Mexico

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 15, 2023 2:12 pm

THE US THREAT TO MEXICO AND THE LIMITS OF INTEGRATION

william serafino

Mar 14, 2023 , 11:41 a.m.

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Politicians from Washington, DC, threatened Mexico to invade it militarily (Photo: Henry Romero / Reuters)

The recent counterpoint between Mexico City and Washington, product of the murder of two US citizens kidnapped in the border town of Matamoros, has meant such a serious impasse that a military intervention by the United States in Mexican territory has even been considered.

A haze of confusion surrounds the fact. The five alleged implicated in the kidnapping and the deaths were handed over by the Gulf Cartel with their hands covered and their faces covered in a gesture aimed at distancing themselves from the accusations. In addition, they left an apology letter in the vehicle where the people were found.

It is also not entirely clear what the Americans were doing in Matamoros, if they had any connection to drug trafficking—three of them had criminal records—or if the kidnapping was caused more by a mix-up with rival organizations.

But, already at this point, for US political sectors, the speculations around the event are accessory. For the official discourse, reality ends with the fact that two Americans were murdered by Mexican drug cartels, without mediating important nuances, such as the fact that more than 200,000 weapons manufactured in the United States cross the border every year to strengthen the power of fire from drug traffickers, as published by journalist Ioan Grillo in his book Blood Gun Money: How America arms gangs and cartel.

On the Republican side, the hawk Lindsey Graham, a member of the party's interventionist hard wing, captured attention with a press conference in which he claimed to be working on a bill that would allow the designation of Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, in addition to seeking an authorization for the US army to enter Mexican territory in order to combat the cartels.

Graham's bill is joined by Republican Senator John Kennedy. However, it is not the only one that arises. Sens. Rick Scott and Roger Marshall, fellow Republicans, introduced one with a similar profile . The two projects seek to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations, although they differ in the scope of the entities to include in said list.

Graham's delirious warmongering speech resonated across the border and provoked an immediate response from its president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The Mexican president asserted : "We are not going to allow any foreign government to intervene, much less the armed forces of a foreign government to intervene in our territory."

Putting on the table a US military intervention in Mexico not only removes the long historical saga of war, territorial expropriation and economic plunder carried out by the United States since the 19th century, but also constitutes a highly dangerous rhetorical escalation for the region, given that the question of drug trafficking arises as a transnational phenomenon.

It is true that the jingoism of Republican hawks, electoral calculus to weaken Biden's re-election prospects, and the logic of political theater deeply ingrained in American media culture had a lot to do with the discursive hysteria of Graham and other hawks.

However, the obsession with military intervention in the region is not an issue of exclusive reference to Mexico as a result of the event in Matamoros. It is part of a US geopolitical strategy that found in this fact a promotion mechanism and also a way to update its axes of incursion.

A couple of immediate and synthesisable examples help to understand why it is not only about Mexico.

For example, drug trafficking related to "terrorism" is the backbone of the Southern Command's operational framework, in which it is interpreted as one of the main "threats" to be contained. Even in 2020, Admiral Craig Faller, in command of said institution at that time, stated that said "threats" came from Venezuela, which paved the justifications for military action.


Since 2021, Cuba has been included in the list of states "sponsors of terrorism" of the United States, a provision recently reaffirmed by the Joe Biden government, which continues to derail the thesis that the Democratic administration would treat the aggressive approach differently. of Trump to the island.

The hysteria over drug trafficking and terrorism, which has become an official discourse not only of the State Department but also of the Southern Command, has as its principle of reality what the current head of the institution, Laura Richardson, confessed at the beginning of the year: The urgency for controlling strategic natural resources such as lithium, oil, among others.

By way of national data, the fact that a matter of weeks ago the AMLO government nationalized lithium stands out .

Regardless of the intricate institutional paths that Graham's proposal will have to travel from now on, the proposal of a military intervention in itself is already a sign of seriousness for the security of Mexico, regional peace and, in a general sense, for the basic notion of respect and equality between States.

The discursive escalation of the Republican hawks also expresses that they feel safe to threaten third countries with the use of military force because they know that they will not suffer any diplomatic or geopolitical consequences.

Deep down, in the mentality of a Graham lives the idea that Latin America and the Caribbean is a weak continent, subject to humiliation and incapable of responding as a bloc to such expressions of gravity.

The threat of intervention against Mexico has also exposed the limitations of the so-called new "progressive cycle" and the relaunch of regional integration.

It is precisely in these moments of high tension that the region must show itself united, articulate and determined to respond as a geopolitical bloc, from community platforms with CELAC-type weight and influence, and even from bilateral meetings.

A unified statement from the region has been needed to show that the promotion of integration is a serious, credible effort and a common consensus, and not a merely institutional framework to comply with periodic meetings subject to bureaucratic lapses and final declarations with little support.

The situation of confrontation and impasse between Mexico and the United States allows us to imagine how the commitment to integration could be landed, taking advantage of the continental ideological shift of recent years, in which different leftist tendencies have obtained a quantitative majority on the hemispheric map.

One of the steps in this sense could be to expedite the procedures for calling extraordinary summits or emergency meetings of CELAC whose objective would be, in addition to addressing the issue and the publication of pronouncements in defense of peace and security in the region, inject dynamism into the organization and increase its own capacities for coordination and exchange of concerns between Member States.

This principle would be equally valid for other regional integration mechanisms and political and diplomatic forums, following the strategic projection of a common position on peace and security that allows for the inclusion of as many actors as possible.

The recomposition of the regional integration that has been sold with security and firmness, in the case of the threat against Mexico, has been shown to be far below what is expected. Without a unified bloc that rejects displays of humiliation and commands respect, hawks like Graham will continue to see opportunities for advancement.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... ntegracion

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 14, 2023 1:53 pm

UNACCEPTABLE CONDUCT OF THE ARMY IN NUEVO LAREDO IS NOT AN EXCEPTION, BUT THE CONSTANT OF ITS PRESENCE IN THE STREETS

Published: 01 March 2023

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The militarization of the country, begun during the Calderón government, continued by Peña Nieto's, and reinforced by the current government of President López Obrador is unacceptable, and we must persist more firmly in the fight for the return of the Army to the barracks.

During this government, which obtained many votes with which it won the elections in 2018 based on the broken promise to end militarization, the presence on the streets and in public life of the armed forces increased and was legalized. , both from the Army and the Navy, as well as from its new façade: the National Guard. In addition to assuming previously civil functions such as el control of customs and airports, distribution of textbooks and vaccines, the Army has been assigned economic functions in the construction and real estate industries, and important infrastructure projects such as the Isthmus Train, hotels, transportation of passengers and merchandise of the Mayan Train, ensuring that the high command will increase not only their political but economic power. As if that were not enough, since the first day of his government, President López Obrador has consistently used a speech to launder the Army, which he calls "good uniformed people", and exempt it from its crimes throughout the 20th century: the atrocious murder of Rubén Jaramillo, his partner Epifania Zúñiga García, who was pregnant, and their children, in 1962; in 1965 in Chihuahua, in 1968 in Tlatelolco, during theDirty War that liquidated a generation of young revolutionaries in the cities of the country and in the mountains of Guerrero, as well as proven massacres such as the one that occurred in Tlatlaya, and constant murders and violations of human rights. Without forgetting the shocking case of Ayotzinapa, which the current government no longer wanted to resolve so as not to further incriminate the Army. Ayotzinapa is clear proof that the Army and crime maintain close coordination in their functional role in the repression of the social movement. It has been a total slap in the face to the history of our people's struggle to want to equate the revolutionaries of our country with the military. No Mr. President, they were not the same, some were victims and others perpetrators. Some fought for justice and others to preserve injustice.

After almost two decades of using the Armed Forces for public security tasks, the balance is that the drug trafficking industry and crime have not weakened or diminished, but have now expanded and their intertwining with the State is close to symbiosis

Let us also keep in mind that, during the governments of Lázaro Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho, due to social demands and the growing union and political organization of the working class and peasantry, it was concluded that the military should restrict its role to a force defense of sovereignty against any probable aggression from abroad, and limit its until then predominant role as a political factor in public life. Riots, barracks, conspiracies had to come to an end. Today, from the National Palace, the serpent's egg is dangerously incubated by granting the Army a leading role in political decisions.

There is enough data to ensure that there is a historical intertwining between the drug trafficking industry and the military and police commands in our country. The role of generals such as Quirós Hermosillo, Gutiérrez Rebollo or Acosta Chaparro, or of structures such as the extinct Federal Security Directorate and the Army Special Forces groups, in strengthening drug cartels in our country cannot be hidden. This connection continues, as shown by the most recent scandals involving García Luna and General Cienfuegos.

At checkpoints, raids, and operations, the military presence is detrimental to the rights and freedoms won by the people in their struggle. There are many "errors" and therefore too many casualties of the civilian population at the hands of the Army: innocents murdered, women raped, tortured and disappeared. Now it is also a task force against our migrant brothers to comply with the agreements of the Federal Executive with the Trump and Biden administrations.

Now we are witnessing the behavior of the Army in the streets of Nuevo Laredo. Once again, as in the governments of Calderón and Peña Nieto, they seek to justify extrajudicial executions, this time under the cloak of hope for change. From the government and its ideological transmission channels, the alleged association with crime is repeated identically, so that it is tacitly accepted that shooting into the air or at the feet of the civilian population and that new military protocols are applied with impunity, such as snatching cell phones and destroy any evidence that can be gathered in recordings by witnesses about the unconstitutional actions of the soldiers and their commanders. There is no possible justification for the detention, torture or extrajudicial execution of any person by the military.

Nor should it be forgotten that while with Calderón and Peña Nieto the military presence in the streets was illegal, today it is legalized by the constitutional reforms promoted by Obrador and all the parties represented in the Union Congress both in 2019, unanimously, and in 2022 by majority.

We cannot accept it. The Armed Forces must return to the barracks.

Immediate return of the Army to the Barracks!

Stop military brutality against the civilian and working population!

Down with militarization, immediate return of the Army to its barracks!

No more economic power, no more impunity, to the Armed Forces!


Proletarians of all countries, unite!


The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Mexico

http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/par ... las-calles

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 22, 2023 1:47 pm

López Obrador accuses the US of espionage actions in Mexico

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US agencies were infiltrated in Mexican cartels to learn about their operation, something that the country's authorities are already investigating. | Photo: EFE
Published 19 April 2023

At a press conference, López Obrador said that the government of the neighboring country also leaks information to the media.

The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, denounced this Tuesday that the Pentagon (Department of Defense) of the United States (USA) spies on the Mexican Armed Forces, for which they will protect the information.

In his daily press conference, López Obrador said that the government of the neighboring country also leaks information to the media.

