699902

research-article2017
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17699902Latin American PerspectivesPuma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR

Small Groups Dont Win Revolutions

Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of
Poltica Popular
by
Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo

Poltica Popular, an unarmed Maoist group operating from 1968 to 1979 in northern
Mexico, developed as it did because of the attraction of the mass line in its interpretation
as a direct-democratic model for political participation. This is why activists from the
student movement of 1968 adopted Maoist ideas as an ideological guide. Maoism as a
simple organizational catechism easily captured their imagination and persuaded squat-
ters and workers to join them in challenging the authoritarian Mexican regime.

El grupo maosta no armado Poltica Popular, que operara de 1968 a 1979 en el norte
de Mxico, se desarroll como tal debido a la atraccin de la lnea de masas interpretada
como un modelo democrtico directo de participacin poltica. Fue por esta razn que los
activistas del movimiento estudiantil de 1968 adoptaron conceptos maostas como gua
ideolgica. La sencilla naturaleza del Maosmo como catecismo organizacional captur
fcilmente la imaginacin estudiantil y persuadi a las poblaciones marginales y traba-
jadores de unirse a ellos en su lucha contra el rgimen autoritario mexicano.

Keywords: Maoism, Mexico, Poltica Popular, Urban guerrillas, Lnea Proletaria

Writing about memories of armed struggle in Mexico during the 1970s is like
traveling to a forgotten past of debates on the left. After the traumatic events of
1968, radicalized students considered revolutionary strategies for overthrow-
ing the authoritarian regime. There was broad consensus regarding the need to
fight the regime, but students disagreed about the best way to move forward.
Some followed Che Guevaras lead and tried to establish guerrilla movements
in the countryside or the cities, while others pursued revolutionary ideals with-
out recourse to arms but still keeping their distance from electoral politics.

Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo is deputy assistant director of higher education in the Mexico City
Department of Education. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Twenty-third
International Colloquium of History Students at the Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per in
Lima in 2013 and published in Spanish in Cartografas del horror, edited by Fabin Campos
Hernndez et al. (2015). The author thanks Paul Lawrance Haber, Ron Haas, Aaron Leonard, and
Yair Martnez for their comments on this article and their help in its translation. He thanks the
former militants of Poltica Popular in La Laguna and Victoria de Durango for sharing their mem-
ories of their participation in the organization. He is grateful to Adolfo Orive, Jess Vargas,
Salvador Hernndez Vlez, Agustn Acosta, and Hugo Andrs Araujo for helping him to build an
archive of testimonies and documents about Poltica Popular and performing an exhaustive cri-
tique of his conclusions.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue XXX, Vol. XX No. XXX, Month 201X, 116
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699902
2017 Latin American Perspectives

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2 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Poltica Popular (Peoples PoliticsPP), a group of students, workers, and

peasants influenced by Maoism and the idea of the mass line as an organiza-
tional principle,1 walked a different path to revolution by creating squatter
settlements and dissident union organizations and finally concluded that
armed struggle was not one of its options.
In 2013 I interviewed many former militants of PP in northern Mexico (see
Puma, 2014). Their stories did not deviate from the accounts of former
Communists or Trotskyists. Like their fellow leftists, they were students, work-
ers, or squatters.2 They shared a history of radical protest and socialist ideology.
Many of them still believed in the old dream of social revolution and preserved
Marxist ideas and vocabulary. Nonetheless, their organization was surrounded
by contradictory myths of which the most enduring was that PP reneged on its
revolutionary ideals and joined the counterinsurgency.
PP is a contested subject in leftist historiography and popular memory.
Memories of PP are tainted by the collaboration of some of its former militants
with the neoliberal governments of Carlos Salinas (19881994) and Ernesto
Zedillo (19942000). Most of the critics focus on the figure of Adolfo Orive, the
founding leader of PP, whose role as an adviser to the Interior Ministry has
obscured its whole history. Paradoxically, we can trace the origins of the PP
black legend back to a series of newspaper and magazine articles that
appeared between 1993 and 1998 (see Cano, 1998a; 1998b; Correa, 1993; Corro,
1998; Jaquez, 1994; Velzquez, Avila, and Goded, 1998). In those articles former
PP militants developed a harsh critique of the political evolution of their former
leader that received added impetus when Subcomandante Marcos joined the
fray. Marcos (2003 [1998]: 216219) naturalized the outmoded Maoism image
with his communiqu Mxico 1998: Arriba y abajo, mscaras y silencios and
foreclosed any historical inquiry into PP for almost two decades.
It is important that these attacks occurred in the context of the political con-
flicts of the early 1990s. The Salinas and Zedillo presidencies experienced polit-
ical and social turmoil as a result of the privatization of public enterprises,
free-trade agreement negotiations with the United States, and demands for
clean elections. Also important in the rise of discontent was a 1991 constitutional
reform that opened the gates to private ownership of communal lands (ejidos).
In order to curb the protests, the Mexican government created programs to
diminish poverty such as the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (National
Solidarity Program), commonly associated with co-optation. The agencies that
managed those programs, such as the Ministry of Social Development, were
filled with leftist militants of diverse backgrounds, but the critical articles men-
tioned above stressed the participation of former Maoists. As a result, former PP
militants were rapidly sent to the Ninth Circle of Hell in the Mexican lefts imag-
inary. This condemnatory discourse has remained unchallenged until now. I
will try to dispel the myth and contribute new information to the debate.

