American Maoists Building Support For Mexican Revolutionary Movement: Huge Implications For US Natio
The United States’ main Maoist organization, Liberation Road, is developing support networks for Mexico’s ruling leftist party MORENA and its leader, Mexico’s socialist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (popularly known as AMLO).
Liberation Road sees Mexico under its present leadership as a major force for the revolutionary transformation of the United States. With a population of around 128 million, a communist Mexico, sharing a 2,000-mile border with this country, would become a national security nightmare of epic proportions. America’s Maoists are working hard to make that nightmare a reality.
According to Liberation Road’s newly formed Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico:
“México, more than any other country of the world, will influence our struggle in the US for transformational change from imperialist capitalism to socialism. Will the US succeed in maintaining Mexico as a vassal state? Or will México point the way for US social movements to gain governing power?”
Liberation Road is the new name for Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a national communist formation formed out of the various Maoist splinter groups of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. The name change—instituted at a completely unpublicized national congress in April—ends years of confusion. Another group also calling itself Freedom Road Socialist Organization, centered around FightBack! magazine, split from the main group in 1999. All future references to FRSO in this article refer to the larger FRSO/Liberation Road formation.
In recent years, FRSO has built a Latin@ Left Project/Project Izquierda Latina, aimed at building bridges with Latin American revolutionary movements. Since the victory of AMLO and MORENA in 2018, Mexico has become a major focus of Liberation Road’s Latin American solidarity work.
According to the Washington Post, AMLO was always on the far left even while he worked inside the mainstream of Mexican politics:
“Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began his political career with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had been at the heart of Mexico’s authoritarian system since 1929.
“’At the time, there was no other option for an aspiring politician,’ said José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti, a former top aide to Lopez Obrador …
“Even during his PRI days, Lopez Obrador saw himself as an activist, representing the state of Tabasco in negotiations with Pemex, trying to convince oil workers that they should demand better wages and benefits. He named his son Jesús Ernesto after Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the Marxist guerrilla who fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba. …
“But the PRI grew frustrated with Lopez Obrador, considering him ‘a communist with Cuban instincts’ …”
In 1989, AMLO joined the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and was the party’s national leader between 1996 and 1999. He left the PRD in 2012 to later found the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), which catapulted him to the presidency in July 2018 in alliance with the leftist Labor Party and the moderate Social Encounter Party. AMLO won with 53 percent of the vote.
AMLO has maintained close ties to the Sao Paolo Forum, an alliance of more than 100 socialist and communist parties credited with moving most of Latin America into the socialist camp in the 1990s. The Forum was founded by Cuba’s communist leader Fidel Castro and former Brazilian president Lula da Silva “to save what had been lost of Communism in Eastern Europe and the old USSR.”
Through a letter to the 2011 meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum, AMLO explained the rationale behind his new MORENA project. He emphasized that MORENA has as its first task to defeat the “political oligarchy” of Mexico.
AMLO told the assembled Marxist revolutionaries from all over South and Central America:
“We can share that in these difficult times for Mexico, we are building a popular and citizen movement that seeks to carry out the deep transformation of the country …”
One of Liberation Road’s key points of contact to the Mexican revolutionary movement has been Javier Bravo, a MORENA activist and a professor of history and archaeology at the University of Guanajuato and a participant in FRSO’s Project Izquierda Latina.
Bravo studied in the Soviet Union at the end of the openly communist era and lives part of the year in Havana, Cuba. FRSO/Liberation Road has brought Bravo to the United States for at least two tours to explain the revolutionary potential of MORENO and its leader AMLO to U.S. comrades.
On Sept. 19 and 20, Bravo addressed Liberation Road’s Mexican Solidarity Coalition / Coalicion en Solidaridad con Mexico in San Diego. The meeting was organized by longtime FRSO/Liberation Road activist Martin Eder.
