Mexican Communist Party

(MCP, Partido Comunista Mexicano), created in November 1919, when the workers’ movement gained strength in Mexico under the influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Mexican Socialist Party adopted a resolution to join the Comintern.

For a long time the MCP waged a persistent struggle against the petit bourgeois ideology of reformism and anarcho-syndicalism, which had gained a wide following among the Mexican working class. The MCP actively sought to win over the masses and organized the anti-imperialist movement. On its initiative the Anti-imperialist League of America was established in 1924 and the National Peasant League in 1926, the latter playing an important role in the spread of the peasant movement. In 1929 the Communists helped establish the Mexican Unitary Trade-Union Confederation (MUTUC). Also formed that year was the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, comprising the MCP, the MUTUC, the National Peasant League, and a number of local workers’ and peasants’ organizations. Frightened by the Communist Party’s growing influence, the ruling circles banned it in June 1929. After regaining legal status in 1936, the MCP organized several major actions by the masses of workers and peasants between the mid-1930’s and early 1940’s.

During the mid-1940’s the leadership of the MCP fell under the influence of the American revisionist E. Browder, and later the MCP underwent several acute intraparty crises. In the early 1950’s the party succeeded in overcoming factionalism. The Thirteenth Congress (May 1960) elected a new leadership and laid the foundation for a new political party line. The Fourteenth Congress (December 1963) adopted party rules and a program. The Fifteenth Congress (June 1967) carefully analyzed the domestic political situation and the country’s socioeconomic condition, made more precise and developed certain programmatic tenets (for example, on the nature of the first phase of the coming revolution and its moving forces), and marked out the party’s specific tasks in the immediate future. The congress defined the coming Mexican revolution as a popular-democratic, anti-imperialist revolution whose tasks and goals would include elimination of the country’s economic dependence on imperialism, the attainment and defense of full and genuine national sovereignty, the establishment of a popular-democratic system, and the creation of the material conditions for building socialism. The MCP described the present period of the revolutionary movement in the country as a time for gathering strength—a tense economic, political, and ideological struggle. The Sixteenth Congress (October and November 1973) adopted a new party program and new party rules. The Seventeenth Congress (December 1975) outlined the MCP’s tactics for the 1976 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns, mapped out the party’s main tasks in the coming years, analyzed the party’s

work since its previous Congress, and elected its governing bodies.

Delegations from the MCP took part in the international meetings of communist and workers’ parties held in Moscow in 1957, 1960, and 1969, and the party ratified the documents adopted by the conferences.

The MCP adheres to the principle of democratic centralism. The supreme party organ is the Congress, and between Congresses party work is directed by the Central Committee. A. Martinez Verdugo is the general secretary of the Central Committee of the MCP. The MCP’s press organs include the weekly Oposición and the sociopolitical and theoretical journal Socialismo. (See Table 1 for a list of the Congresses of the Mexican Communist Party.)