A Short History Of Pp

In 1968, an unexpected enemy attacked Mexicos authoritarian regime.

Mexico Citys high school and college students joined forces with their peers in
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 3

other states in demanding the end of restrictions on civil liberties. For over six
months the students and some of their teachers occupied public schools and
confronted the police. They demanded public dialogue with the government of
President Gustavo Daz Ordaz. Instead, they suffered police and army repres-
sion in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968. The
government unleashed a wave of political persecution and jailed movement
leaders. Recent interpretations of the 1968 Movement emphasize its role in the
struggle for democracy. These mainstream narratives focus on the movements
suppression by the Mexican army or paramilitary forces (Loaeza, 1989). The
students murdered at Tlatelolco became national martyrs, and every October 2
in Mexico City there are cries of October 2 is not forgotten! Public memory of
the 1968 Movement has erased its radical components and reduced it to being
simply another step toward electoral democracy.
PP had its origins in the 1968 student movement at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute. It was an initiative
inspired by Adolfo Orive, scion of a Mexican postrevolutionary elite family
with strong ties to former President Lzaro Crdenas and the left wing of the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional PartyPRI).
In his youth, Orive participated in the 1958 student protests in Mexico City
against rises in bus fares, and his family sent him to Europe to remove him from
further political involvement. He went to Paris, where he studied Marxism
under Charles Bettelheim and Louis Althusser and adopted the French version
of Maos thought and its critique of really existing socialism in the Soviet
bloc. At the same time, he became involved in the radical groups that flirted
with Maoism and experienced the May 1968 events (Adolfo Orive, interview,
Mexico City, August 10, 2012).3 Orive returned to Mexico between August and
September of 1968, just in time to participate in the student movement there.
After the Tlateolco massacre, student activists felt an urgent need to find a
way forward. Orive and other militants offered an answer in Hacia una poltica
popular, a pamphlet that served to recruit new members and remains the only
document accepted by all former militants. The mimeographed pamphlet had
a yellow cardboard cover, and young Maoist militants in northern Mexico
called it The Yellow Document, mirroring Maos Little Red Book. It con-
tained a critique of the Mexican left and unions strikes in 1950s and 1960s and
proposed, following Maoist principles, a different form of political action that
corresponded to the idea of a mass line with three principles: (1) Trust the
masses and obtain their support. (2) Ideas must come from the masses and then
return to the masses for their discussion. (3) Be the student of the masses before
being their teacher (PP, 2001: 161165). This grassroots elaboration of Maoism
provided the students with a framework for action.
PP also tried to break with the idea of a revolutionary vanguard that was
dominant among activists of the 1968 Movement. It became a vanguard of dif-
ferent kind: a group of militants obsessed with returning the decision-making
process to the people. The PP founders argued that achieving their goals would
require the active participation of the majority of the working class. From
December 1968 on they said, We do not want to make politics in the name of
the people. Instead, we want the people to make their own politics, and we
want to participate with them. That, in synthesis, is peoples politics, fighting
4 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

for true democracy, popular and revolutionary democracy (PP, 1968: 15). The
originality of this proposal was the adoption of the mass line as an organizing
principle and the absence of references to Marxist theory. At a time when eager
revolutionaries identified with internationalist heroes, PP inserted itself into
national traditions of popular struggle and discarded communist symbols.
The first attempt by the future activists to join the masses took place in
1969 in the Mixteca area of the state of Oaxaca. The original group of brigadis-
tas included Javier Gil (a doctor), Adolfo Orive, Jorge Caldern, Blanca
Hernndez, Lourdes Arias, and Hugo Andrs Araujo (Javier Gil, interview,
Mexico City, June 7, 2016). The protagonists remember this action in different
ways.4 While Gil emphasizes the experience gained, Orive considers this expe-
dition a misstep: We realized that poverty does not necessarily determine the
peoples desire to change, and they wanted change to improve their life condi-
tions, not a change like we wanted (Adolfo Orive, interview, Mexico City,
August 10, 2012). However, these humble beginnings were the basis for subse-
quent forays. After the Oaxaca expedition the PP activists met in Tacmbaro,
Michoacn, in 1969, and decided to go north into Nayarit, Durango, and Nuevo
Len and later to San Luis Potos, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Tlaxcala,
Michoacn, Quertaro, Chiapas, Sonora, and Guerrero.
PP arrived in the Laguna region of Durango and Coahuila after a fortuitous
encounter between a local priest, Jos Batarse Charur, and the PP activist
Alberto Anaya at a conference at Durangos State University in 1971. Anaya
reported to his fellow militants on the potential of the priests activities for
building the organization (Riera, 2016: 171). Afterward, they decided to move
some activists into the nascent urban popular movement of the Laguna and
establish a political relationship with the progressive clergy there. Salvador
Hernndez Velez, recruited from the student movement, says that Hugo Andrs
Araujo arrived in the region between 1971 and 1972 (interview, Monclova,
August 12, 2013). In the Laguna region PP reached ground that had been pre-
pared for radical politics by the patient pastoral work of a group of diocesan
priests. These priests were proselytizing recent rural immigrants in the spirit of
the Second Vatican Council (19621965), and they found the ideas of the Maoist
newcomers a complement to their own social teachings. Their approach to the
leftist activists was tolerated by their bishop, but the local authorities harassed
them because they supported the squatters demands (Concha et al., 1986).
Repression escalated in 1976 during the land invasions in San Pedro, Coahuila.
The priests Batarse, Garca Fuentes, and de la Torre were persecuted by the
police, and Benigno Martnez, another progressive priest, was arrested and
beaten along with Araujo and 30 squatters on October 14, 1976, and released
five days later (El Siglo de Torren, 1976a; 1976b). The local oligarchy and state
government considered the radical priests a menace to the established order.
Eventually they pressured Torrens bishop to withdraw his support of them,
but this no longer mattered because of their links to PP. Some remained radical
priests, while others became full-time PP activists.
Student turmoil in the Laguna also facilitated PPs expansion. Since 1971 in
Torren and Gmez Palacio junior high and high school students had partici-
pated in a series of protests. Gradually, a number of radicalized students
became involved with the union anticorruption insurgency.5 From the union
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 5

