Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (C), Mexican Navy Secretary Jose Rafael Ojeda Duran (R) and Mexican Defence Secretary General Luis Cresencio Sandoval, take part in a parade celebrating a new anniversary of the country’s independence, at the Zocalo Square in Mexico City on September 16, 2019. (Photo by PEDRO PARDO / AFP) (Photo credit should read PEDRO PARDO/AFP/Getty Images)

The United States’ main Maoist organization, Liberation Road, is developing support networks for Mexico’s ruling leftist party MORENA and its leader, Mexico’s socialist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (popularly known as AMLO).

Liberation Road sees Mexico under its present leadership as a major force for the revolutionary transformation of the United States. With a population of around 128 million, a communist Mexico, sharing a 2,000-mile border with this country, would become a national security nightmare of epic proportions. America’s Maoists are working hard to make that nightmare a reality.

According to Liberation Road’s newly formed Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico:

“México, more than any other country of the world, will influence our struggle in the US for transformational change from imperialist capitalism to socialism. Will the US succeed in maintaining Mexico as a vassal state? Or will México point the way for US social movements to gain governing power?”

Liberation Road is the new name for Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a national communist formation formed out of the various Maoist splinter groups of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. The name change—instituted at a completely unpublicized national congress in April—ends years of confusion. Another group also calling itself Freedom Road Socialist Organization, centered around FightBack! magazine, split from the main group in 1999. All future references to FRSO in this article refer to the larger FRSO/Liberation Road formation.

In recent years, FRSO has built a [email protected] Left Project/Project Izquierda Latina, aimed at building bridges with Latin American revolutionary movements. Since the victory of AMLO and MORENA in 2018, Mexico has become a major focus of Liberation Road’s Latin American solidarity work.

According to the Washington Post, AMLO was always on the far left even while he worked inside the mainstream of Mexican politics:

“Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began his political career with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had been at the heart of Mexico’s authoritarian system since 1929.

“’At the time, there was no other option for an aspiring politician,’ said José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti, a former top aide to Lopez Obrador …

“Even during his PRI days, Lopez Obrador saw himself as an activist, representing the state of Tabasco in negotiations with Pemex, trying to convince oil workers that they should demand better wages and benefits. He named his son Jesús Ernesto after Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the Marxist guerrilla who fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba. …

“But the PRI grew frustrated with Lopez Obrador, considering him ‘a communist with Cuban instincts’ …”

In 1989, AMLO joined the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and was the party’s national leader between 1996 and 1999. He left the PRD in 2012 to later found the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), which catapulted him to the presidency in July 2018 in alliance with the leftist Labor Party and the moderate Social Encounter Party. AMLO won with 53 percent of the vote.

AMLO has maintained close ties to the Sao Paolo Forum, an alliance of more than 100 socialist and communist parties credited with moving most of Latin America into the socialist camp in the 1990s. The Forum was founded by Cuba’s communist leader Fidel Castro and former Brazilian president Lula da Silva “to save what had been lost of Communism in Eastern Europe and the old USSR.”

Through a letter to the 2011 meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum, AMLO explained the rationale behind his new MORENA project. He emphasized that MORENA has as its first task to defeat the “political oligarchy” of Mexico.

AMLO told the assembled Marxist revolutionaries from all over South and Central America:

“We can share that in these difficult times for Mexico, we are building a popular and citizen movement that seeks to carry out the deep transformation of the country …”

One of Liberation Road’s key points of contact to the Mexican revolutionary movement has been Javier Bravo, a MORENA activist and a professor of history and archaeology at the University of Guanajuato and a participant in  FRSO’s Project Izquierda Latina.

Bravo studied in the Soviet Union at the end of the openly communist era and lives part of the year in Havana, Cuba. FRSO/Liberation Road has brought Bravo to the United States for at least two tours to explain the revolutionary potential of MORENO and its leader AMLO to U.S. comrades.

On Sept. 19 and 20, Bravo addressed Liberation Road’s Mexican Solidarity Coalition / Coalicion en Solidaridad con Mexico in San Diego. The meeting was organized by longtime FRSO/Liberation Road activist Martin Eder.

The Mexican Solidarity Coalition wrote on Facebook:

“Professor Javier Bravo, a long-time activist and a rep for MORENA will be … speaking about current struggles in Mexico & how we build a movement against Trump to stop the right-wings ethnic cleansing against Mexican & other immigrants.”

This followed a Boston meeting for Bravo convened Sunday, Sept. 15, which was co-sponsored by Liberation Road and the Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico.

Co-organizers were Garrett Virchick of the Boston Teachers Union and Gabriel Mireles, associate director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association—both known Liberation Road affiliates.

Mireles wrote on the Liberation Road website that his Solidarity Project with the People of Mexico had four main objectives:

1/ Expose and resist political, social, military and economic US interventionist efforts that deny Mexico the right to self-determination and aim to bring down the AMLO government. …

2/ Provide information and analysis about what’s really happening in Mexico to counter the mainstream media that demonizes and/or belittles leftist governments.

3/ Spread the lessons from Mexico’s experience of movement building and electoral activism to increase democratic participation and build progressive independent political organization within the US that would advance a pro-people foreign policy.

