Actions marking International Women’s Day, March 8, 2024, unleashed women’s fury against patriarchal oppression in Mexico and around the world. Everywhere in the world, this oppression is intensifying. The increased role of women in society, resulting from both the economic and political needs of the capitalist system and the struggle of women, has benefited this system but has also weakened some of the old ways of subjugating women. Faced with these changes, misogyny and attempts to reinforce patriarchal oppression have become sharper, on the one hand, while the struggle of millions of women to break the chains and achieve their liberation has intensified. This contradiction is a very important part of the multiple crises that this same outdated system now faces. Women long to live free, they rebel against the chains of the system that does not allow this, and this fight can and needs to become a powerful force for revolution.

In Mexico City, the government (mis)informed that 180 thousand people marched, but there were many more. The first arrived at the Zócalo [central plaza] around 3:00 p.m., and the last ones arrived around 9:00 p.m. They were only able to enter because those who arrived earlier had already left. The subway lines heading to the city center were overflowing with joy and expectation. Compañeras who were going to march together invited other compañeras, giving them guidance on how to take care of themselves in the face of kettling and arrests by the police, protect themselves from the gases, and other advice. The government closed subway stations throughout the city center, but hundreds of thousands of people came, took to the streets and overflowed them—singing, chanting, drumming, and dancing, in green and purple headscarves, in a sea of banners and signs demanding justice for the tens of thousands of murdered or missing women, an end to all violence and contempt against women, the full right to safe and legal abortion, as well as the expression of deep longings for a different world, in which women can be free.

There were marches all over the country. According to coverage, 50 thousand marched in Guadalajara, 25 thousand in Monterrey and 20 thousand in Querétaro and more than 10 thousand in Puebla. Hundreds of thousands came out to protest and in many states, they marched not only in the capital, but also in other medium and small cities. They also called out other injustices: The marches in Soconusco, Chiapas and Apizaco, Tlaxcala demanded justice for women migrants; in Mexico City and Guadalajara (and perhaps other cities) they demanded freedom for Palestine and an end to the genocide by Israel and the United States. In the capital [Mexico City], when passing by the Antimonument to the missing teacher training college students of Ayotzinapa, they counted up to 43 in support of the fight for truth and justice that has been going on for more than 9 years. Relatives searching for the missing women and men students led the marches in many cities. Women and some men participated, from girls and boys of 3 or 4 years old to older folks of 90. The vast majority were young people, who have driven this movement, especially since 2019, when a new combative spirit was born against the forces of the state, macho violence and, among some people, against the capitalist system that gives rise to these horrors.

In the capital, as has been tradition since 2020, hundreds came to paint commemorations and denunciations of the stolen lives on the large metal fences placed by the state in front of the national palace. On the night of March 7, Irinea Buendía (mother of Mariana Lima Buendía, murdered in 2010 by her husband, a judicial police officer), along with many other mothers of victims of femicide, demonstrated in front of the National Palace, placing white candles and photographs of their daughters and other murdered women on the Zócalo pavement.

In many cities, there were skirmishes in front of these fences that represent the defense of patriarchy and the total rejection of demands for justice. They serve to protect the police who use gas and beatings against the women protesters. Although governments swear that they do not use gas, videos on social media document large jets of tear gas coming out of their fortifications. Some women protesters resisted and tried to tear down the fences.

Newspaper reports and videos on social media documented that there was repression by state forces in Zacatecas, Puebla, Colima, and Monterrey, among other places. The hardest repression was in Zacatecas, governed by Morena [political party of current national president, AMLO or Andrés Manuel López Obrador], where police attacked, beat and detained about 30 women protesters and journalists in the Plaza de Armas at the end of the march. Videos on social media show how 4 or 5 police officers grab and knock down a young woman and drag her throughout the plaza, pulling her by her shirt and her green bandana, dragging her down stone steps. She was one of 30 women, including journalists, who were taken to an alley where police insulted and intimidated the women, hitting and kicking some of them. The women were detained there for an hour, standing with their faces against the wall, unable to turn to see the faces of their tormentors. There were men among the police officers, as well as women. Then they took the women away in patrol cars, along routes with little traffic, without telling them where they were going, until they finally ended up at the municipal police station. (The military and police often do this to terrorize detainees that they will be disappeared). Due to the pressure of the people who came to the police station to demand the release of the women, and due to the videos on social media that showed police abuse, the government finally released the women.