dissidents the Laguna students learned basic tactics of popular mobilization

such as street rallies and a culture of grassroots democracy (Augusto Guti
Snchez Galindo, interview, Gmez Palacio, August 28, 2013). When Araujo
contacted them, the conditions were ripe for their recruitment into the ranks of
Maoism. This restless group of students became political cadres who would
combine their previous training with the Maoist orientation of PP.
These connections helped the PP activists to lead a broad movement of colo-
nias independientes (independent neighborhoods). In the heat of the rural migra-
tion to the city PP activists established a beachhead in the working-class
neighborhood of Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) in Torren and gradu-
ally extended into Torren, Gmez Palacio, and San Pedro (Hernndez Vlez,
2014: 36126). Nowadays just a few of the original squatters still live in the
colonias, all of which now have proper urban services, amenities, and houses
made of bricks and mortar. Surprisingly, the revolutionary spirit of those days
survives in the names of many of the Laguna working-class neighborhoods:
Divisin del Norte, Flores Magn, Rubn Jaramillo, Jacinto Canek, and 2 de
Marzo. These names are a testimony to the radicalism of the urban popular
movement of the 1970s.
PPs achievements in the colonias are impressive: equitable land distribution,
integration of students into working-class neighborhoods, the building of hos-
pitals and productive structures (shops, bakeries, etc.). Squatters testimonies
speak of their enthusiasm for participating in the huge general neighborhood
assemblies and collaboration in communal work. These meetings saw the emer-
gence of a new type of activist, the proletarianthe settler attracted by the
promise of land to build his hut of sticks and cardboard who, sometimes pressed
by his wife, joined the ranks of PP and then took the mass line to his workplace
and elsewhere. This explains how certain elements of direct democracy perme-
ated the municipal janitors union and the Batopilas hacienda strike (Roberto
Guevara and Dolores Lola Chairez, interview, Torren, August 26, 2013).
The Batopilas collective farm (ejido) survives as the greatest success of the
Lagunas revolutionary coalition. It was the result of the organization of
the Batopilas Vineyard farmworkers by student and proletarian activists from
the Laguna communities brought in by progressive priests working in the area.
The organizing drive evolved into a clash with the hacienda owners and a
strike in 1975. The strike ended in the Vineyards expropriation in 1976, after
which its workers became ejidatarios.6 They faced foreseeable harvest loss but
received massive support from the squatters of Tierra y Libertad and other
colonias (Riera, 2016: 168309). Batopilas became a center of PP militancy. Just
as the Russian factory workers did after the 1917 October Revolution, the
Batopilas farmers moved around Mexico sharing their experience in collective
organization in places as far away as Oaxaca and Chiapas. Revolutionary zeal
gradually faded, but internal cohesion and connections with former PP mili-
tants would allow them to survive the 1991 reforms that almost destroyed the
ejidos viability in other parts of Mexico.
The Batopilas experiment continues today despite the problems that plague the
region. In an area where the water supply has been monopolized by the dairy
industry and many ejidos have sold their water rights, it endures as a fragile oasis
of prosperity. The system of collective decision making remains, but it is threatened
6 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

