Mexico: elections and boycott

We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article by Periodico Mural from Mexico.

Almost a week before this year’s federal elections, rejection of the electoral circus of the big bourgeoisie has grown noticeably among the masses. People don’t want to vote, and that is more than clear.

This has to do with the sharpening of the contradiction between the masses and the old State where the people have become disenchanted with all the electoral parties, identifying each of them equally. This makes the people no longer want to be governed as before, and along with other contradictions inherent to this society, it is leading to the fact that the parasitic classes cannot continue governing as before.

This is a structural crisis that shakes the regime and that cannot be covered.

As we have commented previously, these particular elections are presented as the most violent in the midst of this crisis where interbourgeois contradictions also shake this election. The dominant classes fight to the death (literally) for the spaces of power of the old State, and that overflows the electoral violence.

At the moment there are already more than eighty people murdered related to the electoral process, of which 34 were candidates or pre-candidates and the rest political operators from the different parties.

According to a new report from the Electoral Laboratory, from June 4, 2023, when the current process began until May 23, 2024, 272 attacks related to the elections have been recorded, with a balance so far of 82 homicides, 65 attacks, 17 kidnappings and 108 cases of threats.

To these numbers we must add the resignation of at least 200 candidates from different parties in the state of Zacatecas who dropped out of the race to avoid losing their lives. The same in Oaxaca where at least 6 PAN candidates resigned from the race, and according to the statements of the State president of said party, the resignations are due to “fear of threats from Morena or fear of being killed.” It also happens in Chiapas where recently 515 candidates from all parties have resigned, as well as in Michoacán where another 420 candidates did the same to save their skins. These are real numbers that continue to be reproduced throughout the country and confirm that the elections of the big bourgeoisie in Mexico are not only a farce, but also a danger that costs the lives of candidates and voters.

The people organize themselves.

Faced with this rot, the people’s response is the correct one: the call for a Boycott against the bourgeois electoral farce.

In that sense, the debate that has been built from the different expressions of struggle that have emerged from the democratic-revolutionary left has found echo in different unitary spaces where the defense of the class independence of the people’s organizations has been put on the table, and the need to break with opportunism and parliamentary cretinism.

This has not been easy because there are still actors hiding inside the movement who fill their mouths with speeches of “unity at all costs” to subject the movement to the rule of one or another faction of the big bourgeoisie. Opportunists, reformists and revisionists speak of “unity” to traffic in the struggles of the people.

For democrats and revolutionaries it is clear that the unity of the organized and non-organized people is required around two issues: unity of principles and unity in action.

As we have said before, as a matter of principle, the class, economic, ideological and political independence of the movement must be defended, without subordinating it to false circumstances or the agendas of the dominant classes. In that sense, it must be specified: the regime, the electoral system and the elections belong to the big bourgeoisie, not to the people. There is nothing to look for in them!

This leads us to unity in action, which must be translated into specific actions that materialize the call for a Boycott against the electoral farce.

This is something that has been done correctly from various trenches, as demonstrated by the actions of the indefinite national strike of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), who carried out the occupation of the offices of the various electoral parties, the seizure of facilities of the National Electoral Institute (INE), the seizure of strategic facilities such as the CDMx Metro, PEMEX stations, airports, bus terminals, military barracks, banks, toll booths, gas stations, etc.

Added to these are different actions of the teacher student’s movement throughout the country, particularly of the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico (FECSM), as well as the different contingents of the National Popular Assembly (ANP) who, together with the democratic teachers, have carried out the removal and sabotage of electoral propaganda, and other forceful actions against the electoral farce.

Other expressions of the boycott are observed in the resolutions of the towns and agrarian communities in resistance that have determined to prevent the installation of polling stations in their territories, something that we are observing in states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Michoacán and Guerrero, and that surely will have to be replicated in other parts of the republic where the rural masses promote (in most cases instinctively) Self-determination, Self-government and Self-defense, which constitute the three fundamental criteria for the liberation of territories and the exercise of New Power embryos.

Seen individually or as a whole, this series of actions carried out by a sea of ​​raging masses confirms that yes, the call for a Boycott against the bourgeois electoral farce has caught on among the workers and people of Mexico in the midst of a dry meadow.

The results after June 2 will tell us who won the election: the electoral farce or the Boycott against it.