Carlos was always noted for his sharp intelligence and organizing capabilities, as a trainer of new cadre, and for his deep-rooted humanism, which earned him respect and love by those of us lucky enough to have known him.
He began his activism in 1962 in the ranks of the Party of the Revolutionary Worker (T) (POR-t). He joined the International Communist Group (GCI) in 1973, and in 1976, participated in the foundation of Mexico’s Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT). Since the beginning of this century, he participated in the process that led to what is today the Revolutionary Socialist Coordinating Group.
In addition to being a political leader, he participated in the largest campesino land take-over in the state of Sonora in 1976, shoulder to shoulder with his life-long partner Ana MarÃa López RodrÃguez. He was also a union leader at the Autonomous University of Chapingo.
We extend our most heartfelt condolences and solidarity to his partner Anita and their daughters Eunice and Ana LucÃa.
Mexico City
May 19, 2020
Revolutionary Socialist Coordinating Group
Biography
Carlos Rubén Ferra MartÃnez was born in Hermosillo, the capital of the Mexican state of Sonora, in 1942. He studied primary and middle school in the town of Navojoa, Sonora, and moved back to Hermosillo to study at the University of Sonora High School in the 1950s.
In the early 1960s, he enrolled in the School of Economics at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City, where he participated in several student mobilizations, such as the movement demanding the abolition of the campus police.
From 1963 to 1967, he was a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party (Trotskyist), but was unable to conclude his studies in economics because Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior erased his school records in 1967. A couple of years later, he received his bachelor’s in sociology at the Ibero-american University. In 1968, during the huge university movement that shook the country, he participated in brigades supporting it in poor Mexico City neighborhoods.
In 1969, he became a professor at the University of Sonora, where he was a leader of the 1973 university movement against the imposition of an antidemocratic charter for that institution by the state legislature. That same year, he joined the International Communist Group (GCI), the Mexican section of the Fourth International, and later, in 1976, he helped co-found the Revolutionary Workers Party, of which he was a leading member.
From 1975 to 1979, Carlos was a leader, together with his partner in life and in struggle, Anita López, of peasant mobilizations demanding the dismantling of the latifundia and the distribution of land in the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys, which ended in the distribution of 100,000 hectares of land, the largest since Mexico’s agrarian reform in the 1930s. In 1979, he ran as an unregistered candidate for governor of the state of Sonora, supported by the PRT and the Independent Peasant Front. In late 1979, he took a post at Mexico’s most important agricultural school, the Autonomous University of Chapingo, where he taught for 40 years continually, also participating as a union activist and as the union’s general secretary for one term.
In the early 21st century, he became part of the collective that eventually gave rise to the current sympathizing section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Socialist Coordinating Group (CSR), in which he played a leading role in both political orientation and cadre training. He was a member of the CSR until his death on May 19, 2020.