"We are going to take care of the information from the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense, because we are being the object of espionage by the Pentagon," said the Mexican president.


"Many media outlets in Mexico are leaking information provided by the DEA (US Anti-Drug Agency)... and the Pentagon, we are going to take care of our information," the president said.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told local media that "we will make an approach through the appropriate diplomatic channels, asking that" to receive details in this regard, "or if necessary, point out that the information is not true."

Likewise, it was revealed that US agencies were infiltrated in Mexican cartels to learn about their operation, something that the country's authorities are already investigating.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/mexico-l ... -0005.html

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********

Army’s Role in Public Security Limited by Mexico’s Top Court

Published 19 April 2023

"...a restriction on the involvement of the armed forces in public security operations..."


The Supreme Court of Mexico has rendered invalid the legislation which conferred upon the Ministry of Defense the capacity to oversee both the operational and administrative functions of the National Guard. The Supreme Court has declared the aforementioned legislation unconstitutional via a majority vote of eight to three.

The apex court of Mexico has implemented a restriction on the involvement of the armed forces in public security operations, thereby obstructing the proposal by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to place a non-military unit under the purview of the military.

The National Guard plan, approved by the governing party-controlled Congress last September, alarmed López Obrador’s opponents and human rights campaigners who said it handed too much power to the armed forces.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rendered a decision with eight to three votes. It declared as unconstitutional the legislative modification which authorized the defense ministry to assume operational and administrative authority over the National Guard.


López Obrador, prior to assuming power in 2018, had pledged to relegate the military to their barracks.

During his tenure as head of state, the military has sustained its involvement in the suppression of drug cartel-related brutality while assuming increased duties, encompassing the management of harbors and customs, as well as significant infrastructural undertakings.

President López Obrador established the National Guard in the year 2019, designating it a civil authority to supplant the federal police that had faced allegations of impropriety and transgressions against human rights.


Subsequently, he has contended that the armed forces are comparatively less prone to being infiltrated by organized criminal elements in comparison to other factions within the ambit of domestic security forces.

The National Guard reform was deemed by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as a regression in the realm of public safety, which is firmly anchored in the principles of human rights, as revealed in the report from the preceding year.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Arm ... -0004.html

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PEGASUS IN ACTION: HOW THE US SPIES ON MEXICO
20 Apr 2023 , 11:24 am .

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The Israeli spy software Pegasus was acquired during the government of Felipe Calderón (Photo: File)

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador , recently denounced that the United States is spying on Mexico through the Pentagon and affirmed that it will strengthen the protection of military information.

Regarding this complaint by the Mexican president, The New York Times published a report that reveals details of how these espionage tools were introduced into the Mexican intelligence system.

According to the US media, it all started in 2011 when Mexico became the largest user of Pegasus, one of the most infamous Israeli stalking mechanisms developed by NSO Group.

The acquisition of this software was made secretly during the government of Felipe Calderón and it continued to be used during the period of Enrique Peña Nieto. Initially it would be intended to spy on civilians who had differences with the Mexican State at that time.

How does Pegasus operate? This tool is powerful in that it can break into electronic equipment without any sign of intrusion. You can extract all the data and even activate the cameras and microphones of the phones. Currently it would be implemented to monitor the security system of Mexico.

https://misionverdad.com/pegasus-en-acc ... pia-mexico

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Wed May 03, 2023 3:13 pm

Former President of Mexico Revealed as CIA Asset
MAY 2, 2023

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Photo composition showing former Mexican President José López Portillo (left) and the logo of the US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA (right). Photo: SDP Noticias.

By Saheli Chowdhury – Apr 20, 2023

Declassified documents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have revealed that former President of Mexico, José López Portillo, who led the country during 1976-1982, was a CIA asset. The revelation comes as part of a new batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives.

The documents, most of which are related to a CIA probe into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, contains a memo from a meeting of CIA agents held on November 29, 1976. In said meeting, US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts said to his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years.”

Sturbitts further commented that the new president of Mexico “can be expected not to look favorably upon publicity of that relationship,” the declassified memo revealed.

Although López Portillo was not mentioned by name in the memo, he was surely the indicated “new president,” given that the meeting took place just days before he took office.

It is interesting to note that López Portillo had run for office in 1976 as the only candidate from Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000, and again during 2012-2018. He passed away in 2004, at the age of 83.

López Portillo was not the only former president of Mexico to have been on the payroll of the CIA. Three other presidents who preceded him, namely, Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), and Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) were also revealed to be CIA assets in earlier declassification of official US documents. All these former presidents committed acts of grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity against the people of their own country, but that did not stop the United States, the self-proclaimed champion of “human rights,” from cultivating close relations with them.

Cultivating national leaders was not the only interventionist act that the CIA did in Mexico. Declassified documents over the years have revealed a range of illegal activities of US intelligence in Mexico, including spying on Soviet and Chinese embassies in Mexico City; financing extreme right groups; supporting and coordinating the Mexican armed forces; and infiltrating and subverting left-wing students’ organizations and social movements all over Mexico, in COINTELPRO style, often with fatal consequences for the Mexican people.

The list of Mexican presidents who were US intelligence assets would certainly not end with López Portillo. Some declassification of US government documents 50 years from now would reveal more names, among whom Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), who was imposed on Mexico through a stolen election, may be expected to feature prominently.

https://orinocotribune.com/former-presi ... cia-asset/

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‘Mexico Is Not a US Colony!’: AMLO Condemns Invasion Threats, Celebrates Nationalization of Oil, Lithium
MARCH 24, 2023

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Image divided in two, on the left side the Plaza de la Constitución, the main square of Mexico City, full of AMLO supporters, March 18, 2023 and on the right side President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Photo: Atomic Feathers.

By Ben Norton – Mar 22, 2023

Mexico’s leftist President AMLO condemned “hypocritical” Republicans who want the US military to invade, declaring “Mexico is an independent and free country, not a US colony or protectorate!” In a massive rally, López Obrador also celebrated the expropriation of oil and lithium, condemning exploitative foreign corporations.

Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) organized a massive rally in the heart of the capital, honoring the anniversary of the country’s nationalization of its oil reserves and expropriation of foreign corporations.

AMLO also used the demonstration as an opportunity to publicly condemn US politicians who have proposed militarily invading Mexico to combat drug trafficking.

“We remind those hypocritical and irresponsible politicians that Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States!” López Obrador declared.

“They can threaten us with committing some kind of abuse, but we will never, ever allow them to violate our sovereignty and trample on the dignity of our homeland!” he asserted.

AMLO added, “I want to make it clear that this is no longer the time of [Felipe] Calderón or [Genaro] García Luna, that it is no longer the time of the shady links between the government of Mexico and the agencies of the US government”.

The Mexican leader then led a chant: “Cooperation? Yes. Submission? No! Interventionism? No!”

AMLO delivered this fiery speech on March 18 in the Zócalo, the plaza in the heart of Mexico City.

His government officially convened the event to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the 1938 oil nationalization by revolutionary former President Lázaro Cárdenas.

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The poster of the Mexican government event celebrating the 85th anniversary of the expropriation of oil by President Lázaro Cárdenas

López Obrador dedicated half of his hour-long speech to discussing the history of the Cardenista revolution, and the lessons it provides for today.

AMLO praised Cárdenas for challenging foreign corporations and defending national sovereignty, while redistributing land to the poor, protecting labor rights, encouraging unions, and forming an alliance with workers and peasants against the “conservative oligarchy” that had ruled Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, before the 1910 revolution.

The speech was one of the most passionate examples of López Obrador’s left-wing nationalist ideology.

AMLO made clear parallels between the government of Cárdenas and his own government today, between Cárdenas’ oil nationalization and López Obrador’s nationalization of Mexico’s lithium reserves.


Far-right Republicans call for the US military to invade Mexico
This March, a series of far-right US politicians from the Republican Party have called for the military to invade Mexico, in the name of supposedly fighting drug cartels.

Extreme-right Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claimed in a March 15 tweet that Mexican cartels “are planting bombs on our land in our country”. (She posted a photo which did not show a bomb, according to US Border Patrol, but rather “a duct-taped ball filled with sand that wasn’t deemed a threat to agents/public”.)

“Our US military needs to take action against the Mexican Cartels”, she insisted. “End this Cartel led war against America!”

Greene is a Donald Trump loyalist and supporter of the neo-fascist QAnon cult. She ran for office inciting violence against the left, shooting and blowing up the word “socialism” in her campaign ads.


But Greene is far from alone.

Republican Congressmember Dan Crenshaw has introduced multiple bills to authorize the US military to attack cartels in Mexico.

Legislation that Crenshaw introduced in January cites the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was passed a week after the 9/11 attacks, in order to justify the US military to invade Mexico.


In an op-ed, Crenshaw compared Mexican drug cartels to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.

The Republican lawmaker also called for the US to impose sanctions on Mexico – one of its top three trading partners.


Greene wrote that she is “proud to co-sponsor Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s legislation to declare WAR on the Mexican cartels”.

“We must authorize the use of military force to eliminate the thugs who are smuggling drugs and illegal aliens across our southern border”, Greene insisted.

The far-right Republican also suggested that Washington should impose sanctions on Mexico.

“There is a war going on that affects every single American, but it’s not in Ukraine or the Middle East, it’s on our Southern border”, Greene declared.


In the US Senate, another Trump ally, Lindsey Graham, wants the US military to intervene in Mexico.

“We are going to unleash the fury and might of the U.S. against these cartels”, Graham proclaimed in a March 8 press conference.

Graham compared Mexican drug cartels to ISIS and al-Qaeda, referring to them as “narcoterrorists” and calling to “give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist”.

Trump’s former CIA director and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, published an article declaring, “It Is Time for America To Declare War on the Drug Cartels“.

“As Secretary of State, I suggested we use drones to strike the cartels”, he boasted.

With blatantly neocolonial rhetoric, Pompeo claimed that Mexico has a “total lack of sovereignty”. (In his memoir, Pompeo admitted that the Trump administration tried to overthrow Venezuela’s government because it supposedly put “out the welcome mat for Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and the cartels in a twenty-first-century violation of the Monroe Doctrine“, referencing the 200-year-old colonial doctrine.)


Borrowing George W. Bush-era “war on terror” rhetoric, Pompeo referred to the cartels as “narco-terrorist entities”, and insisted that “the U.S. government should designate the major drug cartels – the Gulf Cartel (responsible for the recent kidnapping and murders), the Cartel Del Noreste, the Cartel de Sinaloa, and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion to name a few – as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO)”.

Pompeo also tried to link China to Mexican drug cartels as well, without any evidence. He asserted that the US war on cartels “will require going after the Chinese Communist Party-backed entities that are funneling precursor compounds to cartels”.

