Sheinbaum and the Repression of the Student Movement

During the most recent march commemorating the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, around ten thousand demonstrators demanded justice for the students murdered under the Díaz Ordaz government. In this new day of struggle, the youth confronted the police of the bourgeois regime, today administered by MORENA.

But why did these young people lash out against Claudia Sheinbaum’s government? In her recurring press conference, the president claimed it was an act of provocation. The truth is that the scenes circulated of confrontations led by the Black Bloc only reveal the epitome of a youth constantly murdered and repressed in the country. The youth responded with anger to a government that, under Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency, reproduces the same mechanisms of criminalization and repression against social movements, and specifically against students.

Youthful indignation does not emerge from a vacuum. The constant violence young people face in their schools, instigated by porril gangs, is yet another expression of a low-intensity war waged in neighborhoods across the country. The death of a student at CCH Sur at the end of last month provoked the outrage of the student community, faced with an ever-present state of violence that has been normalized and that is a product of common crime generated by unemployment, misery, and the looting of the nation.

On the other hand, the attacks against rural normalistas in recent years show the continuity of a repressive policy aimed at destroying these institutions where the children of peasants can aspire to higher education. The rural normales, historically linked to popular struggles, continue to be persecuted, precarized, and dismantled by an economic structure that promotes the exploitation of the countryside subordinated to transnational interests.

An example is the case of the Mactumactzá Rural Normal School in Chiapas. In 2003, under the government of Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía, tear gas and firearms were ordered to repress a demonstration of students demanding teaching positions, leaving dozens injured and detained. Two decades later, in 2025, history repeats itself: the death of normalista Jesús Vázquez Pérez during a confrontation with the police reveals the persistence of that state policy.

MORENA, now acting as the administrative tool of this regime, bears responsibility for all of this. Let us not forget López Obrador’s support for Ángel Aguirre, governor of Guerrero, after two normalistas were murdered in Ayotzinapa in 2011. Or the impunity left by the previous government for the perpetrators of the 2014 massacre of the 43 normalistas, as denounced by the families of Ayotzinapa.

In 2022, Claudia Sheinbaum met with Salazar Mendiguchía, the executioner of Mactumactzá, and thanked him for his support for her presidential campaign. And Sheinbaum and Salazar Mendiguchía are not only united politically through MORENA’s candidacy—they also share an essential bond: both are defenders of the system that constantly expels the rural population from the countryside into a life of misery and exploitation, and that seeks to eradicate the resistance of the rural normales.

As is evident, Claudia Sheinbaum was not satisfied with simply thanking the political support of a repressor from Chiapas; she currently backs in her government Omar Harfuch, denounced by the Ayotzinapa parents themselves for links to the case. Although the president constantly attacks the “neoliberals” in her speeches, we see that her policy has little to envy from the old parties with whom she now governs the country. The promoters of hunger, misery, and impunity are the officials of MORENA who coexist and collude with PAN and PRI to uphold this capitalist system.

Just as students were murdered in Tlatelolco yesterday, today the students of the rural normales across the country—such as in Ayotzinapa and Mactumactzá—are being assassinated. To advance the struggle for justice, education, and a better quality of life for workers and poor peasants, it is necessary to open the path to socialist revolution under the leadership of an international party of the working class that combats all reformist tendencies that conciliate with and uphold the MORENA government, as well as the anarchist currents that despise the mass movement and believe that isolated actions are needed to “move the poor,” as if the calamities of this system were not tragic enough for the working class to rise. There is no shortage of reasons or fighting spirit—what is abundant are the traitors to the cause of international socialist revolution.

Down with the MORENA government, lackey of TRUMP and his trade agreements!