Partido Comunista Mexicano

Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party) is a small political party founded on September 25, 1919, with the collaboration of leaders from the U.S. Communist Party. It maintained a long history of opposition to the Institutional Revolutionary Party until 1981. Its leadership in the 1920s pursued the Soviet Union's Third International's political philosophy, and attempted to influence the Mexican labor movement away from organic anarchosyndicalism, important among workers prior to the 1910 Revolution. Valentín Campa (1904–1999), a major figure in the party, founded Confederación Sindical Unitaria de México (the Only Mexican Labor Federation) in an attempt to draw workers into a party-affiliated union. Many of the leaders, including Campa, were imprisoned or assassinated in the 1920s, and the party was forced to go underground from 1929 to 1934. When Lázaro Cárdenas became president in 1934 the party collaborated with the Federation of Mexican Labor (CTM), the leading labor organization in Mexico and a pillar of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Eventually, the Communist Party leaders were expelled, and the party's influence declined. Its leaders continued to affiliate with various strikes and political movements, the most influential of which were the 1959 railroad strike and the national liberation movement in 1961. Campa ran as the party's presidential candidate in 1976, before it lost its registration. Numerous party members in the 1960s and 1970s joined and founded small leftist parties such as the Socialist Workers Party, Mexico's United Socialist Party, and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1989. Some members of Congress in the 2006 to 2012 administration were early members of these parties.

See alsoCampa Salazar, Valentín; Labor Movements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campa Salazar, Valentín. Mi testimonio: experiencias de un comunista mexicano. Mexico: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1978.

Carr, Barry. Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

De Neymet, Marcela. Cronologia del Partido Communista Mexicano. Mexico: Ediciones de la Cultural Popular, 1981.

                                     Roderic Ai Camp