The Mal Gobierno (as Mexican federal, state and local governments and governmental authorities are called by resistance groups, including the EZLN and the Zapatista movement to mean “bad government”) has promised a full federal investigation — a promise that has been made (and broken) before regarding crimes allegedly perpetrated by the state. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side is dying. 

Job offers abound for those innocent enough to believe it. USD $400 a week, in Jalisco, buy a bus ticket here and we’ll take care of the rest. The shoes and backpacks piled haphazardly in a corner, the cremation ovens out back — they finish the story. The state police visited in September of last year, arrested a few people, and left. More shoes and more backpacks piled in the corner, and acrid smoke filled the sky again. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side feels pain.

When the suffering beg for justice, the government meets them with scorn. “What do you want, woman?” an exasperated official yells at a grieving mother. “You think I lost your daughter? Just go away!” Mothers organize to search for their disappeared children, shaming so-called law enforcement into doing their job. The state police come and take everything the people find, leaving buildings literally swept clean. We’re categorizing the evidence, says the federal attorney. The mothers know better, and their wails echo throughout the empty rooms. First the government disappeared their children, then it disappeared the remains the mothers dug out of the ground with their own hands.  

Arrests have been made, arrests are always made. This time, it’s a few municipal cops, an alleged “cartel leader” living on the outskirts of Mexico City. The National Guard has taken over from the municipal police, and the federal attorney’s office has fired the state attorney. Is this justice? No, but it’ll lead to the resignation of the governor. Political infighting is drowning out the cries of mothers demanding justice for their murdered children.

Mexico is at war, and those with power profit. 

Local toughs shake down a municipal market for protection money. Everyone knows who they are, where they live. But the police don’t do a thing about it, because they are in on this little enterprise, too. News filters out about a little ranch on the outskirts of town. Turn a blind eye, take the envelope, don’t ask too many questions. When a police officer’s time is up, they cross the line and join their friends in the mafia.

Mexico is at war, but only one side is fighting. 

Trucks full of soldiers in army green, or Marines in blue, patrol ominously, always at the corner of one’s vision. For the narco? No, for the people. A warning. Stay out of our way, say the automatic rifles. The military ousts the police, and takes over their racket. A captain-capo picks up the envelopes full of cash, and kicks a share up to their colonel-consigliere. The military arranges for planes to land and send transport trucks to pick up the bales of drugs they carry. They sell guns to paramilitary forces, hitmen and the so-called cartels. The military enforces the will of the government, and the will of the government is to get rich, the rest be damned. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side uses bullets.

Paramilitary gangsters force families off land for which their ancestors fought in the Revolution over 100 years ago. Then come the businessmen— the alchemists who turn screams into profit and monetize the blood of the dying. Wells run dry, soil is poisoned, pollution chokes the air, agricultural workers make an average of less than USD $150 a month, and imperial capital receives enormous profits. Encomenderos of the Spanish colonial age would recognize this oppression well. The people resist, they fight tooth and nail, they file suits in court, they march in the streets. The people pursue every outlet available to them within the confines of the law, but these confines form no limit for the government. It doesn’t matter what the courts decide — hitmen resolve any inconvenient judicial or political outcome. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side knows it. 

The government has always studiously pursued a pacifist foreign policy devoid of antagonism or confrontation. Why, then, does it so violently deny this same respect to the people it claims to represent? The government wipes the blood off its chin and flashes a ghastly smile to the camera; it stretches out its arms to embrace whichever capitalist ghoul seeks its blessing; it sacrifices its people’s dignity, destiny, present and future to feed the slavering, ravenous maw of capitalist empire. And for anyone who stands in the way, the ovens roar with flames, ready to consume, to devour, ready to reduce a human life to a pitifully small collection of bones, teeth and personal effects, the essence of a life, buried in the dirt to clear the way for the great and terrible march of imperial capitalism. 

Mexico is at war with its own people! El Mal Gobierno must go! 

Aquila is a small town of roughly 2,000 Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants, nestled in the mountains of southeastern Mexico. Ternium is by far the biggest commercial interest in the area, and according to Aquila locals the company processes between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of ore per day from the Aquila Mine. Local farmers also claim Ternium disposes of hazardous waste without taking proper precautions and that the company’s water demands have lowered the water table, making it difficult for them to grow crops. 

