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

• Author: Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699902
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 217, Vol. 44 No. 6, November 2017, 140–155

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699902

© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

140

Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions

Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of

Política Popular

by

Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo

Política Popular, an unarmed Maoist group operating from 1968 to 1979 in northern

Mexico, developed as it did because of the attraction of the “mass line” in its interpretation

as a direct-democratic model for political participation. This is why activists from the

student movement of 1968 adopted Maoist ideas as an ideological guide. Maoism as a

simple organizational catechism easily captured their imagination and persuaded squat-

ters and workers to join them in challenging the authoritarian Mexican regime.

El grupo maoísta no armado Política Popular, que operara de 1968 a 1979 en el norte

de México, se desarrolló como tal debido a la atracción de la “línea de masas” interpretada

como un modelo democrático directo de participación política. Fue por esta razón que los

activistas del movimiento estudiantil de 1968 adoptaron conceptos maoístas como guía

ideológica. La sencilla naturaleza del Maoísmo como catecismo organizacional capturó

fácilmente la imaginación estudiantil y persuadió a las poblaciones marginales y traba-

jadores de unirse a ellos en su lucha contra el régimen autoritario mexicano.

Keywords: Maoism, Mexico, Política Popular, Urban guerrillas, Línea Proletaria

Writing about memories of armed struggle in Mexico during the 1970s is like

traveling to a forgotten past of debates on the left. After the traumatic events of

1968, radicalized students considered revolutionary strategies for overthrow-

ing the authoritarian regime. There was broad consensus regarding the need to

fight the regime, but students disagreed about the best way to move forward.

Some followed Che Guevara’s lead and tried to establish guerrilla movements

in the countryside or the cities, while others pursued revolutionary ideals with-

out recourse to arms but still keeping their distance from electoral politics.

Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo is deputy assistant director of higher education in the Mexico City

Department of Education. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Twenty-third

International Colloquium of History Students at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in

Lima in 2013 and published in Spanish in Cartografías del horror, edited by Fabián Campos

Hernández et al. (2015). The author thanks Paul Lawrance Haber, Ron Haas, Aaron Leonard, and

Yair Martínez for their comments on this article and their help in its translation. He thanks the

former militants of Política Popular in La Laguna and Victoria de Durango for sharing their mem-

ories of their participation in the organization. He is grateful to Adolfo Orive, Jesús Vargas,

Salvador Hernández Vélez, Agustín Acosta, and Hugo Andrés Araujo for helping him to build an

archive of testimonies and documents about Política Popular and performing an exhaustive cri-

tique of his conclusions.

699902LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17699902Latin American PerspectivesPuma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLÍTICA POPULAR

research-article2017

Puma / ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLÍTICA POPULAR 141

Política Popular (People’s Politics—PP), a group of students, workers, and

peasants influenced by Maoism and the idea of the “mass line” as an organiza-

tional principle,1 walked a different path to revolution by creating squatter

settlements and dissident union organizations and finally concluded that

armed struggle was not one of its options.

In 2013 I interviewed many former militants of PP in northern Mexico (see

Puma, 2014). Their stories did not deviate from the accounts of former

Communists or Trotskyists. Like their fellow leftists, they were students, work-

ers, or squatters.2 They shared a history of radical protest and socialist ideology.

Many of them still believed in the old dream of social revolution and preserved

Marxist ideas and vocabulary. Nonetheless, their organization was surrounded

by contradictory myths of which the most enduring was that PP reneged on its

revolutionary ideals and joined the counterinsurgency.

PP is a contested subject in leftist historiography and popular memory.

Memories of PP are tainted by the collaboration of some of its former militants

with the neoliberal governments of Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) and Ernesto

Zedillo (1994–2000). Most of the critics focus on the figure of Adolfo Orive, the

founding leader of PP, whose role as an adviser to the Interior Ministry has

obscured its whole history. Paradoxically, we can trace the origins of the PP

“black legend” back to a series of newspaper and magazine articles that

appeared between 1993 and 1998 (see Cano, 1998a; 1998b; Correa, 1993; Corro,

1998; Jaquez, 1994; Velázquez, Avila, and Goded, 1998). In those articles former

PP militants developed a harsh critique of the political evolution of their former

leader that received added impetus when Subcomandante Marcos joined the

fray. Marcos (2003 [1998]: 216–219) naturalized the “outmoded Maoism” image

with his communiqué “México 1998: Arriba y abajo, máscaras y silencios” and

foreclosed any historical inquiry into PP for almost two decades.

It is important that these attacks occurred in the context of the political con-

flicts of the early 1990s. The Salinas and Zedillo presidencies experienced polit-

ical and social turmoil as a result of the privatization of public enterprises,

free-trade agreement negotiations with the United States, and demands for

clean elections. Also important in the rise of discontent was a 1991 constitutional

reform that opened the gates to private ownership of communal lands (ejidos).

In order to curb the protests, the Mexican government created programs to

diminish poverty such as the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (National

Solidarity Program), commonly associated with co-optation. The agencies that

managed those programs, such as the Ministry of Social Development, were

filled with leftist militants of diverse backgrounds, but the critical articles men-

tioned above stressed the participation of former Maoists. As a result, former PP

militants were rapidly sent to the Ninth Circle of Hell in the Mexican left’s imag-

inary. This condemnatory discourse has remained unchallenged until now. I

will try to dispel the myth and contribute new information to the debate.

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