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- Mexico’s Mass Disappearances and the Drug War (Ayotzinapa: The Missing 43 Students)
- Guerrilla Movements in Guerrero, Mexico
Mexico’s Mass Disappearances and the Drug War (Ayotzinapa: The Missing 43 Students) : Guerrilla Movements in Guerrero, Mexico
History
During the 1960s Guerrero was at the center of an array of movements by campesinos (rural workers), laborers, students, and teachers yearning for democracy, civil rights, and social justice. In response to dissent the local government ordered security forces to crack down on these nonviolent mobilizations and criminalized their leaders. Repression proved counterproductive and only served to radicalize movements.
Both Normal and Rural Teacher Training Schools –inspired by the socialist education project sponsored by president Lázaro Cárdenas (1936-1940)– transformed into major centers of political activism. Students participated in open social movements, while others opted for the socialist armed struggle.
Lucio Cabañas (1938- 1974)
Schoolteachers like Genaro Vázquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas Barrientos individually lead two of the largest campesino guerilla movements in the state: the National Civic Revolutionary Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PdlP). Between 1969 and 1978 the federal government carried out numerous counterinsurgency operations to exterminate the rebels, setting up a virtual siege throughout the Sierra de Atoyac. Estimates indicate that at least 3,000 victims were executed, tortured, disappeared, or displaced as a result of state terror.
Recommended Readings
Specters of Revolution by
The 1960s represented a revolutionary moment around the globe. In rural Mexico, several guerrilla groups organized to fight against the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Specters of Revolution chronicles two peasant guerrilla organizations led by schoolteachers, the National Revolutionary Civil Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), which waged revolutionary armed struggles to overthrow the PRI. Both emerged to fight decades of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by the government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. This book reveals that these movements developed after years of seeking legal, constitutional pathways of redress, focused on economic justice and electoral rights, and became subject to brutal counterinsurgencies. Relying upon recently declassified intelligence and military documents and oral histories, it documents how long-held rural utopian ideals drove peasant political action that gradually became radicalized in the face of persistent state terror and violence. Placing Mexico into the broader history of post-1945 Latin America, Specters of Revolution explodes the myth that Mexico constituted an island of relative peace and stability surrounded by a sea of military dictatorships during the Cold War.
Call Number: F1235 A84 2014ISBN: 9780199936571Publication Date: 2014-06-24
Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico by
Simultaneously published in the UK--T.p. verso.
Call Number: F1236 .C47 2012.ISBN: 9780415889032Publication Date: 2011-12-13