by generational change and the harsh demands of a contract with a Torren-based

dairy company) (Salazar, 2012). The ejidatarios no longer celebrate Christmas
together as they did in the 1970s, but they still hold a large communal dance on
April 22, the anniversary of the founding of the ejido.
The history of PP is marked by ruptures. In 1969, some of the original draft-
ers of the Yellow Document left the group and followed a more reformist
strategy, looking to participate in electoral politics. Years later, they would form
the Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores (Mexican Workers PartyPMT).
However, the most important internal conflict began when the organization
grew in Monterrey and Laguna. PP had functioned as a loose confederation of
brigadas, but its expansion induced a move to create a central leadership. As
part of the process Lagunas militants, supported by Orive, gained strength
inside the organization, and in 1976 they intervened in the Monterrey colonias.
Newcomers and the activists already settled in Monterrey split over leadership,
ideology, and strategy. Laguna militants began to argue against the way Anaya
and other Monterrey activists controlled the colonias organization. Alberto
Anayas group responded by denouncing these attacks as a pretext for the cen-
tralization of leadership in the person of Orive. In response, the Laguna mili-
tants criticized their use of the assemblies to legitimize decisions without real
peoples democracy. Orives partisans argued (LP, 1999: 179) that a revolution-
ary line implied that

a struggle to get water to the colonia or to build a school has to be discussed by

the blocks, decided by the colonias general assembly, coordinated according
to a program by the executive bodys commissioners, and carried out mainly
by our own efforts, that is, by the work of the masses. . . . At the end of the
struggle our organization is going to matter more to us than the water we get.
Why does the organization matter more to us than the water? Because with the
organization we can continue to resolve all our needs, even transform society
and defeat the bourgeoisie and its government, and without the organization
we cannot resolve anything by ourselves; we continue to depend on leaders
and the government.

At the same time, Orives partisans criticized the practical implications of

Anayas social democratic position, with its emphasis on solving the problems
of the squatters as opposed to organizational and political work. They did not
miss the mark, as Haber (2006: 139) notes:

Like many, if not most, other popular movement organizations in Mexico, the
CDP [Comit de Defensa Popular (Popular Defense Committee), the organiza-
tion founded by the militants aligned with Anaya in Durango] did not foster
collaborative decision-making processes as much as it depended on rank-and-
file consultation and ratification for leadership decisions sent down through
the organization.

Anayas partisans sowed the seeds of clientelism. Still, commitment to organiz-

ing and radical politics could not stop the process. The mass-line colonias never
became self-sufficient. The economic apparatus existed as an idea but failed to
fulfill its full potential, and therefore PP lacked a renewable source of income to
sustain itself. When colonos achieved their goals (housing and services), they
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 7

gradually participated less in radical politics. Former PP militants and other radi-
cals turned to the state and electoral politics in order to survive. They began to
exchange votes for resources to maintain their organizations, and the neighbor-
hoods reverted to undemocratic practices more akin to those of the PRI than to
their former model of grassroots democracy. This was a destiny they would share
with almost every independent neighborhood in the late 1990s.
After separating from the Anaya group, Orive and his supporters renamed
the organization the Lnea Proletaria (Proletarian LineLP) and changed its
political direction. On the one hand, they continued to infiltrate the emerging
peasant movement (in Durango, in the Victoria plains) and created new ejidal
unions in Sonora, Guerrero, and Chiapas. On the other hand, they gained
strength with the dissidents of the teachers union, leading to the formation of
the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacin (National
Coordinating Committee of Workers in Education) (see Foweraker, 1993). They
also infiltrated the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos
y Similares de la Repblica Mexicana (National Mexican Mining and
Metalworkers Union) to the point of almost gaining control of its national
executive committee (Aguilar, 1987).
LP as a national organization imploded in 1979 as a result of contradictions
between following the mass line and the existence of a national coordinating
unit monopolizing the production of theoretical work. In a bizarre episode the
organization published a pamphlet based on the proceedings of a meeting in
which the national executive resigned in an attempt to prevent the develop-
ment of a personalized leadership (see Legorreta, 1998: 121123). In the end, the
militants continued their mass work well into the 1980s. However, because an
important sector of PP militants opposed the existence of a centralized leader-
ship organ, Mexican Maoists lost the opportunity to generate a party of a new
type anchored to an organic relationship with popular movements and unions.
Thus, the old dream of a mass party representing the urban and rural prole-
tariat faded from view.
The idea of the mass line still inspires former PP militants, but their attach-
ment to it does not mean that they preserve its radical framework. The 1980s
introduced a totally different political landscape. The former PP militants faced
an emergent middle-class militancy and competitive elections. In the course of
these developments the neoconservative discourse of the Partido Accin
Nacional (National Action PartyPAN) achieved hegemony in northern
Mexico. Colonias and ejidos voted for right-wing candidates while Maoist activ-
ists struggled to overcome their own distaste for elections (see Hernndez
Navarro, 1991). The lack of an acceptable solution forced many former militants
to adopt pragmatic and reformist positions. They did not abandon the squatters
and farmers, but they abandoned any trace of socialist claims in practice.
The cycle of direct democracy and mass-line politics ended in 1991 with the
founding of the Partido del Trabajo (Labor PartyPT). The PT regrouped LP
militants and Anayas partisans along with other Maoist-inspired organiza-
tions. It used PP rhetoric and ideas in its program, but the emphasis was now
on municipal elections. As many left-wing groups did, the PT recognized the
new presidency of Carlos Salinas in exchange for state resources for its munic-
ipal governments in Durango. Later, the PT would become a junior partner of
8 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

