Why are working class youth criminalized? For the last few decades, youth have been the most vulnerable sector of the working class under capitalism. With the current crisis of overproduction, the ruling class has no interest in providing education or future employment for our youth. Instead, they have implemented huge and expensive campaigns to warn us that poor and unemployed youth will be the future hired killers of organized crime. Or that youth who participate in protests are black-clad people bent on destruction and terrorizing the general population, which the system must punish harshly with jail sentences.
Smear and elimination policies promote the brutality of the murders. The working class has a long-held affection for teaching students and teachers because of these groups’ commitment to their communities. For this reason, the Mexicanos Primero and Televisa bosses, along with the government, have massively promoted the idea that teachers, including student-teachers, are to blame for the educational backwardness. These workers are labeled parasites who get a salary to spend their time at sit-ins, which are a waste of money the government should not allow. But the context of this campaign was the passage of the education reform, which created huge profits for the groups, promoting the commercialization of education.
Although originally the police and army were trained as the capitalists’ repressive branch. Today due to the increasing violence carried out by drug cartels — amply documented to be sponsored by businesses and covered up by the politicians — the police fire on unarmed students under orders from local drug lords, with the pretext that their lives were in danger. While the cops could use their weapons against criminal groups, they prefer to hunt and murder 18- and 20-year-old youth who the government describes as undesirables.
Ayotzinapa is not an isolated case of police brutality. Thousands of unarmed black and Latino youth are murdered by racist police in the U.S. Even in those few cases where crimes were recorded, the police claimed they feared for their lives because they were confronting one of those “black rappers drug-dealing youth” who could “hurt” them as shown in countless racist movies and TV shows. In Europe, immigrants are massacred by the police, as was the case of the unarmed Brazilian immigrant murdered by the British cops because he looked like an Arab attempting to “commit a terrorist act” on the city subway.
Mexico is not a failed state. Capitalism is a criminal system. We cannot conclude that Mexico is simply a failed state (a concept which describes government institutions that cannot solve the problems of its population) when on a daily basis its ruling class invests huge amounts of money to promote racist ideas, smear campaigns, or wars designed to obtain resources to stay in power. They won’t solve the current situation because they deliberately created it. Only the organized international working class is capable of stopping these crimes by destroying the system that promotes them. We took power in the past; we can do it again.