Miguel Sánchez Lora | Antonio Gramsci Socialist Chair (Mexico)
Global Analysis and Tasks in Mexico
1. The bloc formed by China, Russia, North Korea and Iran has overcome scientific-technological dependence on the bloc led by the United States and subordinately composed of Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia. This situation has consequences in many areas.
2. China’s scientific and technological developments are enormous in both quantity and quality; focusing on just one point of its military industry, the aerial supremacy of its fighters was demonstrated in the Pakistan-India confrontation in May 2025.
3. Russian technological sovereignty in the military field, built on the organizational foundations and scientific developments of the USSR, is rapidly destabilizing the military supremacy of the Western bloc (NATO).
4. It is because of the latter that Russia’s notable military performance has been possible; at the same time, it halted the genocide against the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas carried out by Zelensky and his neo-Nazi political milieu, and prevented Ukraine’s annexation to NATO. Likewise, the assistance in this domain to the successful movements against the vestiges of French colonialism in Africa finds its ultimate explanation in the Soviet technological inheritance.
5. North Korea’s strategic nuclear power and missile technology decisively help deter an attack from the U.S. bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. A small portion of its enormous army is helping to accelerate the total defeat of the Kiev regime, thus slowing NATO’s expansion.
6. Iran’s development of various types of drones contributes, at the tactical level, to strengthening the military power of those countries and/or movements that fight the Western bloc and governments subordinated to it in several parts of the world.
7. A breaking point in the geopolitical order is that U.S. imperialism and its subordinated allies can no longer compete productively and commercially with China; (the federal cuts to science and education pushed by Trump and his MAGA bloc will exacerbate this). In contrast, the Chinese state’s investment in scientific research and education is enormous, and the organization of production and commercialization is much more efficient than that of any other state on the planet. In addition, the wall of international exchange conducted exclusively in dollars is beginning to crumble.
8. We must add to the analysis the enormous amount of natural resources owned by China and Russia, plus those coming from countries with a certain autonomy and/or openly antagonistic to the Western bloc: relevant is access to raw materials and markets that allow them treaties such as the BRICS, and other bilateral agreements in different parts of the world.
9. The sum of all the previous factors has made U.S. imperialism and its industrialized allies realize that they cannot continue their expanded reproduction of capital in vast zones of Eurasia and Africa in their usual way: mainly absolute-surplus extraction, environmental plunder and monopolistic practices. Obviously, the route of imposing themselves in a free-competition scheme is ruled out because of their comparatively low scientific-technological and organizational development.
10. There are still countries in that region of the planet with very dependent governments that will apply the North American economic model against their peoples, and where this is not the case, it will try to manufacture “color revolutions” and coups d’état. It will further strengthen the genocidal State of Israel in its expansion; a Washington aircraft carrier floating amid growing regional enemies. But all of the above will not restore the lost geostrategic control.
11. U.S. imperialism has direct military options left, initially using non-nuclear weapons, but they know there is a huge risk: if NATO forces are in danger of being defeated there is the temptation to use tactical nuclear weapons (under 100 kilotons), which would produce an automatic escalation. They also know that their adversaries might make a similar decision. Even the most bellicose hawks in government and the advisors inside think tanks know that unleashing a direct confrontation with China, Russia and North Korea would have disastrous consequences. Instead, they will foment, in places of Eurasia and Africa that try to slip from their control, bloody and prolonged proxy wars (initiated as peaceful “freedom” protests), or sabotage against the interests of their own “allies” (like Nord Stream 2), to prevent them from sliding eastward. However, they know these maneuvers would only aim to partially slow down the development of their rivals, not to significantly stop them.
12. The most important objective of the imperialist operation to dissolve the USSR was to permanently appropriate the heartland of the world—Eurasia (Mackinder)—and they did not achieve it; worse: despite their powerful fleet and numerous military bases, they are degrading from a global power to a continental one; the comparatively low development of their productive forces is a powerful ballast. Ironically, the braggart Trump has the prudence not to go beyond what the real volume of his forces allows; he withdraws to the American continent, but not to stay permanently in that position, rather to try to resolve backlogs and accumulate forces (doubling down on exploitation and environmental plunder) that would allow him to go into a clash with the rival bloc from a stronger position, because he knows we are already living the initial phases of the Third World War.
The Monroe Doctrine in the New Conditions of Imperialist Weakness
13. U.S. imperialism is in retreat; therefore it will try, by various means, that the peoples and nature of this continent, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, make up for what it can no longer obtain elsewhere in the world. A new edition of the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, but now to strengthen itself in its withdrawal.
14. To achieve this it needs to break the resistance of countries with governments that can pose obstacles to its plans; Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico; in that order of importance. The universal pretext is the fight against drug trafficking; it uses a common strategy, but applied with differentiated tactics according to each country. Simplified:
15. Against Venezuela, strengthening the economic blockade and articulating the media-psychological warfare with possible relatively limited military interventions. A total war would not be tolerated by the U.S. electorate: economic criteria and the specter of conscription would prevent it, besides that confronting on the ground a civic-military unity equipped with Bolivarian ideology transitioning to socialism and Russian weaponry deters most hawks.
