Mexico

We need to consolidate and deepen the current program of struggle that is leading the movement.

In Mexico, for decades peasant communities and indigenous peoples have faced the plundering and contamination of water caused by the region's big industrial companies. Mines, breweries, agricultural farms, bottling plants, metallurgy and automotive plants extract the resources on which millions of peasants, workers and ecosystem species survive. In 2022, 59.1% of the country's rivers, streams, lakes, lagoons, dams and coastal areas were polluted with irreversible damage. Meanwhile, more than 50% of the national territory suffers moderate and extreme droughts. According to data from the National Water Quality Measurement Network.

Factory occupations, road blockades, massive demonstrations and the formation of local self-defense groups have been the forms of resistance with which these communities have confronted organized crime (the narco), private security and the state's public forces. However, in the last 3 years, the communities have begun a process of linking and coordinating local struggles at the national level. The first efforts were reflected in the holding of the Asamblea Nacional por el Agua y la Vida (National Assembly for Water and Life) which brings together more than 125 organizations and indigenous peoples from 18 provinces of the country. The assembly has strengthened the tools of struggle and has formed a movement that aims to bring together millions of peasants and workers, and lead the battle with an anti-capitalist program.

However, the movement is still at an early stage, and therefore of unequal strength in the face of the political and economic power wielded by the large companies. At the national level, they continue to exploit and destroy ecosystems, while persecuting, kidnapping and murdering peasants and indigenous territorial defenders. Therefore, as socialists we must offer the right answers so that the movement, brought together in the Assembly, organizes, grows, strengthens and wages a real battle against capitalism and its corporate killers.

In recent months there have been various pressures and aggressions by the Mexican State, capitalist companies and criminal groups against water activists and indigenous communities who resist, on a daily basis, the plundering of water caused by large industries: a result of the ease with which capitalism can seek to dismantle isolated and local struggles. For this reason, we urgently need to discuss the next steps within the national movement in defense of water. We must abandon the logic of isolated battles and build a national organization that moves from continuous resistance to a total offensive, an organization that fights, face to face, the aggressions of the bourgeoisie.

There have been extremely disturbing events during the struggle, such as the assassination of Felix Vicente Cruz in Oaxaca, Nemesio Zambrano, Miguel Estrada and Rolando Mauno in Michoacán along with the forced disappearance of Ricardo Lagunes and Antonío Díaz, all activists that defend land and water. Likewise, judicial harassment by the Mexican State against defenders Miguel López and Alejandro Torres of the Frente de Pueblos Unidos in Juan C. Bonilla, Puebla, has intensified. The political persecution of entire communities such as the Nahuatl people of Ostula, the Binnizá people of Puente de Madera in Oaxaca, the Mayan community SITILPECH in Izamal and the Autonomous Council of Santiago Mexquititlán in Querétaro.

The intensification of the attacks perpetrated by the capitalists and the government are not coincidental. During this period, communities have won multiple legal protections to stop the operations of mining, textile factories, bottling plants, thermoelectric plants and other extractive industries in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, Querétaro, Coahuila, Puebla, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. The most recent experiences of getting organized reflect the force with which the masses are beginning to fight back against the multinational companies that plunder the region's resources. Actions such as the closing of wells, the occupation of extraction plants, roadblocks, legal disputes and the formation of community self-defense groups are the result of the hundreds of assemblies held in which important sectors of these communities are grouped and mobilized. However, it is clear that to such action there is a reaction. The popular organization of indigenous peoples against megaprojects and capitalist industries terrifies the ruling class, pushing them to resort to other, non-legal, measures to destroy the movement: extrajudicial executions, homicides perpetrated by organized crime, kidnappings, judicial persecution, blackmail, police brutality, harassment and forced disappearances.

It is a fact that now, both the Mexican state, as well as organized crime and multinational companies, seek to co-opt, through local and isolated blows, all the initiatives that respond to a single common cause: to fight against the capitalist system and its corporate killers. Due to this alarming situation, the movement must recognize that our actions and methods of struggle up to this point have been battles without much echo; local, isolated and temporary. All while capitalism operates like a great war machine, one that a small skirmish cannot damage. It is here that self-criticism must be expressed within the movement, combatting certain ideas about strategy that can lead us to serious defeats and illusory hopes.

The significant efforts carried out in the last two national assemblies For Water and Life (2022 and 2023) were the first step and an example of the rallying power we can achieve when we consciously try to build a national organization to fight against the plundering of water in all corners of the country where capitalism exploits and pollutes our rivers and lakes. From these events, we learned and shared experiences and tools of struggle that enriched our general understanding of the crisis we are currently suffering. The main agreements were the Law of the Peoples, to draw up a national directory of organizations, a national program of struggle and the annual agenda of joint interventions in each state of the republic. The movement entered a new organizational phase, maturing the strategy and methods of struggle.

The Law of the Peoples is a decree launched by the National Indigenous Council that promotes direct action and occupation of industrial properties and water wells in indigenous regions. This allows indigenous communities to control peasant regions, in a democratic way, through their "uses and customs". In recent years, this law has been extended in various territories of the Republic where indigenous communities live, to occupy and expel the industries that operate in their towns. Both the program of struggle and the national agenda of expulsion were two documents unanimously approved by the assembly, and contain the first objectives to be met by the movement in the coming months: to expel transnational companies that loot resources, to stop the persecution of activists, the total rejection of the construction of the Mayan Train and megaprojects of the federal government.

However, it is true that there were also errors and floundering ideas that may be problematic in the future, when looking for bigger victories. Next, we present a series of issues that must be discussed by the movement and resolved in the next period of struggle.