AMLO condemns US threats: “Mexico is not a colony!”
In his March 18 speech, López Obrador declared:

Friend, I cannot forget to mention that, in recent days, some legislators from the United States, who are accustomed to hypocritically throwing stones while forgetting that they live in glass houses, have a propagandistic plan. As we say here, in popular language, they are scheming. And for electoral purposes, political operatives are saying that, if we don’t stop the traffic of fentanyl to the northern border, they are going to propose in Congress that North American soldiers occupy our territory, to fight organized crime.

First, I want to make it clear that this is no longer the time of [Felipe] Calderón or [Genaro] García Luna, that it is no longer the time of the shady links between the government of Mexico and the agencies of the US government.

The most important thing is that, from here, from this Zócalo, the political and cultural heart of Mexico, we remind those hypocritical and irresponsible politicians that Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States, and that they can threaten us with committing some kind of abuse, but we will never, ever allow them to violate our sovereignty and trample on the dignity of our homeland!

Cooperation? Yes. Submission? No! Interventionism? No!


AMLO then shouted out the following words, and the audience replied: “Oligarchy? No! Corruption? No! Classism? No! Racism? No! Freedom? Yes! Democracy? Yes! Honesty? Yes! Social justice? Yes! Equality? Yes! Sovereignty? Yes!”

The president concluded his speech chanting: “Long live the oil expropriation! Long live the workers and technicians, of before and today, in the national oil industry! Long live General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río! Long live Mexico! Long live Mexico! Long live Mexico!”

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Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas declaring the nationalization of the railroads in 1937

AMLO honors Lázaro Cárdenas’ revolutionary legacy
AMLO spent the first half of his speech discussing the legacy of leftist former President Lázaro Cárdenas.

He explained:

General Lázaro Cárdenas did not hesitate to rely on those below to carry out his transformation. The general’s strategy can be summarized in three important, consecutive actions. First, he gave land to the peasants and helped the workers. Then, he motivated them to organize. And finally, with that social base, he was able to carry out the expropriation of the oil and other national resources, which Porfirio Díaz had given away to individuals, fundamentally to foreigners.

In the Cardenista strategy, the most important thing was meeting the economic and social demands of the peasants and workers.


It is undoubtable that the peasants saw in Cárdenas a faithful representative of the revolutionary cause. The agrarian reform ensured that many people were loyal to the Cardenista government, and from then on, there was an alliance between the peasants and the state.

Moreover, during Cardenismo, the workers felt that their labor rights were guaranteed, with strict adherence to the law. Cárdenas respected the economic struggle of workers for better salaries and better labor conditions.



The organization and political mobilization of the masses advanced the goal of valuing the economic independence of our country.

Thereby, with the expropriation of the oil corporations, national goods and resources were returned to the nation, which since the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz had been in the hands of foreigners.



There has not existed in Mexico a president as close to humble people as General Cárdenas, nor a president as dedicated to the cause of social justice.

For example, already as president, in power in 1935, he wrote in his notes the following: “Ending the miseries that the people suffer from is above all other interests”.



I quote General Cárdenas; he says: “We made considerations of the circumstances that could arise if governments like those of England and the United States, in the interest of supporting the oil companies, pressured the government of Mexico with violent measures. But we also took into account that there is already the threat of a new world war with the growing provocations of Nazi-fascist imperialism, and that this would stop them from attacking Mexico in the case of the expropriation, among other reasons”.

And taking advantage of this circumstance, on March 18, 1938, the oil expropriation was carried out.



He then made known, by radio, to all of the nation, the step taken by the government, in defense of its sovereignty, reintegrating into its domain the oil wealth that, as the same general said, “Imperialist capital has been taking advantage of to keep the country in a humiliating situation”.

In response to Cárdenas’ expropriation of Mexico’s oil wealth, AMLO explained, “The millionaires requested a US [military] intervention. They complained to the United States”.

He then added with a sarcastic tone, “That sounds familiar, that sounds familiar, that sounds familiar”.

The millionaires “went and complained so that [the United States] would come here to protect their companies”, AMLO added.

But the threat of Nazi Germany and the clear signs that World War Two was coming prevented the US from militarily intervening to stop the nationalization, López Obrador argued.

He also noted that the US leader at the time was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom AMLO referred to as “one of the best presidents that that country has had in all of its history”.

“But the corporations were not as conscious and respectful” as FDR, López Obrador continued.

Foreign corporations thought that “Mexicans were born to enrich foreigners”, he said, “and that God put important natural resources below Mexico’s soil to increase the fortunes in the treasure chests of the exploiters and concessionaires”.

AMLO recalled that Cárdenas’ government was forced to “confront a boycott, pressures, and acts of sabotage promoted and funded by the foreign oil companies in our country”.

The Mexican president continued:

The oil expropriation caused deep discomfort among a minority, above all among the wealthy at the time, in sectors of the middle class, and in the majority of the media.

It is interesting, and this is a lesson, to highlight that, historically, the right wing always regroups when a democratic change is trying to be carried out, and it becomes plainly intolerant, and even violent when it comes to social demands in favor of the people and the control of the nation.

López Obrador discussed the example of Francisco Madero, a leader of the Mexican Revolution who governed as president from 1911 to 1913, but who was toppled and murdered in a coup d’etat sponsored by the United States and carried out by the right wing.

AMLO emphasized:

Let us remember that the overthrow of President Madero, our apostle of democracy, relied on the intervention of the US ambassador, but that overthrow was carried out by internal right-wing groups that had previously promoted a campaign of hatred and smears, consisting of ridiculing the leader, President Madero, in their newspapers, to the point of treating him as crazy and spiritualist.

As an example of the long history of Mexico’s right-wing elites betraying their country’s national interests in collaboration with foreign corporations, AMLO pointed out that the country’s right-wing party PAN, which governed from 2000 to 2012, had been created in 1939 as a representation of the wealthy oligarchic forces that opposed Cárdenas’ oil expropriation.

The Mexican president finally summarized his discussion of Cárdenas: “In this brief history, there are greater lessons. The main one is that only with the people, only with the support of the majority, is it possible to carry out a popular transformation to guarantee justice and confront the reactionaries who don’t want to lose their privileges”.

AMLO Says Mexico is More Democratic than Oligarch-Run USA, Condemns State Dep’t Meddling Against Electoral Reform


AMLO boasts of unprecedented government spending on social programs to help working-class Mexicans
Later in the March 18 speech, AMLO boasted of the unprecedented social spending his government has carried out:

All of the [government’s] savings are used to finance social programs, such as pensions for the elderly, support for people with disabilities, single mothers, peasants and fishermen; with scholarships for students from poor families; internet for everyone; programs to build and improve housing; favorable loans; fertilizers and guaranteed prices for small producers in the country; the Wellness Bank; the drive for public education and health care, universal and free.

This year, more than 25 million people will receive direct support totaling 600 billion pesos. In other words, out of the 35 million homes that there are in the country, 71% are already benefiting from at least one of the social programs.

With this policy of attention to the neediest, the most vulnerable, and especially the youth, we have also been able to reduce crime



]These policies] have allowed us to avoid more debt. We have not requested additional debt since we are in government.



The price of gasoline, diesel, gas, and electricity has not increased.



Also, public investment has increased, which did not happen for many years. This year, more than 1 trillion pesos will be spent on public works. That is to say, we are going to keep building roads, bridges, trains, airports, hospitals, universities, markets, sports facilities, piers, and natural, recreational, and ecological parks.



In the time that we have been in government, the minimum wage has increased by 90% in real terms, and more than double at the border.

Do you remember what the lying technocrats said about raising the salary, that there was going to be inflation? Pure nonsense! That is not true.

Of course we have to increase wages in a responsible way, to strengthen the internal market, as we are doing, and thereby to achieve well-being for our people.



“We have also directed our resources and efforts toward achieving food self-sufficiency and energy self-sufficiency.



We can ensure that we are guaranteed to have oil sovereignty. Next year, we are not going to buy gasoline, diesel, or other oil products abroad. We are going to process all of our raw materials.



And recently, the lithium was nationalized, strategic minerals used in making batteries, for electric cars and the storage system for clean energy. It fills me with pride to remember that.

While listing the accomplishments of his government, López Obrador also referenced the negotiations in 2018 and 2019 that led to replacing NAFTA with the new United States – Mexico – Canada Agreement (USMCA).

AMLO said with pride:

We were able to remove from the free trade agreement a broad chapter that compromised our oil in that agreement and put in its place a small paragraph that I am going to read to you.

It says that the United States and Canada recognize that “Mexico reserves its sovereign right to reform its Constitution and its domestic legislation; and Mexico has the direct, inalienable, and imprescriptible ownership of all hydrocarbons in the subsoil of the national territory”.

The Mexican president added:

We are going to continue with that collective conscience. We are going to continue pushing back against the dirty war, the smear campaigns, and the manipulation attempts that they will continue to carry out because they have no other choice, our adversaries and their media outlets, sold out, bought up, in the hands of members of the corrupt conservative bloc.

But at the same time, we must have faith in the wisdom and loyalty of the people.



I maintain that, whatever they do, the oligarchs will not return to power. An authentic and true democracy will continue to prevail in our beloved Mexico.

(Geopolitical Economy)

https://orinocotribune.com/mexico-is-no ... l-lithium/

Oligarchs are still in power, it's the nationalists now instead of the trans-nationalists.

***********

GREETINGS FROM THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF MEXICO FOR MAY DAY: AGAINST THE PRESENT THAT IS IMPERIALIST WAR, EXPLOITATION, HUNGER AND MISERY... FOR THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM-COMMUNISM

Image
Category: Communist Party of Mexico
Published: 30 April 2023

Comrades proletarians, workers,

working woman, young worker,

migrant workers, unemployed:[/b]



Today, May Day, the Communist Party of Mexico greets with optimism and great fraternity the entire working class of Mexico, the powerful force without which nothing moves, the builder and maker of everything, the producer of wealth. We salute all the proletarians, women and men, young and old, nationals, immigrants and emigrants, mestizos and indigenous people, from the city and the countryside, from the mines, industries, oil fields, offices, education, health, the transport and services, which as a whole are the working class, which will transform this rotten society, of exploitation and misery, of hunger, suffering, barbarism and death.



We pay a sincere tribute to the workers of the World who, with their sacrifice, have taken important steps to win rights, such as the 8-hour day, the right to unionize, the right to retire, among others, and to raise the flag of emancipation of workers power and the construction of the new world. The martyrs of Chicago, Cananea and Río Blanco will never be forgotten, nor will the heroic efforts of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the socialist Construction in the USSR.



