page_title: Party of the Poor (Mexico)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Party of the Poor (Mexico) / History / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Bronze sculpture of Commander Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, creator of Poor People Party and fighter against goverment in 60´s decade Español: Escultura en bronze del Comandante Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, fundador del Partido de los Pobres y luchador en contra del mal gobierno en la decada de los 60`s
context_page_description: The Party of the Poor was a left-wing political movement and militant group in Mexico operating between 1967 and 1974. Led by the rural schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas, the PdlP – through its armed wing, the Peasants' Justice Brigade – waged guerrilla warfare against the Mexican government in the mountains of Guerrero.
  After the death of Cabañas and several other key insurgents at the hands of the government on 2 December 1974, the Party of the Poor was dissolved. Its legacy, and that of Cabañas, remains active in contemporary Mexican radical politics, however.
context_section_description: After the collapse of the Party of the Poor following Cabaña's death, some remnants of it joined together with the militant Revolutionary Clandestine Workers' Union Party of the People (PROCUP, formed in 1971), which followed a doctrine that combined traditional Marxist-Leninist and Maoist concepts, achieving "ideological unification" and forming the PROCUP-PdlP by 1980. The group would continue carrying out small armed operations, including assassinations and bombings, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1985, a group calling itself the Party of the Poor kidnapped the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico politician Arnoldo Martinez Verdugo. David Cabañas Barrientos, Lucio's brother, became a principal PROCUP-PdlP leader, and was imprisoned in 1990 for his alleged role in an assassination. The movement dissolved in 1996, merging with new militant groups such as the Ejército Popular Revolucionario and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente.
  Lucio Cabaña has become hugely popular among certain parts of the Mexican left in recent years, an icon in the vein of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos. Throughout the 1990s, posters and graffiti praising Cabaña and his guerrilla fighters could be found in the back streets of many Guerrero municipalities. Often compared to Robin Hood due to their reputation of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, Cabaña and the Party of the Poor are surrounded by a number of folkloric tales and urban legends, among them that Cabaña surrounded himself with a group of beautiful female bodyguards, and carried a bag full of money which he distributed to anyone in need.
  In 2002, with the help of forensic anthropologists and archaeologists, family members of Cabañas located his body in an unmarked grave, and identified it with a DNA test. At least a thousand people crowded in the streets to commemorate the anniversary of his death on 2 December, when his remains were placed in an unfinished obelisk in Atoyac de Álvarez's central plaza, a monument constructed without official permission. At the same site a statue of Cabaña was later erected. It has become a somewhat important site for the local left. For example, after Rocio Mesino Mesino (leader of the Campesino Organization of the Southern Sierra Madres) was gunned down in Atoyac de Álvarez, his body was laid at the foot of the statue, where hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects.
  A number of left-wing groups in Mexico have been named after Lucio Cabañas in recent years, among them the Lucio Cabañas Barrientos Revolutionary Movement, the Lucio Cabañas Barrientos Community Civic Council, and the Lucio Cabañas Justice Command. In 1997, the late author Carlos Montemayor told the story of the Party of the Poor in his historical novel Guerra en el Paraíso. In 2005 the documentary film La guerrilla y la esperanza: Lucio Cabañas was released, portraying Cabañas and his armed movement.
  As part of the ongoing criminal conflict in Mexico, Isabel Anaya Nava, the widow of Lucio Cabañas, was gunned down by two armed men in Guerrero on 3 July 2011.
caption: Statue of Lucio Cabañas in Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero.
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