Capitalist Democrats and Republicans Bleed Mexico

Mexico: Mass Protests over Gas Price Hike

For Socialist Revolutions on Both Sides of the Border!

Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets across Mexico since January 1 in protests against the gasolinazo—the imposition of an increase in gasoline prices of up to 20 percent by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. This attack on Mexico’s workers, peasants and poor has resulted in the largest mobilizations in history in several states and cities. Protesters in the states bordering the U.S. have repeatedly shut down toll booths and border crossings.

The almost complete media blackout of the protests in the U.S. is not an accident. The U.S. imperialist rulers are clearly worried about continuing instability south of the border and want to keep working people in the U.S. ignorant of the struggles by their Mexican class brothers and sisters. Helping to fuel the protests in Mexico is the enormous fear and loathing provoked by newly elected president Donald Trump, who has missed no opportunity to revile the Mexican people. Trump’s protectionist tirades have already caused Ford and GM to reconsider investment in Mexico, while the Mexican peso, already on a slide, has hit all-time lows in recent weeks following anti-Mexico pronouncements by Trump and his new secretary of commerce. The multiracial U.S. proletariat has a particular obligation to oppose the depredations of the U.S. imperialist behemoth, which has condemned millions of Mexican workers and peasants to hunger and joblessness under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The gasolinazo is a result of the phasing out of price controls as part of the union-busting energy reform approved by the Mexican Congress in 2013, which opened up PEMEX, the nationalized oil industry, to foreign investment. The moves to sell off PEMEX are part of a wave of privatizations demanded by the U.S. rulers to open up the country to untrammeled imperialist plunder. The NAFTA free trade agreement has long served this purpose, devastating the Mexican countryside and massively increasing urban poverty. Workers in the U.S. must oppose NAFTA out of solidarity with Mexico’s exploited and oppressed. Such proletarian internationalist opposition to NAFTA has nothing in common with the chauvinist protectionism pushed by both Trump and the AFL-CIO officialdom. (read on)