Down with the imperialist war that hits us with its consequences



A year ago the imperialist war broke out, with the unacceptable Russian invasion of Ukraine and with the participation of various countries and interstate alliances of death such as NATO. On the one hand, the US and its allies and on the other, Russia-China and its bloc, dispute the hegemony of the imperialist system, to impose their economic, commercial, political and military conditions. In this the main sacrifices have been the working class of Ukraine and Russia, but the workers and peoples of the World are paying the consequences, the most visible, the increase in the prices of food, electricity and fuel and with it the cost of living .



This imperialist war is only for the benefit of the monopolies, of the bourgeoisies, and it is going in the direction of generalizing into a world war, because the rivalries of these imperialist countries have no solution: they want cheap labor, natural and energy resources, trade routes, markets. None of them is interested in the life of the people and the workers, they only want to extract surplus value and profit. And to achieve these objectives they do not hesitate to make rivers of blood flow, destroy entire populations, unleash barbarism, horror, death. They want us to get involved in this war by taking sides with one of them, but their interests are not ours. The interests of workers and peoples are contrary to both the US/NATO and China/Russia.



In one year, food prices have skyrocketed, the price of bread has doubled, and everything goes up without stopping, and this is felt in the pockets of all workers, on the table in their homes, in the hunger and uncertainty of your families. And that happens in Mexico and in the world, and no governmental, social democratic or liberal management can reverse this situation because the basis of the problem is the system of exploitation, capitalism.



The workers of the world raise the red flag of struggle



Faced with the consequences of capitalist barbarism, exploitation and war, the class struggle is accentuated; the same in France as in Greece, in England, the USA, Germany, powerful general strikes are unleashed, massive protests, counterattacks on capital. In the case of France and Greece, these are exemplary struggles, with which it is necessary to develop solidarity and learn the lessons. And in Mexico, workers must prepare for this scenario, since the attack of capital against work is general.



In Mexico an anti-worker government



After more than 4 years of the Obrador government, it is possible to affirm without error that it has an anti-worker and anti-popular leadership. The reforms approved in previous governments to attack labor rights that were previously contained in the Federal Labor Law have been maintained, outsourcing is maintained, the so-called educational reform was not reversed, the 30,000 workers of the Compañía de Luz y Fuerza del Centro, and on the contrary, the process of extinction of public companies continues, as now with Notimex, thus hitting the thousand-day strike of SUTNOTIMEX.



With the ratification of the TMEC, initially signed by Salinas de Gortari in 1993, confirmed by Obrador, the intervention of the US State Department is promoted, with a million-dollar budget, for the reassignment of collective labor contracts. With this direction, unionism is fragmented, the unity of workers in strong unions is attacked to create micro-unions with less capacity for resistance against the bosses.



Although it has not prospered yet, this social democratic government of Obrador tries a corporatism and control similar to the charrismo of the PRI times, for this it uses Pedro Haces, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and Susana Prieto as scabs. With great demagoguery, he announces salary increases that are reduced to ashes by inflation, or youth support plans that give away the labor of the new generation to the monopolies.



All these militarization measures, reinforcement of the security forces, in reality have the orientation of preparing to contain and repress the workers. In this government, the bourgeoisie was privileged, exploitation was favored to the point that the time that the worker requires to earn his salary is barely 5 or 6 minutes, working 7 hours and 54 minutes without any payment and generating greater surplus value for the exploiters.



There is a brutal policy against migrant workers: more than 1,000 are detained daily and held in inhumane conditions in death camps, such as in Ciudad Juárez where almost 40 victims of a fire died.



The workers of the present Government of Obrador can expect nothing. Nothing changed and everything must be changed.



The future is to bury capitalism and forge the new world



There are many reasons to fight, to organize and fight. All the problems mentioned and many others are caused by the system of exploitation of man by man, of the private appropriation of socially produced wealth, this system called capitalist.



It is the workers, organized by the Communist Party, who can put an end to the class rule of the bourgeoisie and bury capitalism. That is its historical mission. It is up to the proletariat to put an end to exploitation and injustices, emancipating itself and emancipating women and all the oppressed.



It is an essential, urgent, possible and necessary task.



This May Day, we call on the workers to contribute their effort and conscience to accelerate the pace for the overthrow of the system.



With power in the hands of the working class, developing a socialist, planned and centralized economy, fighting the vestiges of society divided into classes, life will be better for the working class and the peoples and happiness will be possible.



The first step is to come to strengthen the Communist Party, the party of the working class and its program of profound and radical transformations.



Organized to fight for socialism-communism...



Proletarians of all countries, unite!



The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Mexico

http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/par ... -comunismo

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Mon May 08, 2023 3:02 pm

AMLO Asks Biden to Stop USAID Financing Opposition Groups in Mexico
MAY 7, 2023

Image
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during one of his regular press conferences next to the letter sent by the Mexican government to US President Joe Biden. Photo: El Tecolote Diario.

Caracas, May 6, 2023 (OrinocoTribune.com)—The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, asked his US counterpart, Joe Biden, to stop his government from funding organizations that are “openly opposed to the legal and legitimate government” of Mexico, since “it is clearly an act of interventionism, contrary to international law and the respect that should prevail among independent and sovereign states.”

During his morning press conference on Wednesday, May 3, in response to a question by journalist Nancy Flores of Contralínea, AMLO showed the letter he had sent to Biden the day before, asking the US president to stop the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from funding opposition parties and associated NGOs, such as Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) and Article 19 that are trying to destabilize the government of Mexico.

“I would like to express briefly,” said the letter, “that for some time now, the United States government, in particular the United States Agency for International Development, has been financing organizations openly opposed to the legal and legitimate government that I represent, which is clearly an interventionist act, contrary to international law and the respect that should prevail among independent and sovereign states.”

“Moreover,” the letter continued, “a few days ago it was announced that said agency [USAID] will increase the budget granted to organizations opposed to our government, as published in the official page of the State Department.”

However, President López Obrador cautiously added that he believes that Biden in unaware of the matter, “and therefore I respectfully ask for your valuable intervention” to put an end to these interventionist actions. AMLO went on to add that initially he had considered not sending the letter, but finally decided the contrary, as “this is a matter of principle, of defending the country, so that future generations should not wonder why this type of violations against the nation’s sovereignty were allowed.”

The letter was handed over to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s presidential advisor on National Security, who was in Mexico on a work visit.

The matter came up when Nancy Flores asked the president whether he had spoken to Biden about the US Department of Defense spying on the Mexican armed forces, the Secretariat of the Navy, and the Secretariat of National Defense. The spying was revealed by AMLO himself last month, when he stated in a morning press conference that the Pentagon was spying on Mexico and that “many media in Mexico are publishing information provided by the DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] and the Pentagon,” information that had been obtained illegally.

When asked by Flores how the country will be shielded from this interventionism, AMLO responded, “If we inform the people, there is no problem because we have nothing to hide. We have no complicity with anyone; we are not corrupt; we have moral authority. We are doing this, because, although it [this type of interventionist acts] does not harm us, politically speaking, by revealing all this, the people become aware—they understand better what we have been saying all this time, that these conservatives are traitors to the nation.”

https://orinocotribune.com/amlo-asks-bi ... in-mexico/

Mexico: AMLO Receives Julian Assange’s Father and Brother, 97 Legislators Ask Biden to End Persecution Against Wikileaks Founder
MAY 3, 2023

Image
Mexican President AMLO hosted Julian Assange’s father and brother, John and Gabriel Shipton on April 20, 2023. Photo: Twitter/@lopezobrador_.

Caracas, April 29, 2023 (OrinocoTribune.com)—The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reaffirmed his support for Julian Assange after a meeting with Assange’s father and brother, who were in Mexico during the global days of protest for Julian Assange, on the occasion of four years of the journalist’s arrest by the British police and subsequent imprisonment in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison in London. As part of the protest actions, 97 legislators of the ruling MORENA party sent a letter to the US authorities, calling for the end of persecution against the Wikileaks founder.

On April 20, AMLO received John Shipton and Gabriel Shipton, father and brother respectively of Julian Assange, at the National Palace in Mexico City, the seat of the Mexican government. “We will continue to defend Julian Assange, he is a political prisoner and his case is an unacceptable offense against freedom of expression,” the president wrote on social media after the meeting.


Furthermore, on April 21, John and Gabriel Shipton addressed met with the Congress of the Republic, the lower house of the Mexican parliament, at the invitation of MORENA’s parliamentary group. As part of the events of the day, the documentary Ithaka, in which John Shipton describes the Assange family’s fight for justice, was shown at the National Film Archives of Mexico (Cineteca Nacional).

Journalist Alina Duarte, a coordinator of the movement for Julian Assange in Mexico, pointed out that his case “can set a precedent so that any journalist, any human rights defender around the world would be at risk, given that the United States has decided to try an Australian citizen, who has Ecuadorian nationality also, under US laws, in British territory. The United States is trying to set an exemplary case to send a message to all journalists throughout the world, that anyone who dares exposing crimes against humanity will be persecuted, regardless of national borders.”

Gabriel Shipton, in his speech, thanked the Mexican government and the legislators, and especially President López Obrador for his unconditional and unwavering support over the years. “Mexican lawmakers have been at the forefront of a global movement for freedom of expression… calling for Julian’s freedom but also all our freedoms,” he said.

John Shipton commented that the Mexican lawmakers’ action “has opened a new door in the fight for Julian Assange.” He also thanked the people and the presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Venezuela for their support and solidarity.

“This new power emanating from Latin America has begun a change in the geopolitical circumstance of the world,” he noted. “Important in that change is the freedom of Julian Assange, and the freedom of each of us to speak to each other and publish what we think freely.”

Congresswoman Susana Prieto Terrazas proposed the creation of a permanent commission of various parliamentary groups, belonging to all parties with parliamentary representation, that would work with US Congressmembers to draft and put forward resolutions for Julian Assange’s freedom directly to the US government.

97 Mexican lawmakers call on Biden to free Assange
In a letter addressed to US President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, 97 members of the Mexican Senate, the Mexican Congress, and the Congress of Mexico City demanded immediate freedom for Julian Assange. Mexican Senator Citlali Hernández, MORENA general secretary and one of the signatories of the letter, and journalist Alina Duarte delivered the letter at the US embassy in Mexico on April 11, the fourth anniversary of Assange’s unjust arrest in UK.


The signatories expressed through the letter their “collective concerns about the US request to extradite journalist and publisher, Julian Paul Assange, from the UK to the US, and the chilling precedent that extradition would set for other journalists and publishers around the world.”

The legislators pointed out the political nature of the 18 charges that the US Department of Justice alleges against the founder of Wikileaks, especially given that the US authorities want to try Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. “Assange carried out standard journalistic practices, which include receiving classified information from a source within the government and then publishing that information in public interest,” they stated. “Charges under the Espionage Act would criminalize these routine practices that are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.”


