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“Your fight is our fight!”

Declaration of the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) on the Recent Events in Mexico

Wednesday 5 December 2012, by Russian Socialist Movement (RSD)

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On December 1, Vladimir Putin sent official congratulations to his Mexican colleague Enrique Peña Nieto, the declared winner of the presidential elections just held in that country. The two presidents truly have a great deal in common. The victory of Peña Nieto, who received just 38% of the vote, was met with mass protests brutally dispersed by the police.

Nieto’s main opponent, the leftist López Obradror, who fell short of the winner by only 6% even according to official reports, spoke out against massive electoral fraud and vote-buying. It goes without saying that the Mexican Central Electoral Commission did not support his claims. Nieto represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which is rooted in the bureaucratic government machine and has ruled the country uninterruptedly between 1929 and 2000. In the eyes of a significant portion of the population, the PRI has become a symbol of corruption and the unrestrained financial advancement of the elite. But the party credits itself, of course, with maintaining “stability.”

In the middle of the 2000s, when Peña Nieto was the governor of the State of Mexico, the brutality of his police in the town of Atenko shocked the Mexican public. Local peasants made a stand against the construction of an international airport on their lands not far from Mexico City, and were attacked by police forces outnumbering them by a factor of ten. Several were killed, among them a 14-year-old. The leader of the protesting peasants was of course declared the main culprit and received a cumulative jail sentence of 150 years imprisonment!

Several years later, the man actually responsible for this tragedy was elected president of Mexico. He was elected with the aid of fraud and manipulation, surrounding himself with armies and brutally suppressing mass protests.

One week prior to Peña Nieto’s inauguration, the state parliament was surrounded by special operations forces. Police attacked the demonstration organized by the student movement Yo Soy 132 and leftists groups during the December 1st inauguration. At the present time, 108 participants in the protest have already been arrested, and several hospitalized with serious injuries.

President Nieto and President Putin truly resemble each other in many ways — and not only in that they love to celebrate their own inaugurations in solitude. Both are champions of elite interests, ready to defend their power by any means. These self-satisfied “guarantors of stability” preside over regimes that make their country’s natural resources the fiefdom of a privileged few while the majority of the population trudges on, poor and powerless.

We, representatives of the leftist protest movement in Russia, express our solidarity with our comrades and brothers ans sisters in Mexico — with the activists of Yo Soy 132 and the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT), — who are in the avant-garde of the opposition to Nieto. Your fight is our fight!

The Russian Socialist Movement