Mexican Labor News & Analysis

Mexico in the Midst of Mayhem, Murder and Manipulation

By Dan La Botz

Mexican police attacked activists and residents in the town of San Salvador Atenco in the State of Mexico during several days in early May, killing one, injuring scores, and jailing over two hundred. The police attack on Atenco followed only a little more than a week after a violent police assault on striking steelworkers in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán that left two dead and several severely injured.

President Vicente Fox argued that police had moved in to deal with small cells of violent groups whose presence threatened the public peace. Local residents believed that the Fox government was taking revenge on Atenco activists for their success four years ago in blocking the construction of a new airport. Others speculated that the Fox administration’s Secretary of the Interior Carlos Abascal Carranza may be using violent confrontations with steelworkers and community activists to create the sense that under a leftist administration led by presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador the country would fall into chaos.

The Flower War

The events began on May 3 when police violently attempted to evict flower vendors from the Belisario Domínguez Market in Texcoco. Conflicts between police and street vendors are common in many Mexican cities. The vendors said that they had been given permission to sell on that day by mayor Nazario Gutiérrez Martínez of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), but that he broke his promise to the flower vendors, sending in the police to remove them.

The vendors attempted to defend themselves and then called for the aid of the Town Front in Defense of the Land (FPDT). It was the FPDT that, in the summer of 2002, had carried out a series of militant confrontations with the authorities, successfully blocking the building of a new airport on private and communal land.

The FPDT activists and others from the community blocked the Texcoco-Lecheria highway, a typical form of protest in Mexico. Students from the local university, hearing of the conflict, joined the community in defense of the vendors. The local government then sent in 600 police to dislodge the local citizenry who, in turn, responded with rocks, machetes and Molotov cocktails. The FPDT militants kidnaped some police officers for a while, also a traditional form of protest in Mexico, but then released them as a show of good will.

Brutal Police Assault

The next day local, state and federal authorities sent 3,000 police to dislodge the vendors and their community and student supporters. Police fought the community for two days, ransacking houses, brutally beating students and local residents, allegedly sexually molesting and raping several women and reportedly also raping two men. Police reportedly killed Francisco Javier Cortés Santiago, 14, in the course of the attack. Several police officers were also wounded, one reported to have lost his hand.

The Mexican government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received 154 complaints against the police from citizens including seven accusations of rape and
16 cases of sexual abuse. Two Spanish women arrested in Atenco were deported.

Political Developments

Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), who had recently been in Atenco as part of a national tour of the “Other Campaign,”immediately returned to Atenco appearing at the head of a mass demonstration. Some in Atenco had declared the town an autonomous community and supported the “Other Campaign” of the Zapatistas. Marcos spoke out after the attack saying that local residents had acted out of a commonly felt rage at the authorities. Mexico, he said, was on the verge of social disintegration and argued that none of the three major party candidates presented an alternative.

Speaking to a national audience in a television interview, Marcos ridiculed the election and called for a peaceful revolution to legally change the Mexican government as provided for in the Constitution. After taking a group of hundreds of supporters of his “Other Campaign” to show solidarity in Atenco, he promised to stay in Mexico City until all the prisoners of Atenco were released. The prisoners, meanwhile, had begun a hunger strike.

Several clandestine Mexican guerrilla groups issued statements saying that they had had nothing to do with the Atenco events, but urging their members to prepare for armed self-defense against the government.

Parties Blame Game

Felipe Cálderon of the PAN and Roberto Madrazo of the PRI blamed the PRD for the violence in Atenco. The conservative parties and press have attempted to link the Atenco “riots” to Marcos and to the PRD, creating the impression that a vote for the center-left party would be a vote for chaos.

Spokesmen for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the center-left party whose candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador was until recently leading in the polls, argued that the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were responsible for the violence. Surprisingly López Obrador himself had not spoken out on these recent developments.

What is Behind the Increase in Violence?

Mexico has experienced two massive police assaults in the last months, one in Lázaro Cárdenas (see MLNA Vol XI, No.4) and the other in Atenco), each involving many hundreds of police officers in attacks on social activists. Both resulted in deaths, several critical injuries, and many wounded. While all the circumstances have yet to be investigated, there are allegations of human rights violations in both cities, including several cases of rape by police in Atenco.

What is happening here? What has led the state to use such massive force against striking steel workers and against flower vendors and their supporters? Why now?