The signatories listed all the human rights violations to which Assange has been subjected by US and British authorities, including the CIA spying on him throughout the seven years that he stayed in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in addition to the miscarriage of justice in his extradition trial in the United Kingdom.

“We join the call for the immediate release of Mr. Assange made by international organizations at the United Nations, Amnesty International, other human rights defenders, and legal, medical, and other professional associations,” the legislators stated.

“We urge the US Department of Justice to drop all charges against Assange,” they concluded.

Later, in a press conference at the Mexican Congress, the promoter of the initiative, Congressman Manuel Vásquez Arellano, accompanied by Congressman Jorge Barrera Toledo, Senator Citlali Hernández, and journalists Alina Duarte and Rafael Barajas, stated that the Wikileaks founder will receive political asylum in Mexico, as has already been offered by President López Obrador.

Rafael Barajas highlighted how the case of Julian Assange is a classic example of the “world turned upside down”. “What we are seeing is incredible,” he said. “Julian Assange was arrested and remains in prison, while those who promote wars, those who commit genocide, they remain free, enjoying life, and, in fact, someone even got the Nobel Peace Prize, as is the case of Barack Obama.”

On April 11, 2019, Assange was pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had lived for seven years under political asylum, and since then has remained incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison, although there is no sentence against him. The US government is at the point of being able to extradite him to US soil, where he potentially faces 175 years of imprisonment. Human rights groups, journalists’ organizations, social movements, United Nations officials, and presidents and politicians of countries across the globe have called for the freedom of Julian Assange. Many have also expressed concerns about the grave risks to Assange’s life if he is extradited to the United States. However, until now, the US government has remained deaf to all requests for dropping charges against the journalist.

Wikileaks, for its reporting on the Afghanistan and Iraq war crimes and the rendition and torture program at Guantánamo, had partnered with some of the most influential Western mainstream news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and El País, all of which abandoned Assange after the US government started persecuting him, and some even went on to destroy his character and moral standing. Gabriel Shipton has called upon the media to rectify this, and to continue reporting on Assange’s case, on the human rights violations and procedural abuses that he has suffered; as well as to question politicians on what they are doing for Assange, and follow up on any commitment that they make. “It is a movement from the ground up that is going to free Julian,” he said.

https://orinocotribune.com/mexico-amlo- ... s-founder/

ALMO ain't 'left' but he is anti-imperialist.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 02, 2023 2:15 pm

GREETINGS FROM THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF MEXICO FOR MAY DAY: AGAINST THE PRESENT THAT IS IMPERIALIST WAR, EXPLOITATION, HUNGER AND MISERY... FOR THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM-COMMUNISM

Image

Published: 30 April 2023

Comrades proletarians, workers,

working woman, young worker,

migrant workers, unemployed:




Today, May Day, the Communist Party of Mexico greets with optimism and great fraternity the entire working class of Mexico, the powerful force without which nothing moves, the builder and maker of everything, the producer of wealth. We salute all the proletarians, women and men, young and old, nationals, immigrants and emigrants, mestizos and indigenous people, from the city and the countryside, from the mines, industries, oil fields, offices, education, health, the transport and services, which as a whole are the working class, which will transform this rotten society, of exploitation and misery, of hunger, suffering, barbarism and death.



We pay a sincere tribute to the workers of the World who, with their sacrifice, have taken important steps to win rights, such as the 8-hour day, the right to unionize, the right to retire, among others, and to raise the flag of emancipation of workers power and the construction of the new world. The martyrs of Chicago, Cananea and Río Blanco will never be forgotten, nor will the heroic efforts of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the socialist Construction in the USSR.



Down with the imperialist war that hits us with its consequences



A year ago the imperialist war broke out, with the unacceptable Russian invasion of the Ukraine and with the participation of various countries and interstate alliances of death such as NATO. On the one hand, the US and its allies and on the other, Russia-China and its bloc, dispute the hegemony of the imperialist system, to impose their economic, commercial, political and military conditions. In this the main sacrifices have been the working class of Ukraine and Russia, but the workers and peoples of the World are paying the consequences, the most visible, the increase in the prices of food, electricity and fuel and with it the cost of living .



This imperialist war is only for the benefit of the monopolies, of the bourgeoisies, and it is going in the direction of generalizing into a world war, because the rivalries of these imperialist countries have no solution: they want cheap labor, natural and energy resources, trade routes, markets. None of them is interested in the life of the people and the workers, they only want to extract surplus value and profit. And to achieve these objectives they do not hesitate to make rivers of blood flow, destroy entire populations, unleash barbarism, horror, death. They want us to get involved in this war by taking sides with one of them, but their interests are not ours. The interests of workers and peoples are contrary to both the US/NATO and China/Russia.



In one year, food prices have skyrocketed, the price of bread has doubled, and everything goes up without stopping, and this is felt in the pockets of all workers, at the table in their homes, in the hunger and uncertainty of your families. And that happens in Mexico and in the world, and no governmental, social democratic or liberal management can reverse this situation because the basis of the problem is the system of exploitation, capitalism.



The workers of the world raise the red flag of struggle



Faced with the consequences of capitalist barbarism, exploitation and war, the class struggle is accentuated; the same in France as in Greece, in England, the USA, Germany, powerful general strikes are unleashed, massive protests, counterattacks on capital. In the case of France and Greece, these are exemplary struggles, with which it is necessary to develop solidarity and learn the lessons. And in Mexico, workers must prepare for this scenario, since the attack of capital against work is general.



In Mexico an anti-worker government



After more than 4 years of the Obrador government, it is possible to affirm without error that it has an anti-worker and anti-popular leadership. The reforms approved in previous governments to attack labor rights that were previously contained in the Federal Labor Law have been maintained, outsourcing is maintained, the so-called educational reform was not reversed, the 30,000 workers of the Compañía de Luz y Fuerza del Centro, and on the contrary, the process of extinction of public companies continues, as now with Notimex, thus hitting the thousand-day strike of SUTNOTIMEX.



With the ratification of the TMEC, initially signed by Salinas de Gortari in 1993, confirmed by Obrador, the intervention of the US Department of State is promoted, with a million-dollar budget, for the reassignment of collective labor contracts. With this leadership, unionism is fragmented, the unity of workers in strong unions is attacked to create micro-unions with less capacity for resistance against the bosses.



Although it has not prospered yet, this social democratic government of Obrador tries a corporatism and control similar to the charrismo of the PRI times, for this it uses Pedro Haces, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and Susana Prieto as scabs. He announces with great demagogy salary increases that are reduced to ashes by inflation, or youth support plans that give away the labor of the new generation to the monopolies.



All these militarization measures, reinforcement of the security forces, in reality have the orientation of preparing to contain and repress the workers. In this government, the bourgeoisie was privileged, exploitation was favored to the point that the time that the worker requires to earn his salary is barely 5 or 6 minutes, working 7 hours and 54 minutes without any payment and generating greater surplus value for the exploiters.



There is a brutal policy against migrant workers: more than 1,000 are detained daily and held in inhumane conditions in death camps, such as in Ciudad Juárez where almost 40 victims of a fire died.



The workers of the present Government of Obrador can expect nothing. Nothing changed and everything must be changed.



The future is to bury capitalism and forge the new world



There are many reasons to fight, to organize and fight. All the problems mentioned and many others are caused by the system of exploitation of man by man, of the private appropriation of socially produced wealth, this system called capitalist.



It is the workers, organized by the Communist Party, who can put an end to the class rule of the bourgeoisie and bury capitalism. That is its historical mission. It is up to the proletariat to put an end to exploitation and injustice, emancipating itself and emancipating women and all the oppressed.



It is an essential, urgent, possible and necessary task.



This May Day, we call on the workers to contribute their effort and conscience to accelerate the pace for the overthrow of the system.



With power in the hands of the working class, developing a socialist, planned and centralized economy, fighting the vestiges of society divided into classes, life will be better for the working class and the peoples and happiness will be possible.



The first step is to come to strengthen the Communist Party, the party of the working class and its program of deep and radical transformations.



Organized to fight for socialism-communism...



Proletarians of all countries, unite!



The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Mexico

http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/par ... -comunismo

UNACCEPTABLE CONDUCT OF THE ARMY IN NUEVO LAREDO IS NOT AN EXCEPTION, BUT THE CONSTANT OF ITS PRESENCE IN THE STREETS

Published: 01 March 2023
The militarization of the country, begun during the Calderón government, continued by Peña Nieto's, and reinforced by the current government of President López Obrador is unacceptable, and we must persist more firmly in the fight for the return of the Army to the barracks.

During this government, which obtained many votes with which it won the elections in 2018 based on the broken promise to end militarization, the presence in the streets and in public life of the armed forces increased and was legalized. , both from the Army and the Navy, as well as from its new façade: the National Guard. In addition to assuming previously civil functions such as el control of customs and airports, distribution of textbooks and vaccines, the Army has been assigned economic functions in the construction and real estate industries, and important infrastructure projects such as the Isthmus Train, hotels, transportation of passengers and merchandise of the Mayan Train, ensuring that the high command will increase not only their political but economic power. As if that were not enough, since the first day of his government, President López Obrador has consistently used a speech to launder the Army, which he calls "good uniformed people", and exempt it from its crimes throughout the 20th century: the atrocious murder of Rubén Jaramillo, his partner Epifania Zúñiga García, who was pregnant, and their children, in 1962; in 1965 in Chihuahua, in 1968 in Tlatelolco, during theDirty War that liquidated a generation of young revolutionaries in the cities of the country and in the mountains of Guerrero, as well as proven massacres such as the one that occurred in Tlatlaya, and constant murders and violations of human rights. Without forgetting the shocking case of Ayotzinapa, which the current government no longer wanted to resolve so as not to further incriminate the Army. Ayotzinapa is clear proof that the Army and crime maintain close coordination in their functional role in the repression of the social movement. It has been a total slap in the face to the history of our people's struggle to want to equate the revolutionaries of our country with the military. No Mr. President, they were not the same, some were victims and others perpetrators. Some fought for justice and others to preserve injustice.

After almost two decades of using the Armed Forces for public security tasks, the balance is that the drug trafficking industry and crime have not weakened or diminished, but have now expanded and their intertwining with the State is close to symbiosis

Let us also keep in mind that, during the governments of Lázaro Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho, due to social demands and the growing union and political organization of the working class and peasantry, the conclusion was reached that the military should restrict its role to a force defense of sovereignty against any probable aggression from abroad, and limit its until then predominant role as a political factor in public life. Riots, barracks, conspiracies had to come to an end. Today, from the National Palace, the serpent's egg is dangerously incubated by granting the Army a leading role in political decisions.