A week later, another march in Zacatecas of about 3,000 people took to the streets demanding the firing of the authorities responsible for the repression. They exposed the repressive plot that the government prepared in advance. The governor tried to criminalize the protest, calling it “violent” days before March 8. The Zacatecas Public Security Secretariat (SSPZ) summoned police officers from other municipalities in addition to 400 female agents from the National Guard to set up “a whole surveillance apparatus” against the women and men protesters. They claimed that the order was given to “repress a small group of the more than six thousand women protesters who had marched,” from the SSPZ helicopter that was flying over the plaza with a couple of snipers on board, and thus the police ambushed people, using “a ‘kettling’ tactic, to corner and repress a group of compañeras.” They demanded from the governor “the immediate resignation of the three officials in his cabinet, who had ordered state and highway police to suppress around thirty women with tear gas, fire extinguishers, batons, and shields.”

The marches this March 8 were more numerous and powerful than ever. They represent an important and growing political awakening, rejection and certain rebellion against patriarchal oppression. This movement has been attacked and slandered by president AMLO as “conservative,” because this movement is critical and independent (to an important degree) of his party and his government. According to AMLO, the fact that a woman (Claudia Sheinbaum, from Morena) is going to be the next president represents a great advance for women in Mexico, and it is a good thing that many women in the women’s movement do not believe him. Some women activists replied, “We know from experience that even with positions held by women, there is no guarantee of progress in terms of justice for us women. We stand outside of the partisan thinking, of its political forms invented by patriarchy, we are committed to social organization and mobilization.” This is positive as far as it goes, but something much more radical is needed: We need a real revolution to uproot and eliminate patriarchal oppression.

As our flyer points out (“International Women’s Day—Break All the Chains, Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!”), the struggles and rebellions of women in Mexico and the world are important, because they “awaken, inspire and teach people, but do not break the chains of patriarchy. Because the capitalist system maintains and reinforces these chains, and uses both repression and deception to quell revolts.”

Why is the state in charge of intimidating, terrorizing and repressing women’s demonstrations? Why—despite years of struggle and massive marches—does the state continue to protect feminicidas [murderers of women] and rapists, including the police and soldiers who commit these crimes? Why does SEDENA (Secretariat of National Defense) spy on women feminist activists (as revealed in Guacamaya Leaks) and protect the soldiers who brutally raped Ernestina Ascencio Rosales, a 72-year-old indigenous woman who died from that cruel misogynistic attack in 2007? Why—even though new laws are passed to (supposedly) protect women—are violent attacks, harassment and humiliation intensifying everywhere?

Many women activists say that the problem is that “the state is not doing its job,” but that is a false illusion that has been instilled in us since elementary school: That the state represents the people and exists to protect the people. The reality is that the capitalist state does not exist to protect the people; it exists to protect the capitalist system that oppresses and exploits the people. It exists to maintain inequalities and injustices of gender, nationality, “race,” and class, which under capitalism cannot be eliminated.

Only a revolution that overthrows and dismantles that state and the capitalist system as a whole will open the way to building a new society, a liberatory socialist society. This is the change necessary and possible now to liberate women, all oppressed and ultimately all of humanity.

Therefore, what is most urgent now is to get organized and mobilized as part of the Revolution Movement to prepare and make a real revolution, a revolution guided by the scientific method and approach of the new communism, developed by Bob Avakian.

Do you think that this revolution is a “utopian dream,” even though you recognize that everything is going from bad to worse for the vast majority of people? Are you aware that global warming is advancing faster than scientists calculated, that the clashes between China, the United States and Russia are worsening, posing the real threat of the use of nuclear weapons? Do you understand that we face these two threats to humanity and other species due to the functioning of the world capitalist-imperialist system? In the face of these and other horrors, it is even more important to understand that the possibility of making revolution and overthrowing this system in the near future is real, even though this cannot be seen on the surface. The deep contradictions of the system are intensifying, causing crises that bring greater suffering for millions of people and also greater divisions among “the powers that be,” which makes a revolution with real possibilities of winning much more possible. You see this in the United States now, in the contention between the Republican fascists and the bourgeois Democrats, and greater divisions are opening up between the ruling classes here as well. At the same time, more and more people cannot continue living as before and are looking for a way out of this hell, but they will only find a real way out by bringing them the liberating truth that revolution and another way of living much better is possible. A liberatory revolution is necessary and possible. We call on all women and men who long to put an end to this system of endless horrors to learn about and participate in the fight to prepare and make this revolution.

Aurora Roja
Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico
auroraroja.mx@gmail.com | aurora-roja.blogspot.com