In recent years there have been important victories and direct actions, such as the takeover of the Bonafont plant in Juan C. Bonilla by the Nahua peoples of the Popocatepetl region, an experience that marked an entire generation of environmental activists who followed closely what happened in the region. However, a year after the takeover, the "house of the Atepelmecalli peoples" (as the community renamed it) was vacated through brutal state repression, carried out by the National Guard and the Federal Police. Now the large company has regained control of the plant and is reusing it to continue its normal operations.

This unfortunate event should teach us a valuable lesson: that the ruling class has all the necessary resources and means at their disposal to confront the masses when they rise up in struggle. The bourgeoisie is not stupid nor does it stand idly by when the workers organize to combat the injustices and inequalities of a system that produces misery. In this case, the ease with which the Bonafont businessmen, in complicity with the Mexican state, attacked the Nahua community only demonstrates that those in power have the numbers, the weapons and the money to impose their rule.

Given the above, we must abandon the beliefs and assertions about the exceptionality and peculiarity of struggles in "different geographies" and make a general analysis of the different paths of dispossession that are connected to the great commercial circuits of the global market. Bonafont, the narcos, the corrupt local politicians, and big business, all of them represent, with different faces, the economic system that exploits every corner of the earth. Drawing these political conclusions will help the movement abandon old and outmoded approaches and allow the masses’ demands to be generalized at the national level, building a cohesive and coordinated fight against major industries.

The last National Assembly took significant steps in terms of the formation of commissions and distribution of tasks to carry out concrete activities for the remainder of the year. However, the reports of the discussions and press statements are vague as to the ways in which agreements were voted and delegated. In the absence of clarity, there is bound to be serious confusion in the practice of collective decision-making. What is the most democratic way to vote on assembly resolutions? Who should vote on resolutions? And who should follow up on tasks? These questions are the ABC of the process of organizing a movement. If the assembly is to have a rapid response capacity and an effective fighting force, then strong, centralized, democratic structures are required, where resolutions are enforced with the fullest commitment of the organizations and communities that make up the movement.

In the next National Assembly it is possible that one of the central discussions will revolve around this issue: how to achieve a movement that has a leadership body that ensures that the program, the committees and the mass actions achieve significant victories and with greater ability to resist the counter-offensives of the bourgeoisie. Paradoxically, the capitalist state has its anti-democratic decision making organs and chain of command to carry out its orders. As long as we continue to rely on the resistances of the "different geographies" we will continue to live on sporadic and short-lived victories. In the current period it is essential we build an organizational structure at the national level, one that coordinates our efforts, that can bring them to a more developed level of struggle that is not limited to small communities.

For years, it is a fact that most of the battles and experiences of struggle in rural communities and towns have separated themselves from what happens in the big cities. This distancing has generated demands and slogans that do not connect, or do so in a minimal way, with the struggles of workers in the cities. A current example of this is the lack of political clarity of our movement in the face of what is happening with the increase in consumer rates for drinking water service (already private in many cases) in the homes of the country, the lack of sanitation and the absence of service that leaves millions without water for days, weeks and even months, giving as an example the recent water shortage crisis that occurred in Nuevo Leon last year.

We have to ask ourselves, what do the workers of the cities demand and how can we connect with their demands, through their organizations of resistance, to open two fronts of struggle? Communities that attended the assembly, such as those from the Xochimilco and Xoco neighborhoods of Mexico City, find themselves in the middle of one of the largest urban sprawls in the country. Their methods and traditions of struggle can be distinguished from other towns. The demands and slogans that make up their causes have to be incorporated, discussed and fully expressed by the movement: No to the increase in the water tariff; sewage sanitation in poor neighborhoods; no more water scarcity; remunicipalisation of the private water service; water supply committees under worker control! If the workers demand sanitation of the water system, let us fight for it, if the workers demand a reduction in the rates of drinking water service, let us fight for it, if the workers demand a stop to the mega-complexes and apartment blocks, let us fight against them.

We must vindicate the demands and slogans of the rural communities, such as the Law of the Peoples, without leaving aside the struggle for the slogans and demands of the cities that share their basins and rivers with the countryside. The assembly still has this task pending, and if we manage to carry it out we will be able to win over a large layer of workers who trust less and less in the reformist and conciliatory policies of the Fourth Transformation, which have not resolved this ongoing crisis — nor will they resolve it.

We need to consolidate and deepen the current program of struggle that is leading the movement. A first step was the general agreements reached in the Second National Assembly for Water and Life, which for the most part weaved solidarity networks and formalized the dynamics of work between different groups and communities in the country. However, the road ahead is still long. Honestly pointing out some of the shortcomings of the current movement with the purpose of strengthening the struggle, must be addressed if we are to resist the aggressive onslaught of the state, organized crime and the bourgeoisie, and move on to the offensive.

From Alternativa Socialista we call for a joint struggle, not only against the dispossession of water and territory, but also against all kinds of oppression suffered by our class, under a system of economic domination and exploitation. The struggle for life is also the struggle for the rights of workers, women, youth, peasants, the LGBTQ+ community and indigenous peoples. A cause that frees humanity from all oppression and maintains a balanced and environmentally responsible relationship with nature, which is only possible under socialism. Fighting for a socialist society is the only viable alternative against the apocalyptic end presented today by capital and its industries of death. Because the worker will only regain an intimate contact with nature when freed from slave labor and miserable wages. Therein lies the essence of the conflict and humanity's disconnection with nature: in the material conditions of existence and the need for emancipation from them.

In August of this year the Third National Assembly for Water and Life will be held in Xochimilco, Mexico City. We hope that, at this upcoming event, the points and arguments made in this article can help in the process of clarifying what the movement's next steps should be. Proper and comradely criticism is the best way to glimpse our future victories.