The Mexican Solidarity Coalition wrote on Facebook:
“Professor Javier Bravo, a long-time activist and a rep for MORENA will be … speaking about current struggles in Mexico & how we build a movement against Trump to stop the right-wings ethnic cleansing against Mexican & other immigrants.”
This followed a Boston meeting for Bravo convened Sunday, Sept. 15, which was co-sponsored by Liberation Road and the Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico.
Co-organizers were Garrett Virchick of the Boston Teachers Union and Gabriel Mireles, associate director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association—both known Liberation Road affiliates.
Mireles wrote on the Liberation Road website that his Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico had four main objectives:
1/ Expose and resist political, social, military and economic US interventionist efforts that deny Mexico the right to self-determination and aim to bring down the AMLO government. …
2/ Provide information and analysis about what’s really happening in Mexico to counter the mainstream media that demonizes and/or belittles leftist governments.
3/ Spread the lessons from Mexico’s experience of movement building and electoral activism to increase democratic participation and build progressive independent political organization within the US that would advance a pro-people foreign policy.
4/ Build a broad-based grassroots solidarity project of individuals and organizations on the model of CISPES to connect social movement activists on both sides of the border to shift power from US and Mexican elites to the peoples of our countries.
CISPES refers to the Committee in Solidarity with the Peoples of El Salvador, one of the communist movement’s most successful operations on U.S. soil.
In 1980, the El Salvadoran Communist Party, then fighting a guerrilla war with their government, sent Farid Handal, brother of the Party chairman, Shafik Handal, to the United States. His mission was to organize a North American support network for the El Salvadoran guerrilla army.
According to Newsweek journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, quoted in The American Journal of International Law:
“CISPES was formed in October 1980 as a direct result of a visit to the United States by Farid Handal, brother of the secretary general of the Salvadoran Communist Party Shafik Handal. His principal adviser in this venture was Alfredo Garcia Almeida, at that time the station chief of the Departamento de America of the Cuban Communist Party in New York. …
“CISPES was subsequently set up as a tax-exempt organization with an office in Washington and countrywide chapters, that included 500 college campuses.”
CISPES consistently supported the El Salvadoran communists, agitating against U.S. aid to the El Salvadoran elected government and also joining in demonstrations against aid to the anti-communist forces in neighboring Nicaragua.
Clearly, Liberation Road, which enjoys close relations with the larger Communist Party USA (with an estimated 5,000 members) and the nearly 60,000-member strong Democratic Socialists of America, intends on building major operations in support of the unfolding Mexican revolution.
In a recent conversation, a moderate former member of MORENA told me that the leading militant faction of the party is planning a major swing to the hard left, probably after Mexico’s 2021 congressional elections. In the words of my contact, “they know this will wreck the Mexican economy—but they don’t care.”
If AMLO and MORENO take Mexico’s 128 million down the Cuba/Venezuela road as it seems they intend to do, the consequences could turn into the worst national security crisis this country has ever faced.
Venezuela’s Marxist-driven economic and political crises have driven more than 2 million refugees into neighboring countries. If AMLO and MORENO succeed in driving Mexico to economic ruin, we could see 10s of millions of refugees clamoring to cross the border into the United States. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, even Florida, could be engulfed by a human tidal wave like nothing we have ever seen before. This chaos would be a major advance for the Mexican, U.S., and world revolutionary movements.
The current flooding of the border by 10s of then thousands of illegal immigrants a month could be seen as a dress rehearsal for a possible human tsunami currently building in Mexico.
President Ronald Reagan fought with mixed success to overturn the communist revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. He understood that if communism was not pushed back in Central America it would eventually reach the U.S.–Mexico border—we are now almost at that point.
President Donald Trump must pick up Reagan’s fallen sword before it’s too late.
The first step is to order an investigation of Liberation Road’s Mexican revolutionary support networks under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—it is very likely they are not registered as agents of the Mexican government.
President Trump has actively worked to thwart the revolutionary regimes of Cuba and Venezuela. He must soon begin to formulate plans to counter a potentially even more dangerous revolutionary movement in Mexico.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