Mexican law states that all commercial interests that wish to operate on communal land must reach an agreement with the ejidatarios resident to the land. In 2012 the Aquila ejidatarios and Ternium signed a contract stating that in exchange for permission to operate a mine on ejido land, Ternium would pay the ejidatarios a fee of USD 3.80 per ton of iron ore extracted. In 2017 the contract was renegotiated: the fee remained the same, but added to the deal were a reforestation campaign, a designated site for disposal of hazardous materials, and the construction of two pedestrian bridges and a hospital (the town’s sole clinic was exclusively for the use of Ternium employees and their families — all medical care beyond the ability of a general practitioner had to be seen to out of town), all to be funded by Ternium. 

Ternium simply did not keep up their end of the bargain. According to members of the community, the USD 3.80 Ternium agreed to pay became MXN 3.80 — only USD 0.19 at the time of writing. No hospital was constructed, and neither were the promised pedestrian bridges.The land appointed for waste disposal was instead mined for iron ore. From 2012–2023, the Aquila Mine expanded from 73 hectares (180 acres) to 380 hectares (939 acres) and the company began to extract gold, silver and copper, all without community approval or a renegotiation of the standing contract. Fighting back proved a deadly business: in 14 years 38 community leaders have been killed in Aquila and the surrounding countryside. 

Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca helped the ejidatarios petition the courts to allow the community to elect their own leader, as the ejidatarios considered the then-current community leaders to be in the pocket of Ternium. The community also sought the payment of millions of pesos in back rent that had been placed in escrow, but not given to the community. Ternium fought the community every step of the way, but in 2022 it seemed that the legal process would favor the community over the mine. At this time, the threats began. The two men were stalked by local gangsters. More than once Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca were chased by masked men on motorcycles, but managed to outrun their pursuers in their Honda pickup truck. 

On December 13, 2022, Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca attended a community assembly meeting in Aquila, where they, along with hundreds of the town’s residents, threatened to block the mine’s operations if Ternium did not respect the agreements signed in 2012 and 2017. Also present were three members of the directorate for the Aquila Mine: Mining Development Director Diego Ferrari, HR manager Rogelio Omaña Romero and Community Relations Director José Ulises González. Also present was the town mayor, José María Valencia Guillén. 

When the two lawyers told the Ternium representatives that the community was ready to shut down the mine in protest, the directors responded with a threat of their own. According to three eyewitnesses present at the assembly, Omaña Romero told Díaz and Lagunes to “let go” of their fight with the mine, and if they didn’t, “they would be killed at any moment.” Díaz Valencia replied that Omaña Romero had given him a death threat, and made sure the government official present to mediate the assembly registered it as such. Said one of the eyewitnesses: “The engineer Ferrari threw the microphone, they [the three men representing the mine] got up, and they left.” One month later Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca had disappeared. 

In the subsequent trial investigating the disappearances, Javier Puntos testified to being present at and participating in the kidnapping of Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca. He said under oath that he, along with other local criminals, had received pictures of the two men and strict instructions not to let them escape. “Afterwords we found out they were killed because they were fucking things up for the mining company [Ternium].” Soon after testifying, Puntos was also murdered, after being released from police custody without explanation. 

When asked for comment, Ternium reiterated their willingness to pursue “a good working relationship” with the ejidatarios of Aquila, and stated that all communities surrounding their operation should “submit their concerns in a constructive and transparent manner.” They also condemned “any type of violence against the community.” No employee of Ternium has been investigated or indicted in connection with the case. 

In September of 2023, the community of Aquila finally won their court case, which allowed them to elect their own leader to represent them in negotiations with the mine. An ex-employee of Ternium won the vote, and the rapacious extraction of fuel for the capitalist death machine continues — generating Ternium towering profits that cast a bloodsoaked shadow upon the town of Aquila, the people who live there, and the world. 

“El orgullo más grande que siento estar siempre al lado de mis compañeros, hermanos de raza, los indígenas…ofrendaré todo mi esfuerzo, mi trabajo y mi vida por defender nuestra raza.

The greatest pride I feel is to be forever by the side of my friends, my brothers, the indigenous…I will give all my strength, my work and my life to defend our people.”

— Antonio Díaz Valencia

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.