16. If military and para-military actions materialize, they could be developed in several modalities, combined or not. Transitory ones: such as aerial incursions to destroy civil and military infrastructure or attempts to assassinate Bolivarian leadership. Permanent ones: if Washington decides, it will order the government of Guyana to play the role Honduras played in the 1980s, a base for harassment and sabotage operations against the Sandinista Revolution. The hydrocarbons they would try to keep stealing from the block currently called Stabroek, Venezuelan maritime territory off the coasts of the Essequibo Guayana, would more than pay the costs of this intervention modality, probably operated by U.S. military contractors leading other local mercenaries, presented as “patriots,” “the resistance,” etc., all coordinated by a reduced number of U.S. Army personnel. This type of operation does not bother the average U.S. voter, whether Democrat or Republican. It would be strange if ExxonMobil lobbyists were not pushing for this route.
17. In Colombia they are trying to mobilize the most conservative sectors of society to defeat the Historic Pact (Pacto Histórico, PH) at the ballot box. That is why the State Department has declared that against Colombia there will be no economic sanctions or blockades, specifying that the objective to be destroyed is exclusively Petro and his circle; they try, with this, to widen the base of Uribismo and other right-wing factions. Their political rifle will gradually turn to Cepeda during the presidential campaign: a threat similar to the one deployed in Argentina (if Milei’s party lost there would be no “rescue” loan). If the PH wins, the tactic would change. While this is decided one way or another, the local right and U.S. intelligence will do everything necessary to give the current legitimate government an image of ungovernability.
18. Since the greatest weakness of Mexico’s 4T government is security, the North American State—government, big capitalists and their media consortia—seeks to increase the perception of ungovernability, pressuring Claudia to accept military “aid.” The other prong of the pincer is exercised by the cartels who, by brutally controlling large swaths of the country, inflict severe damage on local economies, terror, distrust, abandonment of civic life, emotional retreat into conservative family cores and, at the same time, active acceptance of the anti-values of criminal culture; children who grow up with music and videos that glorify criminals and their sadistic and misogynistic habits. The U.S. government allows these criminals free access to arms and it is hard to believe that its financial system is not colluding with the money-laundering activities of this illegal/legal segment of the transnational bourgeoisie.
19. Moreover, the capacity and speed with which organized crime groups anticipate operations by the Mexican armed forces suggest they receive real-time satellite information from our northern neighbors, faster and more reliable than that coming from infiltration. Because these criminal groups function as an occupying army in the service of imperialism, carrying out on the territory the dissolving and repressive tasks that Washington contracts out to mercenary armies elsewhere in the world.
20. Because U.S. imperialism in retreat has profoundly modified its policy toward Latin America in a very short span, we must analyze rapidly and in detail the changes our enemy makes, and at the same time carry out a deep critique of how it is combated. The Fourth Transformation (4T) has not been able to stop the modality of imperialist aggression represented by the cartels, which, we insist, function as an occupying army.
21. The Mexican government does not apply an efficient strategy of financial prosecution, blocking and seizure against the fifth column that organized crime represents (the illegal bourgeoisie), because the money’s trail would necessarily lead to bankers and various businessmen, who could openly join the coup activities of the ultra-right. To paralyze or confront them it would not be enough to fill plazas and hold mass marches; the government and its party should have built a huge popular vanguard, well instructed and organized into structures appropriate to each environment—territorial and sectoral—coordinated but autonomous from electoral sections, not symmetrical to them. Part of the high bureaucracy in Morena has decisively prevented this from being realized.
22. The National Institute of Political Training (INFP) could have been the instrument to add the qualitative component to the 4T’s quantitative popular support—the indispensable element for a people to be able to defend itself from imperialist aggressions, mandating its government to respond in unity with other besieged countries. But when its leaders and moral figures have declared, for years, that the 4T is a successful project because “we are not like Venezuela,” they end up helping the imperialist encirclement against the people and government of a brother country, and that servile attitude does not lessen, but rather increases, the harassment against Mexico because they know we are isolated. At the INFP conferences and cycles on Latin America are permitted, so long as what is expressed there—sometimes valuable analysis—lacks instruments to become truly institutional political orientation, the enemies of Latin American unity facing imperialism, who want to reach the TMEC 2026 negotiating table by ceding pieces of national sovereignty without seeking alternatives, without fighting, are reassured.
23. Therefore, among the anti-imperialist tasks we must promote political formation and the organization of Marxist think tanks, as well as various communication projects. While in the immediate term we must push for in-depth discussion of security and related or connected issues across the country; because the current 4T security project advances much more slowly than the patience of the population across all social classes. They know this, and the imperialists’ local allies—who have shifted from presenting themselves as passive ‘victims’ of an alleged authoritarian government to calling for the president to be violently overthrown—also exploit it.
