Page:Strategy of the Communists - A letter from the Communist International to the Mexican Communist Party.pdf/17

 the bone and controlled by cudgel and whip. The workers' press is suppressed, the frontiers are controlled, the censorship is severe, for the world must not discover how American capitalism is murdering the Negroes and Indians of those countries. The America which advocated Wilson's Fourteen Points has been violating for years the national freedom of the West Indian and Central American Republic. The most primitive rights of existence of these people are being trampled underfoot. The United States hopes "in time" to parcel out Mexico into single "independent" territories. It is already openly advocating the annexation of fruitful Lower California to the United States as a territory. In Yucatan and in the State of Chiapas, the Americans are fanning the flames of the separatist movements. But times are changing. Even in these backward areas, the proletariat is awakening, is organizing, and is beginning to understand its class condition. In Cuba the revolutionary trade union movement is again raising its head after the defeat it suffered in 1921 at the hands of reaction. In Guatemala a Communist Party of Central America has been founded; in Mexico the revolutionary labor movement has such strong roots that neither the claws of American capital nor of any other capital can tear it to pieces. But the conception is still lacking of the fight for freedom for all the oppressed masses in the West Indies, in Central America and in South America, against the imperialism of the oil magnates and industrial barons of Wall Street. The workers and peasants of Mexico and Central America especially must stand close together. The aim of the common struggle must be to create a League of Central American Workers' and Peasants' Republics. It is the duty of the Communist Party of Mexico to announce this slogan with all revolutionary fervor to the oppressed masses of Central America. The Mexican Party must treat exhaustively the question which we have roughly sketched here. In conjunction with the Communist Party of Central America and the communist group in Cuba, a programme of work and action must be prepared. But the communists must be conscious of the fact that this is not only a most difficult and dangerous matter, but one of grave responsibility. The American capitalists will not look on in silence. They will mobilize all their bourgeois hangmen, their hirelings, spies and agents, to stifle your voices. The best of you will be thrown into prison or murdered treacherously. But your fight is the fight of the dawn against the night; it is the fight of the near future, which belongs to the proletariat.