JOHN ROSS ON REVOLUTION

Mexico is wracked by the deepest economic contraction since the Great Depression; millions are out of work (one estimate calculates real unemployment as 40%), 72,000,000 out of 107,000,000 Mexicans live in and around the poverty line
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's (EZLN)
The "Sexta" called for the writing of a new revolutionary Mexican constitution in 2010, a process to be accompanied by prolonged social struggle.
At a meeting of "Otras" from eight states and the federal district this past March in Tampico, Tamaulipas, activists considered the prospects for renewed revolution in the coming year.
Carlos Montemayor, the nation's top scholar of guerrilla movements, even declared the 2010 timeline to be a "trap"
Subcomandante Marcos, born Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente,
has been missing in action
briefly last New Year's at the rebels' Festival of "Digna Rabia" ("Rage with Dignity") in Chiapas.

the phantom of 2010 provoked more speculation than in Chiapas
Governor Juan Sabines and his Secretary of Government Noe Castanon never weary of warning of "a social explosion" in the coming year. Many like La Jornada's veteran Chiapas correspondent Hermann Bellinghausen see their dire pronouncements as paving the path for the increased criminalization of social protest that has marked the Calderon years and a pretext for further militarizing an already militarized state.
San Cristobal de las Casas Bishop emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz.
Bishop Ruiz was the government's favorite villain, condemned as "Comandante Sammy", the real face behind the Zapatistas' ski-masks.
federal troops raided a ranch near Frontera Comalapa on the Guatemalan border
Three men taken into custody were pictured as "guerrilleros" and claimed that they had been trained by one "Comandante Uerto" of the "Kaibiles", a dread unit of the Guatemalan Army that functions as a death squad

the Chiapas press
suggested that the three were members of either the OCEZ (Emiliano Zapata Campesinos Organization) or the OPEZ (Emiliano Zapata Proletarian Organization) depending on which mendacious journalistic vision the reader swallows.
newspapers like Cuarto Poder
finger Diocesan priest Juan Hurtado Lopez in Altamirano in the Zapatista zone of influence, for calling for armed revolt in 2010 from his pulpit,
Cuarto Poder accuses the priest of Nueva Galicia of preaching revolution
Ricardo Lagunes, a lawyer for the Diocesan Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center founded by Bishop Ruiz was beaten by thugs in Jotola down in the hot lands, September 18th.
September 29th arrest of veteran social activist Juan Manuel Hernandez, universally known as "Chema", a founder of the OCEZ and the House of the People ("Casa del Pueblo")
in the central valleys around Venustiano Carranza.

Chema, a longtime lightning rod for that community's recovery of 14,000 hectares from local ranchers, is a fiery indigenous leader whose political leanings are said to tilt more to the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) than to the EZLN.
Governor Sabines's plans to build a super highway that will divide up Zapatista autonomous villages has also increased their vulnerability and the rebels may well consider that a second edition of 1994 in 2010 would be political suicide.
A more likely theater for revolution would be Oaxaca and Guerrero,
confrontations between the military and unidentified guerrilleros were reported in the Guerrero sierra where 40 years ago Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor rose against the mal gobierno.
Popular Revolutionary Army which made its debut in 1996 with a series of murderous attacks on the military along Guerrero's Costa Grande and whose cadre are thought to be drawn from Cabanas's descendents

(the EPR is now based in Oaxaca) and the ERPI or the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People, active in the Sierra and Costa Chica regions of Guerrero. Long incarcerated (ten years) ERPI founders Jacobo Silva and Gloria Arenas were recently released from prison and pledged allegiance to non-violent social struggle, aligning themselves with the Zapatistas' Other Campaign.
Other actors in the mix include the Armed Forces of Popular Revolution (FARP), the Villista Army of the Revolutionary People (EVRP), the December 2nd Revolutionary Organization (OR-2nd), The Viva Villa Collective (CVV), the Justice Commando-June 28th (CJ-28), the Democratic Revolutionary Tendency (TDR), and the Triple Guerrilla National Indigenous Alliance (TAGIN.)
While most of these "focos" express a Marxist-Leninist orientation, a handful of anarchist cells take credit for at least ten bombings at Mexico City banks and auto showrooms in September -