the PRI, the PAN, or some other left-wing party, depending on the circum-
stances. Its successes in Durangos elections quickly faded, and nowadays it is
a marginal force. In 2015 the PT almost disappeared as a national party and
survives only as a result of its alliances with local politicians.
Not every former PP militant joined the PT or merged with the PRIs left
wing. The bulk of the PP rank and file returned to civil life and preserved their
ideology to various degrees. Most of them maintain their distaste for political
parties and oligarchies. They live in societies that are more conservative and
capitalist-oriented than those of their peers in Mexico City. Ironically, they share
a political space with their former rivals from the urban guerrilla groups. They
supported the Zapatista Movement in the 2000s, marched for the disappeared
student teachers from Ayotzinapa in 2014, and were involved in the 2016 teach-
ers protest in Monterrey. In cities like Chihuahua, Durango, Monterrey, and
Torren, these aged revolutionaries are the backbone of left-wing politics.

Armed Struggle In The Testimonies Of Former Members

Of Poltica Popular

While PP militants imbued with the Maoist model viewed armed struggle as
an essential component of the revolutionary process, they did not think the
time was yet ripe for this step. This was a clear difference from the guevarista or
the classic Leninist model of seizing power by storming the state. PP activists
saw revolution as a long and staged process, and it was important not to
rush, letalone skip any stage. Thus they focused on organizing revolutionary
base areas and transforming the gradual accumulation of forces into the revo-
lutionary process itself. PP did not give up social revolution during the 1970s,
but it considered armed struggle something that could not be promoted by a
vanguard. At the end of the day, the people themselves would decide the
timing of the revolution, and this had yet to occur. They did not have to wait
too long for an answer.
The crucible presented itself when a PP brigada organizing Durangos squat-
ters faced the hard question of whether to join the guerrillas of Lucio Cabaas.7
As Ramn Durn (1991) attests in his chronicle of the events, the brigada did
not accept the invitation from Cabaas, but they did not want to lose contact
with his guerrillas. Vargas said, We told them no, our commitment was to a
mass organization, we could not dispose of the organization even if a revolu-
tionary approach presented itself, and what we could offer him was to main-
tain the contact (Jess Vargas Valds, interview, Chihuahua, July 12, 2013). The
PP militants were not afraid of repression, and they paid for their recklessness.
Shortly after the meeting with Cabaas, the police beat them and expelled them
from Durango on February 9, 1973. Vargas and his wife even went to prison at
the infamous Campo Militar No. 1 in Mexico City (Martnez, 2012: 5556). PP
militants were revolutionaries, but they thought themselves part of a mass
movement and a popular organization, not its owners.
In another interview, Alberto Guero Escudero, one of those who attended
the meeting with Cabaas, referred to Adolfo Orives views to explain why they
rejected armed struggle. In the context of his narration about the repression
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 9

suffered by the brigada in 1973 after the first land invasions, Escudero explained
that the group was sympathetic with the guerrillas but differed from them
(interview, Victoria de Durango, June 26, 2013):

Well, we are talking about [19721973]. They had targeted the guerrillas, espe-
cially Lucio [Cabaas]. They were after him. . . . Then, to the radical popular
movements. . . . They knew we were not going for armed struggle. We are not
for the use of arms. . . . Never, never sympathized. Well, of course, we sympa-
thized with the comrades, because it was the context of that time, but to par-
ticipate in armed struggle? We did not. . . . The reasoning was very . . . for those
of us without much preparation . . . simple. Orive explained to us: Imagine,
comrades, that you are on a soccer field. We are on one side and across is the
government, right? Then, armed struggle is a team and the government is
another. Then, they face each other . . . and people just watch, shouting support
for one or the other side. Our line is not that. Our line is going to the benches,
so that the public plays, but peacefully. Revolutions or movements are not
won by small groups but by the people. More or less that is what the mass line
and popular struggle is all about. Actually, we are convinced, right?

Armed struggle still had an aura of legitimacy fueled by fierce opposition to

the PRIs authoritarian regime, but the emphasis on the peoples will explains
PP militants reluctance to become surrogates of the people.
An example of how PP activists conducted their critique of armed struggle
was the way they reacted to proposals for violent land seizures. Escudero said
that after negotiations with the government they obtained land for what would
become the Divisin del Norte neighborhood in Victoria de Durango. Their
allies, the students of the Aguilera Teachers College, did not approve of their
conciliatory tactics and, at a squatters meeting, proposed violent direct action.
In his words (interview, Victoria de Durango, June 26, 2013),

