Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular

A Short History of PP

In 1968, an unexpected enemy attacked Mexico’s authoritarian regime. Mexico City’s high school and college students joined forces with their peers in 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 Díaz Ordaz. Instead, they suffered police and army repression 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 movement’s 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 Lázaro Cárdenas and the left wing of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional Party—PRI). 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 Mao’s 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 política 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 Mao’s “Little Red Book.” It contained 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: 161–165). 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 different 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 people’s politics, fighting 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 brigadistas included Javier Gil (a doctor), Adolfo Orive, Jorge Calderón, Blanca Hernández, Lourdes Arias, and Hugo Andrés 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 expedition a misstep: “We realized that poverty does not necessarily determine the people’s desire to change, and they wanted change to improve their life conditions, not a change like we wanted” (Adolfo Orive, interview, Mexico City, August 10, 2012). However, these humble beginnings were the basis for subsequent forays. After the Oaxaca expedition the PP activists met in Tacámbaro, Michoacán, in 1969, and decided to go north into Nayarit, Durango, and Nuevo León and later to San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Querétaro, Chiapas, Sonora, and Guerrero.

PP arrived in the Laguna region of Durango and Coahuila after a fortuitous encounter between a local priest, José Batarse Charur, and the PP activist Alberto Anaya at a conference at Durango’s State University in 1971. Anaya reported to his fellow militants on the potential of the priest’s 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 Hernández Velez, recruited from the student movement, says that Hugo Andrés Araujo arrived in the region between 1971 and 1972 (interview, Monclova, August 12, 2013). In the Laguna region PP reached ground that had been prepared 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 (1962–1965), 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, García Fuentes, and de la Torre were persecuted by the police, and Benigno Martínez, 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 Torreón, 1976a; 1976b). The local oligarchy and state government considered the radical priests a menace to the established order. Eventually they pressured Torreón’s 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 PP’s expansion. Since 1971 in Torreón and Gómez Palacio junior high and high school students had participated in a series of protests. Gradually, a number of radicalized students became involved with the union anticorruption insurgency. ⁵ From the union dissidents the Laguna students learned basic tactics of popular mobilization such as street rallies and a culture of grassroots democracy (Augusto “Guti” Sánchez Galindo, interview, Gómez 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 colonias independientes (independent neighborhoods). In the heat of the rural migration to the city PP activists established a beachhead in the working-class neighborhood of Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) in Torreón and gradually extended into Torreón, Gómez Palacio, and San Pedro (Hernández Vélez, 2014: 36–126). 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: División del Norte, Flores Magón, Rubén Jaramillo, Jacinto Canek, and 2 de Marzo. These names are a testimony to the radicalism of the urban popular movement of the 1970s.

PP’s achievements in the colonias are impressive: equitable land distribution, integration of students into working-class neighborhoods, the building of hospitals 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 emergence of a new type of activist, the proletarian—the 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 permeated the municipal janitors’ union and the Batopilas hacienda strike (Roberto Guevara and Dolores “Lola” Chairez, interview, Torreón, August 26, 2013).

The Batopilas collective farm (ejido) survives as the greatest success of the Laguna’s 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 Vineyard’s 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: 168–309). 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 militants 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 by generational change and the harsh demands of a contract with a Torreón-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 drafters 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 Party—PMT). 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 Laguna’s 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 Anaya’s group responded by denouncing these attacks as a pretext for the centralization of leadership in the person of Orive. In response, the Laguna militants criticized their use of the assemblies to legitimize decisions without real people’s democracy. Orive’s partisans argued (LP, 1999: 179) that a revolutionary 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 colonia’s general assembly, coordinated according to a program by the executive body’s 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, Orive’s partisans criticized the practical implications of Anaya’s 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 [Comité de Defensa Popular (Popular Defense Committee), the organization 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.

Anaya’s partisans sowed the seeds of clientelism. Still, commitment to organizing 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 gradually participated less in radical politics. Former PP militants and other radicals turned to the state and electoral politics in order to survive. They began to exchange votes for resources to maintain their organizations, and the neighborhoods 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 Línea Proletaria (Proletarian Line—LP) 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 Educación (National Coordinating Committee of Workers in Education) (see Foweraker, 1993). They also infiltrated the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos y Similares de la República 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 development of a personalized leadership (see Legorreta, 1998: 121–123). 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 leadership 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 proletariat faded from view.

The idea of the mass line still inspires former PP militants, but their attachment 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 Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN) achieved hegemony in northern Mexico. Colonias and ejidos voted for right-wing candidates while Maoist activists struggled to overcome their own distaste for elections (see Hernández 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 Party—PT). The PT regrouped LP militants and Anaya’s partisans along with other Maoist-inspired organizations. 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 municipal governments in Durango. Later, the PT would become a junior partner of the PRI, the PAN, or some other left-wing party, depending on the circumstances. Its successes in Durango’s 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 PRI’s 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 teacher’s protest in Monterrey. In cities like Chihuahua, Durango, Monterrey, and Torreón, these aged revolutionaries are the backbone of left-wing politics.

