD and others sectors of maoist left, populists and nationalists.

[2] In the presidential elections in 2006, like Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in the elections of 1998, López Obrador was the presidential candidate of the opposition organized in various parties of centre-left and broad sectors of the population, both candidates had been members of the PRI. Both won presidential elections, but through a shameful electoral fraud both were denied the victory.

[3] This trade union of electricity workers has a one-hundred-year traditin of worker's struggle and solidarity with social movements, it is one of the rare democratic trade union in our country, in which our political current has always been present (even Leon Trotsky had conversations with some leaders trostkist comrades of the SME, about the petrol expropiation in Mexico). In 2006, a comrade from the PRT and electricity worker of the SME was a member of parliament, always in defense of the workers' struggle.

[4] The PRT won in the Congress that the tendency right would no be forbidden, so that any social and political expression can participate in the process, keeping their organization in an autonomous and independent way. Thus the PRT agreed on not dissolving, but try and promote an anticapitalist and socialist working-class party.

On the PRT (Workers' Revolutionary Party)

Our party, the PRT, was founded in 1967; various trotskist organizations came together in this project, the youth who participated in the students' movement of 1968 were the political basis of the PRT. In 1982, the PRT obtained the legal registration to participate in the presidential elections of that year, with the candidacy of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who organised the mothers of the prisoners and the political disappeared. In 1998, we participated in the electoral campaign again with the same candidate, in these elections the government took away the legal registration from the PRT.

Our party is currently having a political influence in the students' sector, in the popular movement, in the feminist movement, in the migrants' movement, and in the teachers and peasants' sectors. We also participate in the OPT and in Morena.

Ruth Betancourt for the

Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores

Mexican section of the IV International.