Mexican communists slam joint military exercises with U.S.

U.S. Marines, Colombian Marines and Mexican Marines, ride aboard combat rubber raiding crafts during exercise Tradewinds 2022, at Bacalar lagoon, Mexico, May 10, 2022. | Sgt. Matthew Teutsch / U.S. Southern Command

The Communist Party of Mexico (PCM) has condemned the involvement of the country’s armed forces in what it described as “inter-imperialist military drills” led by the United States.

By taking part in the Tradewinds military exercises sponsored by the U.S. Southern Command, the Mexican army is “strengthening the forces of repression,” the party said.

“This action is an expression of the inter-imperialist alliances in which various bourgeois states participate — Belize, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the United States of America, France, Guyana, Holland, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, the Dominican Republic, and Suriname.”

The Tradewinds exercises were established in the mid-1980s and Mexico has participated every year since 2014, with the Central American country’s involvement continuing under the administration of left-wing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Amlo).

More than 1,800 personnel from the U.S. and 21 partner nations took part in the exercises, which supposedly aimed to “enhance the collective ability of their defense forces and constabularies to counter transnational organized crime and conduct humanitarian/disaster relief operations while strengthening relationships and reinforcing human rights awareness.”

However, the communists said that the exercises had “the objective of advancing military coordination among the bourgeois states and rehearsing the response to possible scenarios of war, which would be of an imperialist character.”

“These Tradewinds exercises, which have been going on for eight years and since their first exercise implied an inter-imperialist co-ordination, acquire greater relevance and gravity in the current context of war where the U.S. is indirectly involved and in view of the insistence of Lopez Obrador in generating an integration of an imperialist character in the region of the American continent with the objective of confronting China,” the PCM claimed.

The party alleged that the exercises also solidified the economic integration of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico and it condemned increased military spending “while the working class sinks into poverty.”

The communists alleged that the government was strengthening the repressive forces of the state, warning that they would be used to “quell future outbreaks of insubordination” in the exclusive interest of the monopolies.

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Morning Star

Morning Star is the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. Morning Star es el diario socialista publicado en Gran Bretaña.