I, at that time, I looked up some comrades from Aguilera. . . . [They] already

had an infantile disorder.8 I dont know if you know about the disorder
they contracted. . . . It began in Sinaloa but came here through them. . . . They
were connected. Then they started to accuse us of being sellouts to the govern-
ment and of corruption. We had a meeting with them and they said . . . no, that
it was not right, that we had to invade again, carry weapons, and if the army
came we had to confront it. I said, No, its not the way. The people are not . . .
we are not for that. The people are fighting for a house, asshole, so. . . . They
got angry with us. Obviously, not everyone in the school but the leaders were
already heavily polluted with that . . . political disorder. So we had a meeting
here to finalize, since we were going to occupy the lands and all that. Everything
was arranged. Then they told us that they did not agree. Well, tell it to the
people, tell them that you want to invade again, this time with arms in hand.
And if the people want. . . . They came to the assembly. There were not many
of them, about eight, ten comrades, young, all very young. And . . . then, com-
rades . . . when they went up there and talked, all applauded them, because it
was a school and young men who knew them and who had supported the
squatters unconditionally. Then, when they started to talk a chill began to be
felt, oh, bugger, and then they began to attack usthat we were a pro-govern-
ment line, that we must make the revolution, and that. . . . The people said,
Oh, you bastards! The people began to understand and started to scream at
them and almost jostle them down. They did not hit them, because the people
are not violentjust hustled them out. . . . Get out right now! . . . No, com-
rades, we want a land plot, we will continue. That was our kind of work.
10 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

This example shows how PP militants slowly began to separate themselves

from armed-struggle supporters. However, some more recent recruits inter-
preted the grassroots organization of urban squatters and the formation of new
ideological and productive structures as a precursor to the creation of a popu-
lar army. This is the way we can explain why a student militant such as
Augusto Guti Sanchez describes the formation of the social bases of sup-
port in Gmez Palacio as follows:

We . . . were building institutions . . . the economic apparatus or the economic

structure. Because remember that, basically, what we wanted to build, accord-
ing to our conception, already Maoist, was the social support bases, yeah? It
was assumed that they were the social support bases for the revolution. It was
supposed that they would be organized people, yeah? They would serve as a
basis for if one day there was an army, yeah? It could move here or join the
armed wing, it could hide, go out and come in. That was the idea, okay? You
have to read all about the social support bases. Have you read it? . . . Its awe-
some. Mao, ehh!

This is not a contradiction but evidence that the original prolonged popular
and staged model survived. Militants like Guti still believed that revolution
implied a time of violent eruption that would include the seizure of power by
the masses. Simultaneously, they considered armed revolution a moment in a
long process that could not be replaced by a voluntary effort of a vanguard that
assumed the representation of the people.
The testimonies of the PP militants on the inappropriateness of the guerrillas
in the early 1970s in the context of the squatters struggle contrast with the
relative silence of the squatters themselves. For them the radicals proposing
armed struggle were sick (enfermaban), and not even from a particular dis-
order because they confused the infantile disorder of armed struggle with
others such as social democracy or ultrademocracy. Venancio Chairez, a
settler of Tierra y Libertad, told me that some of his neighbors were influenced
by the student activists: They wanted to carry on armed struggle but did not
engage in ideological debate. In the end, the working-class activists and their
supporters in the new independent neighborhoods rejected those positions,
despite the fact that, according to Venancio, They were against the PRI and
their battle cry was Screw the PRI, comrades! Screw the PRI! (inteview,
Torren, August 26, 2013).
Another example, perhaps more revealing of the rejection of armed struggle,
is the total lack of sympathy with or even acknowledgment of the guerrillas
and their methods in the testimony of Roberto Guevara and his wife, Dolores
Lola Chairez. They mentioned clashes with the police, imprisonment, repres-
sion, and episodes involving violent attacks on the authorities, but the mythol-
ogy of armed struggle remains absent. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of his
testimony Alberto Guevara, a settler from Tierra y Libertad, said, No, I didnt
want to get involved, but she dreamed of a house, some land (interview,
Torren, August 26, 2013). Even though they were gradually integrated into the
mass line, armed revolution was not one of their choices.
Monterrey, Nuevo Len, was, during the 1970s, an epicenter of radical poli-
tics. Communists, leftist radical Christians, and members of the New Left
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 11

joined forces in the fight for university autonomy and fought each other for
control over the student movement. The Monterrey student movement was the
cradle of the emerging urban guerrillas known as Los Procesos (The Routes
PR), made up of young dissidents from the Partido Comunista Mexicano
(Mexican Communist PartyPCM), the Movimiento Armado Revolucionario
(Revolutionary Armed MovementMAR), and the more heterodox Fuerzas de
Liberacin Nacional (National Liberation ForcesFLN).
In his memoirs, the former PP activist Agustin Acosta (2015: 5657) recalls a
debate in 1972 between members of PR and PP. In the debate, which took place
at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Len, both sides presented their views
without convincing each other. Attempting to break the impasse, they asked a
group of old union militants for their opinion about armed struggle. The work-
ers expressed their distaste for the PR position and rebuked the aspiring guer-
rillas. As a result, the PR militants abandoned the dialogue and called the PP
activists cowards and traitors. Once again the PP rejected armed struggle on the
basis of its adherence to the principle of following the masses.
Later, PP members in Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango chose to
distance themselves from the active guerrilla groups of the mid-1970s, a deci-
sion amply reciprocated by Marxist-Leninist guerrillas of the Liga Comunista
23 de Septiembre (September 23 Communist LeagueLC23S). The LC23S was
a coalition of urban guerrilla groups formed around 1974 by young communist
dissidents such as the PR, radicalized Catholic students, and other ultraleft
militants. The LC23S influenced small groups of students, peasants, and work-
ers in Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Nuevo Len, Baja California, Guerrero,
Chihuahua, Durango, Oaxaca, and Mexico Citys Metropolitan Zone. Its found-
ers considered it necessary to oppose state violence with revolutionary vio-
lence, and they acted as the peoples vanguard against the authoritarian regime.
From 1974 and 1981 they embarked on a series of bank robberies and kidnap-
pings of affluent businessmen. These actions funded the distribution of LC23Ss
clandestine newspaper, Madera (see Rangel, 2013). Mexican security forces
used legal and extralegal means against the LC23S in what is often called the
dirty war. This conflict ended in the almost complete extermination of the
LC23S.
The LC23Ss relations with other left-wing organizations were always mired
in conflict. The organization harshly criticized the PPs strategy in the labor
movement and its struggle to capture the national executive committee of the
miners and metalworkers union. For example, in issue 29 of Madera the LC23S
criticized the union bosses of Section 147 of the union in Monclova, a section
controlled by PP militants. Another Madera article of the period illustrates the
LC23S position. The Liga believed that the steelworkers were engaged in a
frontal struggle against the state and the government-controlled unions
(LC23S, 1977):