In the 1960s and '70s, urban guerrilla bands thrived in northern cities like Monterrey and Torreon, heisting banks and kidnapping industrialists. Indeed, the roots of the EZLN are firmly planted in those two northern cities. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation grew out of the Monterrey-based Forces of National Liberation (FLN)
The seven northern border states are the bloodiest battlefields in Felipe Calderon's ill-conceived war
The coalescence of radical forces and the drug gangs could create a climate propitious for revolutionary violence in 2010.
Similarly, one scenario for 2010 proposes coordinated risings in the cities and countryside throughout Mexico. Does the Mexican left have the numbers and organization to pull off simultaneous insurrection?
One subplot for 2010 projects indigenous rebels seizing sacred sites like Palenque and Teotihuacan this January 1st

El Insurgente, the EPR's theoretical journal, reminds readers that revolutions are a "coyuntura" (coming-together) of objective conditions such as economic collapse, repression, natural disaster, and the hunger of the people, and subjective forces - i.e. the revolutionaries themselves. Revolutions only happen when revolutionary forces are ready to carry them out. The EPR's conclusion: although objective conditions in 2010 are overripe for revolutionary upheaval, the objective forces lack cohesion and consolidation. In other words, don’t count on a new Mexican Revolution in 2010.

JOHN ROSS ON PEMEX

On July 11th, newspapers in Mexico City began receiving a series of communiqués under the rubric of the "Military Zone Command of the Popular Revolutionary Army and State Committee of the Party of the Popular Democratic Revolution"

In documents distributed to the press, the EPR identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist military organization composed of 14 little-known guerrilla "focos" that seemed to revolve around an alliance between a clandestine clique of Maoists with a predilection for bombing - the PROCUP - and the Party of the Poor, founded by the long-dead guerrilla martyr Lucio Cabanas along Guerrero's Costa Grande in the 1970s.

the arrest of two top EPR comandantes May 24th in Oaxaca when Eduardo Reyes Amaya and "Raymundo Rivera Bravo" AKA Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sanchez were taken into custody in a hotel in the city's market. Cruz Sanchez is described by guerrilla historian Carlos Montemayor as a 30-year veteran of clandestine armed movements in Mexico and is thought to be the brother of Tiburcio Cruz Sanchez also known as Francisco Cerezo, a maximum EPR leader and patriarch of a clan that includes three activist sons, two of whom are serving long prison sentences for bombing banks in 2001.

According to the Oaxaca daily Noticias, which the hated governor Ulises Ruiz has tried to shut down repeatedly,

But whether the attack was a

• government ruse to reign in social discontent, induce terrorist paranoia as a tool of control, and underscore the need for opening up PEMEX to private investment or a

• legitimate initiative by the armed resistance, the bombings have spiced up a pot already over boiling with upheaval.

... and the mysterious religious right formation "El Yunque" which has had so much influence in both the Fox and Calderon administrations.

Others such as the left-leaning daily La Jornada analyst Carlos Fazio scoff at the bombing as a "hoax."

What surprised Felipe Canseco, a former leader of the PROCUP and uncle of the Cerezo clan was how long it took the EPR to respond to the disappearance of its leaders in Oaxaca on May 25th. "When I went down, he comrades took action the next day," he recalls. Canseco, who served eight years for guerrilla activities, estimates that there are 30 armed groups operating in 22 out of Mexico's 32 states.

One of the hottest pirate DVDs on the Mexican street these days is "The Violin", which depicts the military's "dirty war" in Guerrero in the 1970s in brutal detail. ... those terrible years when an estimated 650 Cabanas supporters along the Costa Grande were forcibly disappeared and held in secret lock-ups where they were tortured and eventually killed and thrown into the Pacific Ocean from Mexican air force planes near Acapulco.