There is enough data to ensure that there is a historical intertwining between the drug trafficking industry and the military and police commands in our country. The role of generals such as Quirós Hermosillo, Gutiérrez Rebollo or Acosta Chaparro, or of structures such as the extinct Federal Security Directorate and the Army Special Forces groups, in strengthening drug cartels in our country cannot be hidden. This connection continues, as shown by the most recent scandals involving García Luna and General Cienfuegos.

At checkpoints, raids, and operations, the military presence is detrimental to the rights and freedoms won by the people in their struggle. There are many "errors" and therefore too many casualties of the civilian population at the hands of the Army: innocents murdered, women raped, tortured and disappeared. Now it is also a task force against our migrant brothers to comply with the agreements of the Federal Executive with the Trump and Biden administrations.

Now we are witnessing the behavior of the Army in the streets of Nuevo Laredo. Once again, as in the governments of Calderón and Peña Nieto, they seek to justify extrajudicial executions, this time under the cloak of hope for change. From the government and its ideological transmission channels, the alleged association with crime is repeated identically, so that it is tacitly accepted that shooting into the air or at the feet of the civilian population and that new military protocols are applied with impunity, such as snatching cell phones and destroy any evidence that can be gathered in recordings by witnesses about the unconstitutional actions of the soldiers and their commanders. There is no possible justification for the detention, torture or extrajudicial execution of any person by the military.

Nor should it be forgotten that while with Calderón and Peña Nieto the military presence in the streets was illegal, today it is legalized by the constitutional reforms promoted by Obrador and all the parties represented in the Union Congress both in 2019, unanimously, and in 2022 by majority.

We cannot accept it. The Armed Forces must return to the barracks.

Immediate return of the Army to the Barracks!

Stop military brutality against the civilian and working population!

Down with militarization, immediate return of the Army to its barracks!

No more economic power, no more impunity, to the Armed Forces!



Proletarians of all countries, unite!



The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Mexico


http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/par ... las-calles

Google Translator

Why no mention of Chiapas?

********

YouTube Suspends Broadcast of AMLO’s Daily Press Conference
JUNE 1, 2023

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Photo composition showing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during on of his daily press conferences and, in the background, several YouTube logos and a screenshot with a YouTube error message. Photo: El Economista.

The general coordinator of social communication for the presidency of the Republic of Mexico, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, reported that, “without apparent justification,” YouTube suspended the channel of the Center for the Production of Informative and Special Programs (CEPROPIE), which broadcasts the morning press conferences of the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

“We demand that the platform respect official accounts and broadcast the president’s conferences,” Ramírez wrote on his Twitter account.

The daily press conferences, referred to in Spanish as mañaneras, have become a staple of AMLO’s administration. The mañaneras were initially a communication initiative launched by AMLO while he was mayor of the Federal District of Mexico City (2000-2005), and were resumed two days after he took office as Mexican president on December 23, 2018.

Recently, the mañaneras have been under attack from mainstream media and far-right figures alarmed by AMLO’s popularity and the approaching presidential elections, to be held in 2024. Millions of supporters inside and outside Mexico pay careful attention to AMLO’s press conferences.


Ramírez added, in statements issued to the press, that the suspension of the channel is part of “a censorship strategy” due to the impact of López Obrador’s morning press conference, which “millions of people watch.”

Regarding YouTube’s actions, he commented that the administration is in dialogue with Google and Youtube to ensure that the content that is broadcast each morning, including images, is official and “copyright free” and that, in the event of “citizen, business, or political” complaints, YouTube does not treat them as an ordinary complaints due to the official nature of the account.


The channel appears still appears on YouTube; however, on the morning of this Wednesday, May 31, the morning broadcast of López Obrador was not streamed, as it usually is.

On Tuesday, the broadcast on the YouTube channel of the Government of Mexico was interrupted. The video of that conference, which is typically over two hours long, is just over eight minutes long.

In addition to being broadcast on the CEPROPIE channel, López Obrador’s morning press conferences are broadcast through the president’s account on YouTube.

Last April, it was learned that López Obrador was one of the 10 most popular Spanish-speaking streamers in the first quarter of 2023, according to data from the Streams Charts platform. In that period, the president’s YouTube channel achieved 13.2 million hours of views.

https://orinocotribune.com/youtube-susp ... onference/

ALMO is a liberal nationalist. But that ain't good enough for the USA, which demands abject deference to US capital. Which shows that ideology ain't got all that much to do with US foreign policy for other than propaganda purposes. We see this clearly with the aggression against the USSR seamlessly transferred to the Russian Federation the moment that state began to reassert it's sovereignty.
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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 07, 2023 2:29 pm

Claudia Sheinbaum is elected presidential candidate for the Morena party in Mexico

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Claudia Sheinbaum won in all five surveys conducted, one of which was applied internally. | Photo: @mario_delgado
Posted 6 September 2023 (10 hours 43 minutes ago)

The president of the National Council of Morena, Alfonso Durazo, read the results of the five surveys that defined the candidacy.

The former head of Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, will be the presidential candidate for the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party for the 2024 elections, after winning in the internal process carried out through surveys.

The president of the National Council of Morena, Alfonso Durazo, read the results of the five surveys that defined the candidacy of that political group.

"The comprehensive analysis of these data allows us to unquestionably conclude that Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo obtained the best position to be considered as coordinator of the committees for the defense of the fourth transformation," he said.


According to what was indicated by Durazo, Sheinbaum won in the five surveys carried out, of which one was applied internally.

In addition, he clarified that all the phases of the process were successfully concluded and that there were no incidents that affected the final result.

After knowing the results in an act, Sheinbaum declared that for this Thursday he has requested a meeting with the leadership of the party because "the electoral process begins and there is not a minute to lose."


"I feel proud, honored. We have been part of this movement since its founding," she added.

For his part, teleSUR correspondent Daniel Rosas recalled that in the country "there is no primary election as such, in such a way that this unprecedented process can be considered a primary election of the bloc made up of the official Morena party and its allies, the Labor Party and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico"

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/mexico-c ... -0036.html

Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalizes abortion at the federal level

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As of this Supreme Court decision, federal health institutions must provide services to those who request them. | Photo: Twitter @MerGarza
Posted 7 September 2023 (8 hours 5 minutes ago)

In a historic decision, the Supreme Court of Mexico endorsed the voluntary interruption of pregnancy at the national level.

The Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico ruled to decriminalize abortion at the national level, which guarantees all women the possibility of being able to access a voluntary interruption of pregnancy (IVE), without being criminalized or the health professionals who carry out this procedure. practice.

The First Chamber of the SCJN has declared it unconstitutional to penalize abortion in the Federal Penal Code for "violating the human rights of women and people with the capacity to gestate."

For its part, GIRE, the legal defense group for the right to abortion that has won the protection, has celebrated the decision on the same social network.


The amparo was against four articles of the Federal Criminal Code (CPF) that still maintain prison sentences for women who resort to abortion, in any of their hypotheses. The effects of the ruling order the Congress of the Union to repeal these provisions.

The significance of the ruling includes giving it retroactive effects, that is, that any person who is currently in prison or subject to proceedings accused of violating those four articles of the CPF, will be able to recover their freedom.


"As long as these are criminal regulations, in terms of the provisions of Article 14 of the Constitution, it is appropriate to establish retroactive effects for the benefit of those people who are currently being prosecuted or sentenced for this crime," adds the project prepared by Minister Ana Margarita Ríos Farjat.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/mexico-s ... -0002.html

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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 23, 2024 4:05 pm

THE BORDER CRISIS: THE VIEW OF THE CP MEXICO
Posted by MLToday | Jan 22, 2024 | Other Featured Posts | 0

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BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF MEXICO
January 20, 2024

The migration of people from different parts of the world to the U.S. is going through a crisis. Migration to the US is not a new phenomenon, but a historical phenomenon that has grown in numbers. This migratory flow crosses Mexico as a transit country and has its cause mainly in the need of migrants to seek better living conditions, needs which are not being resolved in their countries of origin, and that in essence are related to the capitalist crisis that brings economic hardship, imperialist wars, unemployment, precarious jobs, and lack of access to basic rights such as health, education and physical security.

Migrants are a labor force expelled by the countries of origin and absorbed by countries that need that labor force. Depending on labor supply and demand, migration policies are adjusted to restrict or facilitate migratory flows. A very clear example of this is an important episode in the history of Mexico-US migration, the Bracero Program[1], which served to regulate the flow of more than 10 million workers and thus met the needs of the two nations, Mexico as the sending country and the US as the receiving country.

Post-revolutionary Mexico (after 1920) had a surplus labor force; it could not employ millions of workers. On the contrary, the United States labor supply was depleted due to the massive transfer of men to the front lines of World War II (1941-45) and the effects of the Great Depression (1929-39). The U.S. needed that labor force to grow crops and maintain the railroads, a need that was met through the importation of labor. This situation worsened years later with the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the reforms to the agrarian law in those years, which opened the door to the privatization of the ejidos [an ejido is a piece of land farmed communally under a system supported by the Mexican government].

The current administration headed by Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador has been known for maintaining a demagogic discourse on issues related to immigration policy. However, in practice it carries out an anti-immigrant policy. Among its official migratory actions, the Mexican government declared through a joint communiqué between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior, published in 2019, that its migratory policy is “new”, “sovereign” and that it “seeks to preserve the rights of migrants”. However, so far in 2023 Mexico has deported 788,000 migrants.

The Mexican government has also signed the Comprehensive Development Plan of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) , which “seeks to promote the economic development of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in order to reduce the structural causes that provoke migratory flows”. Likewise, the Mexican government affirms that, in view of the US implementation of Article 235 of its Immigration and Nationality Law[2], for humanitarian reasons, it has authorized the entry of asylum seekers to the US, while their hearing on the other side of the border takes place, since to deport them is to deny them the right to asylum.

It is worth mentioning that in 2023 a new immigration agreement between Mexico and the U.S. was signed, in which Mexico commits to the expulsion and return of migrants through northern border cities, deportation to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil and Colombia, as well as increased control operations on highways and train stations.

In the same vein, in 2018 the Mexican government signed the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which seeks that States “respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of all migrants regardless of their migratory status.” It also endorses the principles of non-refoulement [non-suppression] and non-discrimination, and seeks to eradicate all forms of discrimination, such as racism and xenophobia.

However, this official discourse embodied in the inter-imperialist agreements mentioned above contrasts with reality. Mexican immigration authorities do detain migrants and also commit extortion against them, demanding money from them in exchange for not destroying their immigration documents and not deporting them, even while they are in the offices of the Mexico City International Airport and on board units of the National Institute of Migration. There are reports of complicity between officials and the cartels, who share information to violate the rights of tens of thousands of migrant families.