4/ Build a broad-based grassroots solidarity project of individuals and organizations on the model of CISPES to connect social movement activists on both sides of the border to shift power from US and Mexican elites to the peoples of our countries.

CISPES refers to the Committee in Solidarity with the Peoples of El Salvador, one of the communist movement’s most successful operations on U.S. soil.

In 1980, the El Salvadoran Communist Party, then fighting a guerrilla war with their government, sent Farid Handal, brother of the Party chairman, Shafik Handal, to the United States. His mission was to organize a North American support network for the El Salvadoran guerrilla army.

According to Newsweek journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, quoted in The American Journal of International Law:

“CISPES was formed in October 1980 as a direct result of a visit to the United States by Farid Handal, brother of the secretary general of the Salvadoran Communist Party Shafik Handal. His principal adviser in this venture was Alfredo Garcia Almeida, at that time the station chief of the Departamento de America of the Cuban Communist Party in New York. …

“CISPES was subsequently set up as a tax-exempt organization with an office in Washington and countrywide chapters, that included 500 college campuses.”

CISPES consistently supported the El Salvadoran communists, agitating against U.S. aid to the El Salvadoran elected government and also joining in demonstrations against aid to the anti-communist forces in neighboring Nicaragua.

Clearly, Liberation Road, which enjoys close relations with the larger Communist Party USA (with an estimated 5,000 members) and the nearly 60,000-member strong Democratic Socialists of America, intends on building major operations in support of the unfolding Mexican revolution.

In a recent conversation, a moderate former member of MORENA told me that the leading militant faction of the party is planning a major swing to the hard left, probably after Mexico’s 2021 congressional elections. In the words of my contact, “they know this will wreck the Mexican economy—but they don’t care.”

If AMLO and MORENO take Mexico’s 128 million down the Cuba/Venezuela road as it seems they intend to do, the consequences could turn into the worst national security crisis this country has ever faced.

Venezuela’s Marxist-driven economic and political crises have driven more than 2 million refugees into neighboring countries. If AMLO and MORENO succeed in driving Mexico to economic ruin, we could see 10s of millions of refugees clamoring to cross the border into the United States. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, even Florida, could be engulfed by a human tidal wave like nothing we have ever seen before. This chaos would be a major advance for the Mexican, U.S., and world revolutionary movements.

The current flooding of the border by 10s of then thousands of illegal immigrants a month could be seen as a dress rehearsal for a possible human tsunami currently building in Mexico.

President Ronald Reagan fought with mixed success to overturn the communist revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. He understood that if communism was not pushed back in Central America it would eventually reach the U.S.–Mexico border—we are now almost at that point.

President Donald Trump must pick up Reagan’s fallen sword before it’s too late.

The first step is to order an investigation of Liberation Road’s Mexican revolutionary support networks under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—it is very likely they are not registered as agents of the Mexican government.

President Trump has actively worked to thwart the revolutionary regimes of Cuba and Venezuela. He must soon begin to formulate plans to counter a potentially even more dangerous revolutionary movement in Mexico.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN.) speaks at a press conference on the Capitol on July 15, 2019. (Holly Kellum/NTD)

Controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is about to associate herself with one of the most subversive organizations in this country.

On Oct. 3, Omar will present the annual Letelier-Moffitt Awards at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The IPS is a center of both far-left policy formation and support for the Palestinian socialist cause. The Letelier-Moffitt Award is named after the late Orlando Letelier, a paid Cuban intelligence agent.

With Omar’s strong ties to radical groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Palestinian socialist cause, she is a perfect fit for the IPS—whose columnists have been defending her regular outrageous statements since her election to Congress.

An IPS press release states:

“We’re excited to announce that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th District will present this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Awards!

“Rep. Omar has made herself a key figure in the progressive movement by working with a diverse group of legislators on the best ideas in politics today; bold, transformative policies like student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal.

“We’re thrilled to work with her and delighted to welcome her into our community.”

Omar’s IPS connection should raise all sorts of alarm bells.

For many years, the IPS was the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. From its founding in 1963, it steadily pushed a pro-Soviet line on foreign policy, defense, and the economy.

In a 1978 article in National Review, Brian Crozier, then director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described the IPS as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”

The Letelier-Moffitt Award has its roots in Chile’s bloody anti-communist counter-revolution of the early 1970s.

Assassination

In 1973, at the request of the Chilean parliament, Chile’s generals stepped in to remove pro-Castro socialist President Salvador Allende from office for alleged gross breaches of the country’s constitution. Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace rather than surrender to the military. For several years afterward, the military brutally cracked down on Chilean socialists, communists, and terrorists. Thousands were imprisoned, many were executed, and some simply “disappeared.”

One of the victims of the anti-communist purge was Allende’s former ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier. After a period of imprisonment, Letelier was allowed to leave Chile, settling first in Venezuela, then in Washington at the suggestion of IPS staffer Saul Landau, a personal friend of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

In 1975, Letelier became a senior fellow of the IPS, where he soon became a leader of the leftist resistance to anti-communist Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. On Sept. 10, 1976, Pinochet officially deprived Letelier of his Chilean citizenship.