Armed Struggle in the Testimonies of Former Members of Política 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, let alone skip any stage. Thus they focused on organizing “revolutionary base areas” and transforming the gradual accumulation of forces into the revolutionary 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 Durango’s squatters faced the hard question of whether to join the guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas. ⁷ As Ramón Durán (1991) attests in his chronicle of the events, the brigada did not accept the invitation from Cabañas, 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 revolutionary approach presented itself, and what we could offer him was to maintain the contact” (Jesús Vargas Valdés, interview, Chihuahua, July 12, 2013). The PP militants were not afraid of repression, and they paid for their recklessness. Shortly after the meeting with Cabañas, 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 (Martínez, 2012: 55–56). 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 Cabañas, referred to Adolfo Orive’s views to explain why they rejected armed struggle. In the context of his narration about the repression 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 [1972–1973]. They had targeted the guerrillas, especially Lucio [Cabañas]. 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 sympathized with the comrades, because it was the context of that time, but to participate 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 PRI’s authoritarian regime, but the emphasis on the people’s 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 División 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 don’t 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 government 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, it’s 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, comrades . . . 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 us—that we were a pro-government 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 violent—just hustled them out. . . . “Get out right now!” . . . “No, comrades, we want a land plot, we will continue.” That was our kind of work.

This example shows how PP militants slowly began to separate themselves from armed-struggle supporters. However, some more recent recruits interpreted the grassroots organization of urban squatters and the formation of new ideological and productive structures as a precursor to the creation of a “popular 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 support” in Gómez Palacio as follows:

We . . . were building institutions . . . the economic apparatus or the economic structure. Because remember that, basically, what we wanted to build, according 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? . . . It’s awesome. 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 “disorder” 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, Torreón, 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, repression, and episodes involving violent attacks on the authorities, but the mythology of armed struggle remains absent. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of his testimony Alberto Guevara, a settler from Tierra y Libertad, said, “No, I didn’t want to get involved, but she dreamed of a house, some land” (interview, Torreón, August 26, 2013). Even though they were gradually integrated into the mass line, armed revolution was not one of their choices.

Monterrey, Nuevo León, was, during the 1970s, an epicenter of radical politics. Communists, leftist radical Christians, and members of the New Left 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 Party—PCM), the Movimiento Armado Revolucionario (Revolutionary Armed Movement—MAR), and the more heterodox Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Forces—FLN).

In his memoirs, the former PP activist Agustin Acosta (2015: 56–57) recalls a debate in 1972 between members of PR and PP. In the debate, which took place at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, 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 workers expressed their distaste for the PR position and rebuked the aspiring guerrillas. 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 decision amply reciprocated by Marxist-Leninist guerrillas of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (September 23 Communist League—LC23S). 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 workers in Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Baja California, Guerrero, Chihuahua, Durango, Oaxaca, and Mexico City’s Metropolitan Zone. Its founders considered it necessary to oppose state violence with revolutionary violence, and they acted as the people’s vanguard against the authoritarian regime. From 1974 and 1981 they embarked on a series of bank robberies and kidnappings of affluent businessmen. These actions funded the distribution of LC23S’s 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 LC23S’s relations with other left-wing organizations were always mired in conflict. The organization harshly criticized the PP’s 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 Napoleón Gómez Sada from control of the cooperative, the contempt of workers for bourgeois legality and their hatred of scabs could not be minimized.

LC23S militants alleged that PP labor activists betrayed the workers merely by fighting for union positions. In their opinion PP diminished the steelworkers’ revolutionary potential. These criticisms fell on deaf ears. Despite its desperate 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 Agustín 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: 149–153). Only when sectarian attitudes finally prevailed in the late 1970s did the cooperation with urban guerrillas 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 movements, and a middle class ashamed of its own privileges (Rangel, 2013: 17; Walker, 2013: 23–44). 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 PCM’s option), and working with the government. They ignore a fourth alternative, mass-line politics or the social left, that was facilitated by the contradictory nature of Echeverría’s presidency. At the same time that Luis Echeverría fought a “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas, he also supported New Left radicals in their conflicts with local elites and PRI rivals. Echeverría’s populist presidency opened up spaces for the social left in states such as Durango, Nuevo León, and Nayarit. This support ended with the next president, José López Portillo (1976–1982), but that presidency was marked by the 1977 electoral reform that legalized the PCM. The complexity of Mexico’s authoritarian regime created opportunities for independent politics and even local socialist political projects. Thus, during the early 1970s young radical activists both suffered 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: 343–369) 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 example, the PP militants usually sided with the urban guerrillas against the government 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 the regime. PP’s reliance on the mass-line principle reinforced a rejection of armed struggle in urban settings such as colonias and factories, where the economic 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 abandonment of the revolutionary ideal? The answer lies in the narratives of the twentieth-century Marxist left—the 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 struggles for small gains for the sake of the final goal, something that was more akin to Eduard Bernstein’s position that “the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything.” At the same time, it accused those who continued 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 movement 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 postrevolutionary elite. He introduced French Maoism’s emphasis on direct democracy into PP projects of working-class organization. As a result, PP’s 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 revolutionary 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.