24. On Saturday, November 25, the right and far right, using the banner of the anime One Piece, an emblem of Generation Z, gathered a very small number of youths from that generation and a few more people genuinely distressed by insecurity, but above all militants and leaders from PAN and PRI, Catholic fanatics, neo-Nazis, advocates for the legalization of some drugs, Cristeros, some anarchists, and people from three criminal groups from Mexico City, well equipped to remove metal barricades and overpower the police, with the declared objective of entering the National Palace and assassinating the president. The result was about a hundred police officers injured and around twenty provocateurs, but they were seeking fatalities. Had they succeeded, imperial intervention would have advanced one more square on the geopolitical chessboard. That Saturday the first Guarimba in Mexico was born.[1]
25. A turn is urgent: break the imperialist encirclement from the left. The only places where organized crime has been effectively neutralized are where Community Police and legitimate Self-Defenses have operated or operated in the past—discredited, infiltrated, and repressed by former president Peña Nieto. We must build, quickly and efficiently, at the national level, a civic-military security scheme with the participation—with clear legal decision-making power—of neighborhood and ejido organizations in the planning and in-person execution of local operations; we are talking about militias made up of voluntary inhabitants, trained and coordinated by the Secretariats of National Defense and Governance, respectively. The decisions would be taken by the organized communities; the federal government would orient and assist, providing intelligence services and military backing; a project diametrically opposed to the Fuerza Rural, subordinated to the federal government, with which Alfredo Castillo, sent by the PRI government, co-opted and demobilized the Michoacán Self-Defenses in 2014. The government and party of the 4T currently control the three branches of the Union; they can and must make the constitutional and/or legal changes to make this concrete. The task of the anti-imperialist forces in Mexico is to argue for, gather and push this objective from diverse angles.
26. If this is not done, the popularization of Bukele-type “solutions” will grow. The assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán, on November 1—an admirer of the policies of the Salvadoran ruler—is being used as a banner by the right. Road blockades by transporters demanding security and widely disseminated by national and international media are a breeding ground that dangerously increases imperialist pressure on the Mexican government; attempting to solve insecurity by tweaking or slightly modifying the same failed formulas will not work—community presence organized in this struggle could make the difference. To these road and highway closures were added farmers ruined by the importation of cereals and other agricultural products from the U.S., who demand subsidies; the solution lies in carrying out a deep fiscal reform to obtain the resources, which would generate a political response from the oligarchy and require responding with a huge popular mobilization (a quantitative factor) and an instructed one (a qualitative factor), but precisely the development of this latter factor is what has been prevented.
27. During the review of the USMCA (TMEC) in 2026 the U.S. government will pressure to destroy the timid defenses that separate us from its jaws: ISR on digital platforms and inspection of national and foreign companies’ databases. U.S. negotiators will attempt to further reduce the percentage of Chinese components in manufactures and will apply protectionist tariffs. This will be Washington’s weapon so that Mexico permits military meddling on its territory and DOES NOT try to form a defensive political bloc with Venezuela, Colombia and opposition movements in Latin American countries that have puppet governments. Let us win public opinion: isolated, we will be hit harder; the demand to the three branches of the Mexican government to assume Latin American unity against imperialism must be turned into national popular will; let us increase the brigades that, in neighborhoods, media and universities, are already reminding workers how the isolation of our nations—which Bolívar warned against—strengthened the Yankees and we lost half of the territory. Claudia has recently spoken of this dispossession in La Mañanera.
28. For anti-imperialists it is essential to combat NATO’s presence in any country: Mexico has no U.S. bases, but it does have training agreements for Mexican military at bases in that country; every year officers are sent who receive NATO training and ideological formation. The end of such agreements must be demanded, as they are clearly harmful to national sovereignty, as well as the cessation of purchases of U.S. and Israeli weaponry and software, which increases our technological dependence in that important field.
29. Universities are central to the anti-imperialist struggle; in them, world, regional and country cosmovisions are constructed. On one hand they are incubators of bourgeois ideological currents, currently under the guise of hyper-critical student activism, but promoting fragmentary, identitarian, hedonistic, immediateist struggles that undervalue the centrality of class struggle; colonized by postmodern relativism, they are perfectly assimilable by the capitalist system and the bureaucratic elites who govern these institutions. Yes—the same ones from UNAM who congratulated María Corina Machado for her bloodstained Nobel Peace Prize. But also, and although for the moment to a lesser extent, they are spaces for the comprehension and development of Marxism, meeting points for youth who want change and are eager to promote an anti-imperialist, internationalist, revolutionary and communist policy.
30. The process of the Third World War has already begun; this is not easily perceived because we lack the perspective historians will have in the future, since we are inside the scenario. Only with the tools of Marxism can we see the conjuncture opening before us in depth: imperialism, by resorting to war to conserve or expand markets, involuntarily also generates the material and subjective conditions for its defeat; Lenin understood this, giving organicity to the theory and having his party act as the midwife of the first socialist State. Without assuming absolute symmetries, Marxists are obliged to help humanity find a way out of capitalism’s meat-grinder machine in this imperialist phase.
Notes
[1] Guarimbas are the bloody riots that the Venezuelan oligarchy staged to attempt to defeat the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, with the help of advisers such as the Rendon Group, applying the directives of Gene Sharp’s manual to overthrow governments not subordinated to imperialism and with the collaboration of national and international media that distorted the events. The right went as far as killing its own followers at a rally to blame Chavismo.