Undeterred, Letelier carried on his efforts to bring down the Pinochet government. He was reportedly responsible for the cancellation of several major European loans to Chile, which made him a major enemy of the government. He was described by one of his colleagues as being “the most respected and effective spokesman in the international campaign to condemn and isolate” Chile’s anti-communist government.

On Sept. 21, 1976, Letelier was traveling to work with an IPS colleague Ronni Moffitt and her husband. As they were driving down Washington’s Embassy Row at 9.35 a.m. a bomb exploded in their car. Within an hour, Moffitt and Letelier were pronounced dead. Moffitt’s husband survived.

It was later revealed that the bomb had been planted at the direction of Chile’s intelligence service, the DINA.

During the investigation into the assassination, the FBI leaked documents to The Washington Times columnist Jack Anderson, and others, which indicated that Letelier had been an Eastern Bloc intelligence operative. Letelier had also apparently been coordinating his activities with the Chilean government-in-exile, then based in communist East Berlin.

Letelier was reportedly working closely with Allende’s daughter, Beatriz Allende, who was married to a senior Cuban intelligence officer. While working for the IPS, Letelier was being paid $1,000 a month (no small sum in 1976) from Cuba’s communist regime.

So in giving out the Letelier-Moffitt Award, Omar is, in effect, honoring the memory of a paid Cuban agent-of-influence.

Marxist Ties

Today’s IPS maintains strong ties to the DSA and other domestic Marxist groups. The IPS has several DSA comrades on staff, including Ashik Siddique, a research analyst with IPS’s National Priorities Project, and John Feffer, co-director of IPS webzine Foreign Policy in Focus. The Metro DC DSA steering committee even holds its meetings in an IPS office.

Like Omar, the IPS is uncompromisingly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the IPS. He researches “U.S. empire, borders, and migration.”

Until earlier this year, Petersen-Smith was a leading member of the now-disbanded International Socialist Organization. According to the Socialism 2016 conference website: “He has written about Black and Palestinian liberation and US empire for Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. He co-authored the ‘Black Statement of Solidarity with Palestine’ in 2015, which was signed by over 1,100 mainly communist Black activists, artists, and scholars.”

In April, Petersen-Smith, with his IPS colleague Noura Erakat. held an event with the Tufts University chapter of the far-left Students for Justice in Palestine, titled “Black Solidarity With Palestine.”

Veteran IPS staffer Phyllis Bennis runs the IPS’ New Internationalism Project. In 2001, she helped found the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She advises several leading U.N. officials on Palestine and was twice in contention to be appointed the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

Bennis was also a leading member of Line of March, a Marxist-Leninist group that supported first communist China and then the Soviet Union.

The IPS still maintains strong ties to Cuba and played a role in President Barack Obama’s disastrous directive to ease sanctions on Havana, which probably saved the communist dictatorship from imminent collapse.

In July 2015, as the communist flag was raised over the newly re-established Cuban Embassy on 16th Street NW in Washington, Bennis and her IPS and ex-Line of March comrade James Early “joined in the delirious shouts of ‘Viva Cuba!’,” according to The Washington Post.

“It’s an amazing moment,” Bennis told The Washington Post. “In the decades-long effort to normalize relations with Cuba, to stop the US attacks and hostility toward Cuba, we have not had so many victories. Suddenly we have a victory. The flag going up—that’s huge.”

“For those of us who were committed to the values and the aspirations of the Cuban revolution,” said Early, raising that flag again “is a recognition of Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.”

Right from the start, the IPS built networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staff, academics, government officials, and the national media. The IPS’ main aim has always been to influence U.S. government policy in favor of the world socialist movement.

It’s no surprise to see the IPS welcome Omar into its radical bosom.

Paige Kreisman

Paige Kreisman is standing on the Democratic Party line for Oregon House District 42.

She is a US Army veteran and identifies as a Marxist-Leninist. She was an active organizer with the Communist Party USA and the Corvallis-based Benton County Democratic Socialists of America, where she served as chapter treasurer.

Currently, she is a board member at Portland Tenants United and electoral co-chair at Portland Democratic Socialists of America.

In 2018, Kreisman stood unsuccessfully for Corvallis City Council Ward 5, supported by both the Benton County Communists and Democratic Socialists of America.

Once in office, Paige plans to institute a rent and tuition freeze. She also advocates for disarming police officers and removing them from Corvallis schools. Additionally, she pledges to fight for the environment, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrants, and homeless people. Paige is a tireless ally of the working class and is dedicated to the liberation of the proletariat.

Paige Kreisman with Benton County Communists.

Paige Kreisman also supports radical Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar through DSA’s Jewish Solidarity Caucus.

As Jews on the left, we are in solidarity with Representative Ilhan Omar and her statements regarding the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) influence over US lawmakers and foreign policy.

Paige Kreisman is also supporting Portland Democratic Socialists of America member Albert Lee in his bid for US Congress from Oregon District 2.

DSA comrades Brandy Fortson, Albert Lee and Paige Kreisman.