While this time the champions of union democracy have managed to drag
the workers to the struggle to democratize the metallurgical and mining union,
to remove the scab Napolen Gmez Sada from control of the cooperative, the
contempt of workers for bourgeois legality and their hatred of scabs could not
be minimized.
12 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

LC23S militants alleged that PP labor activists betrayed the workers merely
by fighting for union positions. In their opinion PP diminished the steelwork-
ers revolutionary potential. These criticisms fell on deaf ears. Despite its des-
perate attempts to infiltrate unions, the LC23S never created a beachhead in the
union insurgency of the 1970s. By contrast, the militants of PP almost took
control of the national industrial union.
Notwithstanding their differences, PP militants such as Agustn Acosta hid
guerrillas from the police in their colonias or cooperated with them in prison. On
one occasion a cell member of the MAR approached his PP brigada in Monterrey,
the MAR activist offered the PP brigada training in the use of arms and funds to
buy an offset printing machine. The police stopped the collaboration in its tracks
when they put the guerrillas in jail (Acosta, 2015: 149153). Only when sectarian
attitudes finally prevailed in the late 1970s did the cooperation with urban guer-
rillas cease.

The Three Brothers Fable: Divergent Paths To

Revolution

Recent historiography proposes four reasons for the development of urban

guerrilla movements in Mexico: an authoritarian regime, the repression of the
late-1960s student protests, the example of successful socialist liberation move-
ments, and a middle class ashamed of its own privileges (Rangel, 2013: 17;
Walker, 2013: 2344). The presence of all these features in the creation of the PP
demonstrates that they are not sufficient explanations for why some groups
chose armed struggle. The above-mentioned accounts reduce socialists options
to armed struggle (the Movimiento al Socialismo option), electoral politics (the
PCMs option), and working with the government. They ignore a fourth alter-
native, mass-line politics or the social left, that was facilitated by the contradic-
tory nature of Echeverras presidency. At the same time that Luis Echeverra
fought a dirty war against leftist guerrillas, he also supported New Left rad-
icals in their conflicts with local elites and PRI rivals. Echeverras populist
presidency opened up spaces for the social left in states such as Durango,
Nuevo Len, and Nayarit. This support ended with the next president, Jos
Lpez Portillo (19761982), but that presidency was marked by the 1977 elec-
toral reform that legalized the PCM. The complexity of Mexicos authoritarian
regime created opportunities for independent politics and even local socialist
political projects. Thus, during the early 1970s young radical activists both suf-
fered periods of selective repression and adapted to the moments of political
opening. A more nuanced explanation of the reactions to the PRI regime during
the 1970s must therefore consider the existence of a fourth camp, the social left.
When writers such as Adela Cedillo (2014: 343369) portray the conflict as
among three parties (the federal government, the former guerrillas, and the
democratic left), they omit the revolutionary unarmed social left. For exam-
ple, the PP militants usually sided with the urban guerrillas against the govern-
ment and the democratic left. In some cases, they sympathized with their
actions and even hid guerrillas in their neighborhoods. However, they also
argued with them, because PP strategy prioritized mass politics over attacking
 Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLTICA POPULAR 13

the regime. PPs reliance on the mass-line principle reinforced a rejection of

armed struggle in urban settings such as colonias and factories, where the eco-
nomic aspirations of colonos and workers restrained them from joining the
urban guerrillas.9
How, then, do we explain their rejection of armed struggle and later aban-
donment of the revolutionary ideal? The answer lies in the narratives of the
twentieth-century Marxist leftthe dilemma between reform and revolution.
Ironically, PP claimed to have its own revolutionary theory, but it ended up
transforming its practice into a series of reforms. In this respect, it followed the
script of the early-twentieth-century German socialists. First, it relegated armed
struggle to a hypothetical final stage of political struggle as theorized by
Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. Second, it took as a guiding principle strug-
gles for small gains for the sake of the final goal, something that was more akin
to Eduard Bernsteins position that the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing,
but the movement is everything. At the same time, it accused those who con-
tinued armed struggle of having an infantile disorder. Finally, it was divided
between those who wanted to keep the revolutionary ideal alive and those who
recognized the social democratic or reformist character of their efforts.