Most of them are Central American migrants who are victims of extortion and kidnapping in Mexico while they wait for their asylum applications to be processed in the United States. Former President Trump’s controversial immigration program is responsible since 2019 for leaving tens of thousands of migrants in northern Mexico insecure and at the mercy of organized crime.

In 2019 Lopez-Obrador agreed, with then President Trump, that Mexico would stop the growing illegal immigration, under the threat of imposing 5% tariffs on all Mexican products exported to the U.S., and of not continuing the Free Trade Agreement. Thus extending this inter-imperialist agreement but now under the name of USMCA, the treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada, a political-economic alliance against Chinese capital, with Lopez-Obrador’s commitment to deliver to Biden all the labor, lithium, gas and gasoline that is needed for imperialist war.

The current US president, Biden, has given continuity to Trump’s immigration policy, committing Mexico to act as an extension of the border patrol to act as a great containment wall and stop the arrival of more migrants to US territory. The Lopez-Obrador-Biden anti-immigrant policy is responsible for the death of 38 migrants at the Ciudad Juarez migrant station in March of last year.

On the other hand, the repressive containment policy applied by agents of the National Migration Institute and the National Guard on the border with Guatemala, where many Central American migrants choose to enter the country, is evident. The same Migration Policy Unit of the Ministry of the Interior has accepted that Mexican authorities detained more than 252,000 migrants in 2021 and deported more than 100,000.

Another example of anti-immigrant actions are the confrontations between the National Guard and migrant caravans in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, when they shot at a van with migrants, leaving four wounded and one dead. In Tapachula in 2021 there were at least 63,000 migrants stranded waiting for shelter. In this same city some 100 Haitian and African migrants threw sticks and stones at the National Guard that was guarding the offices of the National Migration Institute, an action taken to express their annoyance at the slowness of the procedures to obtain humanitarian visitor cards [3] and to be able to leave Tapachula, known by them as the “great migratory prison.”

The Lopez-Obrador administration is responsible for the violence exercised against migrants by federal immigration authorities, who are also accomplices of the criminal groups that have seen a gold mine in migrants. It is no secret that organized crime is dedicated not only to drug trafficking, but also to other types of economically profitable crimes such as migrant smuggling. The current Lopez-Obrador administration is also responsible for the fact that migrants throughout the national territory are victims of robbery, rape, kidnapping, murder, trafficking, prostitution, forced labor, murder, forced recruitment into the ranks of crime, even ending up becoming victimizers.

The Communist Party of Mexico holds the capitalist State and the capitalist system responsible, reiterates that the way out of this barbarism is the struggle for socialism, internationalism and total solidarity with migrant workers regardless of their nationality. Likewise, the Communist Party of Mexico pronounces itself in favor of the right of migrants to refuge and to enjoy the same rights as all Mexican workers.



Endnotes:

[1] The Bracero Program was developed between 1942 and 1964, and was marked by a series of diplomatic agreements to regulate the temporary work of Mexicans in the United States. The “bracero” was a person who worked mainly with his arms in agricultural tasks. This program regulated a migratory pattern characterized by the movement of single men, many of them coming from rural areas to work temporarily, under a documentation scheme based on a contract endorsed by both nations.

[2] Section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act deals with the expedited removal of inadmissible aliens who arrive in the country referred for hearings. It allows third country asylum seekers entering from Mexican territory to return to Mexico while awaiting the resolution of their immigration proceedings in the U.S.

[3] The visitor’s card for humanitarian reasons is a document to which every migrant is entitled, it is issued by the National Migration Institute. It is a free procedure, which allows the regularization of the stay in Mexico, it is usually valid for one year and implies a work permit.


https://mltoday.com/the-border-crisis-t ... cp-mexico/
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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 02, 2024 2:50 pm

The DEA Takes Aim at Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Misses Badly
Posted on February 2, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

“There was no evidence for what they were trying to say,” said former DEA agent Mike Vigil. “I did not see any evidence that López Obrador was involved, had knowledge or intention of receiving ‘hot money’ from drug traffickers.”

At more or less exactly the same time on Tuesday afternoon (Mexican time), three articles were published by three news outlets — two USian, one German — alleging that Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador’s electoral campaign in 2006 had been part-financed by the Sinaloa drug cartel. The first article, published by German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, was written by the Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández. The second, by Steven Dudley, appeared on the InSight Crime portal. The last one was written by US Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Golden for the independent news agency, ProPublica.

All three articles, written by respected journalists, make the same unifying claim (albeit with diverging levels of confidence): López Obrador’s campaign in 2006 received illegal financing in return for a pledge that, as Golden puts it, “a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.” The $2 million dollars was allegedly given to Nicolás Mollinedo, a long-time aide and personal driver of AMLO’s. All three articles cite as evidence “a dozen interviews,” with DEA agents and US diplomats, all of whom would like to remain anonymous, as well as official documents relating to a DEA investigation launched in 2010 into AMLO’s campaign funding.


That investigation ended up going nowhere and the prosecutors of the Southern District Court of New York decided to close the case in 2011, as Golden himself documents:

[S]ome officials felt the evidence was not strong enough to justify the risks of an extensive undercover operation inside Mexico. In late 2011, DEA agents proposed a sting in which they would offer $5 million in supposed drug money to operatives working on López Obrador’s second presidential campaign. Instead, Justice Department officials closed the investigation, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.

“Nobody was trying to influence the election,” one official familiar with the investigation said. “But there was always a fear that López Obrador might back away on the drug fight — that if this guy becomes president, he could shut us down.”

So, while Mexico was locked in the fifth year of a spiralling drug war, during which time the then-public-security secretary, Genaro García Luna, was essentially running a drug trafficking operation in league with the Sinoloa cartel, the DEA was planning a sting operation to snare López Obrador, whom it feared might “back away on the drug fight,” or even “shut down” the DEA’s operations in Mexico. As the Mexico-based pro-AMLO journalist Kurt Hackbarth notes, “the DEA was trying to set up and effectively blackmail AMLO’s 2012 presidential campaign for fear that he would ‘shut down’ their operations in Mexico.”

Now, 14 years later, the agents involved in that case have decided to spill the beans to three news agencies. But by this point the DEA has lost all credibility and is clearly not a disinterested party. That is not to say that AMLO himself or his government do not have links with one or more of Mexico’s drug cartels. However, these articles do not present conclusive proof showing that; instead, what they appear to prove is that the DEA, which is locked in a power struggle with Mexico’s AMLO government (more on that later), is willing to use US and German media outlets to pursue its own interests.

“DEA agents are trying to accomplish in one news cycle what they could not prove before a prosecutor or their superiors,” writes Carlos A. Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and author of the book, Cien Años de Espias y Drogas: La Historia de los Agentes Anti-Narcóticos de los Estados Unidos en Mexico (100 Years of Spies and Drugs: The History of US Anti-Narcotic Agents in Mexico).

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) himself denied the allegations, declaring in his morning press conference that there is no evidence against him:

“It is completely false, it is slander. They are certainly very upset and unfortunately the press, as we have seen not only in Mexico, is very subordinate to power.”

A Dodgy Source

Other glaring issues with these allegations include the fact that their main source is Roberto López Nájera, a former lawyer for the Beltrán Leyva family and long-time informant with both Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office and the DEA. Code-named Jennifer, López Nájera began working with the DEA in 2010 in exchange for protection and a monthly payment. Since then, he has earned a reputation for fabricating testimonies. In 2013, an article in El País described him as “capable of grabbing a loose thread of information and converting it on the fly into another twig for his nest of fallacy.”

As Pérez Ricart notes, basing a story on López Nájera testimony is “taking a leap into the void.”

In an interview (in Spanish) with the largely anti-AMLO Mexican broadcaster MVS, Mike Vigil, a former head of International Operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) whom the news presenter Luis Cardenas described as an authority on the subject in his preamble to the interview, dismissed the allegations against AMLO as wholly lacking in evidence:

The narcos have always given money to political campaigns. It happens everywhere and I have seen this in Colombia and many other countries, because what the narcos want is to have influence. They seek to buy protection and obtain political favours that benefit them.

But when I read the article by Tim Golden, there was no evidence for what they were trying to say. I did not see any evidence that López Obrador was involved, had knowledge or intention of receiving ‘hot money’ from drug traffickers, in this case from the Beltrán Leyva, of the Sinaloa Cartel… It all culminated in a meeting in Nueva Vallarta where… members of AMLO’s political campaign were supposedly given $2 million. But … there is no evidence that López Obrador was aware of it.

The other thing that strikes me as curious is that in the trial of Chapo Guzman where many members of the Sinaloa cartel made statements about all the people (who were on the take) but they never mentioned AMLO. And again in the trial of Genaro García Luna (the security minister of former President Felipe Calderon who was recently convicted by a US jury of drug trafficking), many members of the Sinaloa cartel gave evidence but never mentioned López Obrador. They mentioned Peña Nieto who allegedly received $200 million. For me that it is absurd.

Later in the interview, Vigil says:

“I do not agree with López Obrador’s policy of ‘hugs, not bullets’ , because it has failed, but that does not mean that he is taking money from the mafia. You have to be very careful with making accusations like that.”

As Golden himself admits, there is no solid proof. Asked why he framed the title of his article as a question rather than a statement (“Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?”), he responded:

“ We are not saying that there is undeniable, conclusive evidence that these donations were made. I believe that people should draw their own conclusions, we are not saying what happened or did not happen, because it seems to us that the information is not conclusive, there was no judicial process that definitively validated that information.”

Anabel Hernández was much more assertive in her reporting for Deutsche Welle, opting for a clearer cut title (“The Sinaloa Cartel Financed AMLO’s 2006 Campaign”). She also claims in the first paragraph of her article that the investigation by the US’s Office of the Southern District of New York and the DEA had “obtained solid evidence that the Sinaloa Cartel contributed between 2 and 4 million dollars to Andrés Manuel ‘s campaign. Which begs two questions: first, why the glaring discrepancy in confidence regarding the investigation’s evidence between the two reports? And second, if the evidence was as “solid” as Hernández claims, why did the prosecutors decide to close the case?

Curious Timing

The timing of the allegations is also curious, coming just months before an election in which the chosen nominee for AMLO’s MORENA party, Claudia Scheinbaum, is hotly tipped to succeed AMLO as president. AMLO himself cannot run for reelection since Mexico’s constitutions hold that presidents can only serve one six-year term.

