September 23rd Communist League | |
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Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre | |
Leaders | |
Dates of operation | 1973–1983 |
Headquarters |
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Ideology | Marxism–Leninism |
Political position | Far-left |
Status | Inactive |
Allies |
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Opponents |
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Battles and wars | the Dirty War (Mexico) |
The Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (English: September 23rd Communist League), or LC23S, was a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla movement that emerged in Mexico in the early 1970s. The result of the merging of various armed revolutionary organizations active in Mexico prior to 1974, with the objective of creating a united front to combat the Mexican government; the name was chosen to commemorate an unsuccessful guerrilla assault on the barracks of Ciudad Madera in the northern state of Chihuahua led by former schoolteacher Arturo Gámiz and the People's Guerrilla Group on September 23, 1965. The LC23S' militancy was made up mainly of young disenfranchised university students who saw any opportunity of a peaceful political transformation die in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement and then to be buried in the violent crackdown of 1971. Its long term objective was the “elimination of the capitalist system and bourgeois democracy, which would be replaced by a socialist republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat”.[1]
Labeled a terrorist organization by the Mexican authorities, the LC23S engaged in numerous violent attacks, both against what they considered their "class enemy" (the bourgeoisie) and the authoritarian government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). At that point, this party had held the presidency for more than 40 years since the end of the Mexican Revolution and, through acts of political corruption, co-opting of opposition and violent repression, had eliminated most political dissent. Although the League saw itself as the vanguard of the proletariat, it never really penetrated the minds of the workers or peasants. Hundreds of young militants died during that time, with many more still considered missing.[2] Without having a social base in the workers' sphere and with a disbandment of militants who saw an opportunity of activism in the aftermath of the new legal framework, the September 23rd Communist League disappeared at the beginning of the eighties.