Conclusions

PP developed as an unarmed Maoist group because of the attraction of the

mass line. This commitment also explains why activists from the student move-
ment of 1968 adopted Maoism as an ideological guide. Its character as an
organizational doctrine captured their imagination. Also important was the
leadership of Adolfo Orive and his position as a member of the postrevolution-
ary elite. He introduced French Maoisms emphasis on direct democracy into
PP projects of working-class organization. As a result, PPs starting point as an
unarmed organization and its emphasis on consulting the people drew these
Mexican Maoists away from armed struggle. If, as Orive says, what the people
wanted was to improve their living conditions and not participate in armed
revolution, a group that held as a compass the wisdom of the masses could
hardly contradict their wishes. Finally, PP represented a different form of revo-
lutionary politics and a fourth position in the dispute for the memory of armed
struggle. The evidence presented here can generate an alternative to the usual
portraits of the Mexican left centered on electoral politics or the guerrillas. In
the tradition of the Mexican left, with its accursed heroes, the hundreds of PP
militants of working-class and middle-class origin deserve a better fate than
condescending oblivion.

Notes

1. I use PP to refer to the original organization and its offshoots.

2. Squatters translates the Spanish colonos, paracadistas, or posesionarios in the sources and
testimonies.
3. It is not clear how far the influence of French Maoism went. Orive translated some pam-
phlets by Charles Bettelheim, and some Mexican militants briefly traveled to France to study
14 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Marxism in the 1970s, but there is no other evidence of direct contact between French Maoists and
PP.
4. Making brigadas (cells) the basic element of organization was a legacy of the 1968 student
movement, in which it played an important role in the first encounters between students and rural
and industrial workers. For a discussion of the brigada in the context of 1968 students movement,
see Zermeo (2003: 226233).
5. Two active groups of union dissidents had an important role in the political education of the
Laguna students. The older was the railroad workers movement commanded by Demetrio
Vallejo, a former communist. Vallejo and Valentin Campa led the 19561958 railroad strikes,
which were the last gasp of independent unionism and were crushed. The leaders ended up in
jail, and the new unions bosses bent their knee to the PRI regime (Trejo, 1990: 323326). After his
release in the early 1970s, Vallejo and his supporters fought corrupt union bosses affiliated with
the PRI and tried to regain control of the railroad workers union. Also important for the future
militants was the appearance of the Tendencia Democrtica (Democratic TendencyTD), which
struggled for democracy in the Sindicato nico de Trabajadores Electricistas de la Repblica
Mexicana (United Electricity Workers Union of the Mexican Republic). The TD attracted many
veterans of the 1968 Movement interested in breaking the chains of government control of the
unions (Trejo, 1990: 203206).
6. The peasants, in spite of receiving a land grant from the government in 1976, fought an eight-
year-long legal battle against the former hacienda owners in which they combined mobilization
tactics learned from PP with litigation in administrative and agrarian courts (Riera, 2016: 584615).
7. Lucio Cabaas was a former rural teacher and communist militant. After graduating from
teachers college he worked in Durango for a short time and then returned to Guerrero. There he
built a peasant self-defense group, the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor), which defended
the peasants of the Guerrero highlands against the local bosses allied with the state government.
Its tactics included kidnapping rich landowners and attacking security forces. In 1973 Cabaas
undertook a clandestine tour outside Guerrero in an effort to connect with other radical organiza-
tions. Some urban guerrilla groups accepted Lucios idea and sent cadres to the highlands, but most
of the social left declined. Finally Cabaas returned to Guerrero and kidnapped Rubn Figueroa,
the PRIs candidate for governor. The kidnapping provoked a massive military offensive against
Cabaass guerrillas. Army and police forces pursued them until they released Figueroa in
September 1974 and two months later killed Cabaas in combat (see Avia, 2009: 346382).
8. During the 1970s a radical student left-wing opposition developed in the northwestern state
of Sinaloa. These radicals attacked Communists and PRI officials at the Sinaloa State University
and eventually opted for armed revolution. Their Communist rivals labeled them enfermos (sick
ones) in reference to their ultraleftism, relating it to Lenins infantile disorder (see Snchez, 2013).
9. A counterexample is the decision of the Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (Zapatista
Army of National LiberationEZLN) to take up arms in 1993 after consulting Chiapas indige-
nous communities. Although PPs influence on the decision-making process persisted after 16
years of social work (the assembly system and rural development efforts) in the communities by
former militants, the military orientation of the EZLN was determinant in the decision. The
Zapatista cadres developed a military organization, and their projects always had a military pur-
pose (see Le Bot, 1997: 188). A path to armed insurrection prevailed over political action as a result
of the EZLNs origin as an armed organization.

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