Op-Ed: Villaraigosa: We came together after the 1992 uprising. We can do it now.
After a quarter century of bitter, intractable strife, the Mexican workers’ movement has emerged from a difficult decade with a common goal: the transformation of this country to a land of freedom, democracy and justice. This is an extraordinary achievement for an enormous number of people who have fought to the bitter end to achieve it. It’s also remarkable that the Mexican people have found a way to do it through the political process, which is the only way to democratize a country that has for centuries been ruled by the political, economic and military elite.
The Mexican revolution has come after more than a century of oppression of the Mexican people by the oligarchic elites. It is in part due to their oppression and in part due to the political process that enabled working class democracy, which gave millions of Mexican citizens more power over how they lived their lives.
It is important to recognize that the Mexican revolution began with a violent, bloody counterrevolution by the landed oligarchy in the form of the Dictatorship of the State.
The revolution began with the seizure of power of Zapata in the Mexican war of independence against Spain, which led to the formation of the revolutionary government of Benito Juárez.
In the midst of the war, a number of young men and women took charge in the struggle, including Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata and Subcomandante Marcos. The uprising was brutally defeated by the armed forces of Spain, and the lives of so many members of the revolutionary government were lost.
However, the movement survived and began to forge a new political society. As the revolution began to falter, the leadership became splintered and weakened, with those who supported revolutionary social programs becoming “reactionaries” who sought power by suppressing the revolutionary program.
The Mexican people were determined to make fundamental changes in their political and social system, first in the form of a republic, but when this was defeated, in 1910, they began to demand that their country be a “republic of workers and peasants.”
The Mexican
