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Revolutionary forces arrive in Sinaloa in 1913 OF SOLIDARITN Isaui: MF PEI Op pOTtEe acit ra Seat.

Oresnise Middie Lane, London No öPL.

'IF YOU owe the bank £100, you have a problem.

If you owe the bank £1 million, the bank has a problem.' So said the economist J.M. Keynes.

Judging by the headlines such as 'Mexican • crisis shocks bankers' and 'West in $8bn bid to save Mexico' the Internation Banking system has one hell of a problem and is desparately trying to patch it up so as to prevent a collapse of International Finance.

Yet the Mexican people themselves have problems of far more importance than those of the Financial extortionists in New York and the City of London.

Price rises of 30% on basic goods. Unemployment.

Corruption in Government on a grand scale. The 'disappearance' of political and trade union activists.

Mexico's history has been presented to most British people in the distorted form of Hullywood Brando in Viva Zapata!

Mexican history is portrayed as a series of mass shoot-outs, typical example being Peckinpah's 'The Wild Bunch"

The real history, however, is one of continual struggle against oppression by the people of Mexico, which reached a peak in a real social revolution in the decade 1910-20.

Mexico, like most of South and Central america, was colonlised by Spain. For centuries its Indian population was subjected by the Spanish conquistadors and criollos (descendents of original Spanish colonists) to a - slave-like existence on the land.

The first revolt against Spain was led by Miguel Hidalgo, a Catholic village priest who championed the Indian cause. He was captured by Royalists and executed. The same thing happened to Jose Morelos, who led a revolt in 1815.

PACIFIC _ OCEANWhen Mexico finally became independent in 1821, its ruling class were the very same group which had put down the popular Indian uprisings. The 90p Bob Fine Lawrence Welch :== SIÉTFF_~° T52 :

4 rx wy ,r Ciudad Juarez SONORA CHIHUAHA!.A Bachíniva • Parral LAGUNA •Torreón Cuencamé® Zacatecas This process had drastic results for the Indian and Mestizo (mixed race)

population. The huge estates (haciendas) took ever the community land of i= wagers and the smallIndependent -- an ins 'andiess work resembled slavery and worse.

STATES Palomas SAN LUIS POTOSI Mexico• City MORELOS former Royalist criallos had become 'republicans' ', but their social attitude toward the mass of the Mexican people remained the same.

An alliance of Church and landowners, together with an army led by military strongmen, operated throughout the 19th century to further dispossess and enslave the Indian peasantry.

The old Spanish interest in Mexico was gold and silver. By independence these resources had been exhausted.

The Mexican landowners now sought to turn the country into a producer of agricultural products for the world market. The two most important products were cattle, raised in the Northern states such as Chihuaha and Sonora, and sugar from southern states like Morelos.

Slavery - MEXICO . 07 veracru.

GUATEMALA CISALIAS In Marelos, Zapata's home state, villages were flattened to make way for sugar-cane fields. In Sonora, the army force the Yaqui indians from their ancestral land. The Governor of Chihuaha, where Pancho Villa grew up, gave the local population 'years of the noose and knife' in order to extend the landholdings of himself and his cronies.

This system of semi-colonial exploitation reached its high point under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), who ruled Mexico in much the same way as Somoza was later to run Nicaragua, and Batista, Cuba. Diaz's most memorable statement was 'Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States"

Diaz was, nevertheless, the main figure responsible for the penetration of US, British and French capital into Mexico on a large scale. As elsewhere south of the Rio Grande, imperialist capital built the railways and transformed agriculture to serve the needs of the metropolitan market.

The changes under Diaz did, however, have one very important consequence. The economic expansion led to the creation of a large internal market and with it the growth of a large liberalminded middle class.

The Indian and Mestizo masses had rebelled on spasmodic occasions in the past, but these revolts were™ local and easily suppressed. The alliance between the rural masses and the middle class of the towns was a much more potent force. It was to end semi-colonialism and feudalism in Mexico.

The champion of the liberal democratic cause was a northern landowner and businessman, Francisco Madero. He campaigned against Diaz in the 1910 Presidential election under the slogan 'A real vote and no Boss rule' Needless to say, he got neither.

The election was rigged and Diaz won. Madero was expected to clear off to his estates and try again next time.

What surprised everybody was his refusal to do so. He raised the standard of revolt and within a short space of time the 35 year old Diaz regime collapsed. revolunionary troops in 1Y11 The army was in no posi tion to deal with a mass nationwide popular insurrection. In Mexico City alone, officers in the Mexican army outnumbered the ranks by 2 to 1. Those with generalships were there through bribery and not military ability. They were no match for the brilliant new generals such as Pancho Villa whose mobile cavalry, recruited from the ranch hands of Chihuaha, routed the reactionary forces.

The agrarian revolt installed Madero , in' the Presidential palace. This was the first triumph of the middle class (bourgeois) revolution in Mexico.

Yet the Mexican middle class disliked the agrarian 'anarchy' as much as the feudal forces they had been opposed to. The history of Mexico from 1911 to 1940 was a history of the middle class now allying with the masses against feudalism, now with the right wing against the popular forces..

Continued

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film - Yul Brynner as Pancho Villa, Marlon

AQUESTION Trade Unions Insourharic