The allegations also come eight months after the Mexican government locked horns with the DEA over revelations that the agency had run a covert, 18-month incursion into Mexican territory, in direct contravention of Mexico’s 2020 National Security Law, which substantially limits the actions of foreign intelligence agencies on Mexican soil. As Kurt Hackbarth reported in his May 2023 article for Jacobin, “In Mexico, AMLO Is Shining a Light on the DEA’s Hypocrisy in the War on Drugs,” AMLO ripped into the operation, calling it “abusive, arrogant meddling that must not be accepted in any way.” Here’s more:

How are we supposed to blindly trust DEA agents when it’s proven that many of them . . . maintain or maintained links with organized crime? Like what happened with the former head of the DEA in Mexico [Nicholas Palmieri], who it was discovered had relationships with representatives of the drug cartels and suddenly they removed him and no one knew any more about it. Or the case of García Luna, where they only defined a limited sphere [of action] . . . as if he didn’t have any ties to international agencies, to the government of the United States and the government of Mexico. . . . Enough with the simulations.

Hackbarth proceeds to list in detail a roster of recent scandals involving DEA agents:

Mexico chief Nicholas Palmieri [was] transferred and then allowed to resign for his chummy social relationship with Miami lawyer David Macey, who has represented prominent defendants in the drug world such as the Colombian Diego Marín. Although Palmieri left the agency in 2022, the hush-hush affair was only pried out by the AP in January of this year.

… [T]he case of agent John Costanzo, Jr, accused of providing sensitive information to intermediary and former agent Manny Recio, who in turn was in the employ of — yes — Miami defense lawyers. Or the case of agent Chad Scott, the “white devil” sentenced to thirteen years for “stealing money from suspects, falsifying government records and committing perjury during a federal trial.” Or the case of agent Nathan Koen, sentenced to eleven years for thousands of dollars in bribes from California drug trafficker Francisco González Benítez. Or the case of agent Fernando Gómez, sentenced to four years for helping a drug-trafficking ring avoid detection from law enforcement.

Or the standout case of agent José Irizarry, sentenced to twelve years for running an extensive money-laundering operation that included, he contends, federal agents, prosecutors, informants, and cartel smugglers, all of them part of a three-continent joyride known as ‘Team America’ that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.

And who, according to Irizarry, taught him the tools of the trade? The Contraband King himself, Diego Marín, defended by Nicholas Palmieri’s Miami friend David Macey. Thus does the circle close.

This latest example of US election interference in Mexico is part of a broader trend. As we have reported for a number of months now, the US military and other government agencies are trying to leverage the War on Drugs to reassert its strategic and military dominance over the American continent. This it is doing one country at a time, with the apparent ultimate endgame being direct, overt military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels — on Mexican soil.

At least that is what many Republican lawmakers, including presidential candidate Donald Trump, are calling for, with the ostensible goal of stemming the flow of fentanyl — despite the fact that most of the fentanyl entering the US is smuggled by US citizens, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute.

In September, Dina Boluarte’s blood-stained government in Peru signed an agreement with US Homeland Security Investigations to collaborate in transnational criminal investigations through the establishment of a Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit (TCIU). Shortly after, the government of Ecuador signed an agreement with Washington to allow the deployment of US forces along its coastline as well as on its soil. Both governments have asked Washington to draw up anti-drug initiatives modelled on the disastrous Plan Colombia. Argentina’s Milei government has also proposed a new reform that would allow Argentina’s executive branch to open the doors to foreign troops without needing the approval of Congress.

Now, the focus is back on Mexico. Over the coming weeks and months, US interference in Mexico’s elections is likely to increase and as we have seen here, the media is likely to play a leading role. Most of Mexico’s corporate press will happily lap up and amplify any allegations against AMLO or Sheinbaum, whether demonstrably true or false.

That said, it is unlikely that these allegations will have any material impact on Mexico’s elections. My guess is that those who already despise AMLO will despise him a little more while those who support him will continue to do so. In other words, it will help to fuel political polarisation in the country while increasing distrust of the DEA among AMLO supporters, who continue to represent over 60% of voters.

In fact, AMLO, now in his last year in office, is the second most popular national leader in the world after India’s Prime Minister Narendi Modi. I would argue that the main reason for this is that Mexico’s economy has fared far better than AMLO’s doomsaying detractors have consistently predicted over the past five years. In the IMF’s latest nominal GDP forecasts, in December 2023, Mexico placed 12th in the ranking of the world’s largest economies, having overtaken Spain, Australia and South Korea in the past two years (the reasons for this will be the subject of a later article).

Lastly, one way AMLO himself responded to the DEA’s allegations was to hold a two-and-a-half hour meeting with the Ambassador of China, the US’s arch-strategic rival, with whom AMLO’s government has had a patchy relationship. In that meeting, the Mexican president expressed his gratitude to Beijing for its support during difficult times for the country, such as the category 5 hurricane that devastated Acapulco in late October as well as all the material aid Beijing sent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/02 ... rador.html

******

New arrest warrants for eight soldiers in the Ayotzinapa case

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Arrest warrants have already been executed in three cases. The Federal Public Ministry will charge the accused with the crime of organized crime. | Photo: La Jornada
Published February 2, 2024 (6 hours 14 minutes ago)

Last week, the uniformed men left the Military Camp 1-A prison in Mexico City on parole.

The Attorney General's Office (FGR) of Mexico obtained new arrest warrants against eight soldiers, who are accused of their alleged participation in the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa normal students and who had obtained their conditional release at a previous time.

Arrest warrants have already been executed in three cases. On this occasion, the Federal Public Ministry will charge the accused with the crime of organized crime. They are attributed with alleged links to the Guerreros Unidos Cartel, an organization that is believed to have had a direct participation in the Ayotzinapa case, reported by La Jornada, citing defenders of the members of the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) and a protected witness. of the Attorney General's Office (FGR).

"We have made the decision, as always, to face the accusations and voluntarily hand them over to face the processes," said the military's defender, Alejandro Robledo Carretero, in statements to Milenio.


The lawyer pointed out that the three arrests that have already been carried out occurred when the accused showed up to sign at the Precautionary Measures Unit.

Last week, the uniformed men left the Military Camp 1-A prison in Mexico City on parole. They had been detained since June 2023 and were allowed to face trial outside of prison.

The soldiers involved in this situation are Gustavo Rodríguez de la Cruz, Omar Torres Marquillo, Juan Andrés Flores Lagunes, Ramiro Manzanares Sanabria, Roberto de los Santos Eduviges, Eloy Estrada Díaz, Uri Yashiel Reyes Lazos and Juan Sotelo Díaz.

Judge Raquel Duarte Cedillo, of the Second District Court in Federal Criminal Proceedings in Toluca, ordered a change in the military's precautionary measures, which resulted in their conditional release. In addition, she requested that they pay a bond of 50,000 pesos, hand over their passports, appear before the court every 15 days and prohibited them from leaving the country and approaching the state of Guerrero.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/ordenes- ... -0001.html
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Re: Mexico

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 26, 2024 2:58 pm

President of Mexico Fights Back Against NYT Slander, Says Imperialist Media Outlets ‘Consider Themselves a Divine Race’
FEBRUARY 25, 2024

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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (left) and the New York Times headquarters (right). Photo: RedRadioVE.

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized the US news outlet The New York Times (NYT) and stressed that journalists of NYT and other imperialist media outlets consider themselves “a divine race” that cannot be touched, “not even with a rose petal,” despite the fact that they spread slander with impunity.

“You, with all due respect, do partisan journalism, because you are biased in favor of groups with vested interests, you are too close to de facto political and economic power,” AMLO said on Friday, February 23, during a tense exchange with Jesica Zermeño, journalist of Univision, during the president’s usual morning press conference.


The reporter asked AMLO why he had disclosed the phone number of Natalie Kitroeff, head of the NYT bureau in Mexico, since it violates the Data Protection Law, and puts her life at risk because Mexico is a dangerous country for journalists.

However, President López Obrador defended his actions and added that he will continue to disclose private information of other journalists when circumstances oblige him, because during his administration “public life is more public.”

He also accused the Univision network, NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Mexican outlet Reforma of being “the favorites” of conservative governments, and of never admitting their own mistakes.


“You are not capable of self-criticism to review your journalism, if what you do can be called journalism,” the president said. “You feel you are embroidered by hand, like a divine, privileged race. You can spread slander with impunity as you have done with us, as it was done yesterday [by NYT]. You all cannot even be touched with a rose petal. What happens when this journalist [Kitroeff] is slandering me, linking me and my family with drug trafficking, without evidence?”


Zermeño insisted and asked López Obrador if he did not think it had been a mistake to disclose Kitroeff’s telephone number.

“No, because this is a public space,” the president responded. “Nothing happens that is just another piece of information. You are the most tenacious liars, the most tenacious manipulators. What you say about there being a great risk for journalists is an association linked to vested interests of hegemonic governments. Of course, unfortunately there are comrades who have lost their lives, but we do not tolerate impunity. The Mexican State is not a violator of human rights.”



“Above that Law [of Personal Data Protection] there is moral and political authority. We represent a people who deserve respect. We are not criminals. Nobody should believe that because it is The New York Times we are going to sit in the dock,” AMLO said to Zermeño’s evident surprise.

“Do not exaggerate, if the colleague [Kitroeff] is worried because her phone number was made public, she can change her phone number,” he recommended.


“You people are very arrogant, what you did was very offensive. Who is going to repair the damage done to me?” he continued. “Who is going to repair the damage done to my children? When they search their names, it will come out that López Obrador’s children were investigated for receiving money from drug trafficking gangs. You do not see that damage. If you slander me, here there is a response.”

What happened the day before
On Thursday, AMLO revealed that NYT Mexico bureau chief Natalie Kritoeff had sent him a “threatening” email, asking him to respond to a number of questions regarding a story in which NYT reported, without showing evidence, that the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had investigated alleged drug trafficking links with López Obrador’s presidential campaign in 2018. The investigation allegedly even involved the president’s children. However, the DEA decided to close the investigation so as not to generate “bilateral conflict.”

“All of that is false, completely false,” López Obrador said on Thursday before the publication of the article. However, that generated a scandal because the president released the journalist’s private phone number.

Later, the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI) of Mexico announced the initiation of an ex-officio investigation against the president to establish whether he had violated the principles and duties established in the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data.

After the NYT published the report, the spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, denied any US government investigation against AMLO’s 2018 presidential campaign for alleged links to drug trafficking.

“The Department of Justice has already made it clear, there is no investigation against President López Obrador. The Department of Justice would have had the responsibility to review any allegations,” Kirby said at a press conference.

(RedRadioVE) by Victoria Torres

https://orinocotribune.com/president-of ... vine-race/

ALMO is objectively on the side of the 'good guys' in the international scene and concerning imperialism. Internally though he is an economic nationalist and serves his national capitalist interests.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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