The National Front to Save the Mexican Countryside (FNRCM), the independent farmers movement leading the fight to protect Mexican agriculture from the global cartels and speculators, has called for a full investigation into the assassination of José Ramírez Yáñez, the coordinator of the FNRCM’s activities in the state of Jalisco. According to the local Prosecutor’s Office, Ramírez Yáñez’s son found his father on Wednesday lying in a pond or a lake, his body showing visible signs of violence.
“We … speak out with deep indignation and grief over the cowardly murder of our comrade, friend, and state coordinator in Jalisco,” the FNRCM wrote in a statement issued the same day. “We cannot, and will not, allow silence to be the response to the violence that took the life of a man who dedicated decades to the struggle for the dignity of our land and those who work it.”
Demanding authorities find the perpetrator(s) and bring them to justice, the FNRCM makes clear that they take his murder as a message directed at the farm movement as a whole. His death “is a direct attack on the social struggle and the defense of the Mexican countryside that he courageously led…. We will not let our guard down. José’s memory deserves not only respect, but also truth and justice. If they touch one of us, they touch all of us who work the land and fight for social justice,” they wrote.
Since the FNRCM’s founding in 2024, EIR has followed and reported on its campaign to free Mexico from the grip of the Chicago Board of Trade and international speculators who have deliberately imposed policies on Mexico designed to bankrupt its independent farmers, and thereby make the nation’s entire food supply subject to their whims.
Through repeated nationwide protests, combined with forums and briefings to government officials and ordinary people alike, the FNRCM has placed the needed alternative policy on the national agenda: return to a policy of protecting the national farmers and the national food supply, through such policies as guaranteed parity prices for farmers’ produce based on national production costs, reestablishing the national rural bank to provide credit, and others. Different members of the FNRCM leadership have also reported on this important fight for development at the weekly meetings of the International Peace Coalition.