One explanation is that these attacks are the result of the changes in President Vicente Fox’s cabinet and other high government offices. Some people talk about the coming of the Yunque, Mexico’s ultra-rightwing, Roman Catholic political movement. In that view, most important of all was Fox’s appointment of Carlos Abascal Carranza to be Secretary of the Interior, head of the office called Gobernación. The title can be deceptive to some one from the United States for whom the Secretary of the Interior is the guardian of Federal parks and government oil deposits. Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior is in charge of law enforcement and the federal police but also historically the country’s top political operative and fixer. The office has frequently been the stepping stone to the presidency. Some believe Abascal and his reactionary brethren finally have the opportunity and are moving to crush the left and the labor movement.

Perhaps. But others suggest that the attacks are not so much about defeating the left as about creating in the minds of the Mexican people a sense that the country is on the verge of a violent outbreak that could lead to chaos if order is not restored. Some believe that Dick Morris, former advisor to President Bill Clinton and more recently consultant to President Fox and the National Action Party, has been advising Fox and Carranza to create a climate of fear in Mexico in order to push voters toward the PAN’s Felipe Calderón. (For a full discussion of this view see: Al Giordano, “U.S. Political Consultants Dick Morris and Rob Allyn Are the Virtual Rapists of Atenco,” The Narco News Bulletin, May 16, 2006, at: http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1817.html )

According to this scenario, if Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution is elected, the left will be encouraged to become more active, leading to more conflicts like those at Lázaro Cárdenas and Atenco. Calderón and the PAN have spent a lot of money on advertising that claims that López Obrador is Mexico’s Hugo Chávez, the populist president of Venezuela. To avoid such a radical shift to the left, the PAN suggests, Mexicans must vote for the conservative party of order, the National Action Party whose candidate is Felipe Calderón. The script seems to be working, for López Obrador, who throughout the past year lead in the polls, has now been passed by Calderón. The latest poll by El Universal newspaper shows Calderón to be ahead with 39 percent of votes, compared to 35 percent for López Obrador, and only 21 percent for Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Marcos’ Role

Subcomandante Marcos, whose anti-capitalist front is conducting the “Other Campaign” and attempting to build horizontal linkages between various grassroots social movements in Mexico, came out strongly in defense of the activists in the town of Atenco. But he may have unwittingly contributed to Carlos Abascal’s campaign to terrorize the Mexican people. And some have suggested that when Marcos said on a television interview that he thought López Obrador would win the election that he gave the PRD candidate the kiss of death. For, despite the fact that Marcos has been attacking López Obrador throughout the campaign period, predicting his victory in the election was taken by some as a kind of crypto-endorsement. Thus the machete-wielding protestors in Atenco, Marcos the leader of a guerrilla army and an anti-capitalist campaign, and López Obrador, the moderate populist have become linked in the media and thus in the public mind, though more out of coincidence than by any real connections. Marcos’s “other campaign” thus serves to provide the government with a boogey man in a mask to terrify the tenuously perched middle classes.

Marcos himself has recognized that the state is attempting to create a sense of fear, and has proclaimed that his Zapatista Army of National Liberation and his “other campaign” will only conduct a peaceful struggle for change. But his presence among the machetes of Atenco and his origins in the armed uprising in Chiapas in January 1994 make it difficult to shake the association with violent struggle.

In short, the Fox administration appears to have fomented unrest by removing a union leader from office for demonstrating both some independence and militance, and then to have taken advantage of the resulting strikes in Lázaro Cárdenas and other areas, as well as community resistance in Atenco, to further its political goals. The government apparently thinks nothing of killing and maiming steelworkers and flower vendors, and risking the lives of its own police force, if it can achieve the goal of creating a sense of instability and chaos. López Obrador then faces the choice of defending the workers and communities who are under attack or supporting repression, but has chosen to deal with his uncomfortable position by saying little and doing nothing, as he slips backward in the polls.

Carlos Abascal appears to be masterminding a victory both by provoking and taking advantage of social conflicts as they appear on his radar and then launching the nearly military response that turns them into violent conflicts. Felipe Calderón may well be the next president.

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May Day: Unions March to Oppose State Intervention

Hundreds of thousands of workers marched through Mexico City and into the Zócalo, Mexico’s national plaza, on May 1, International Workers Day, to oppose the government of president Vicente Fox and his National Action Party (PAN). What a change from a decade ago when the “official” unions of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) marched past the National Palace and saluted the president, promising their loyalty.

Workers from the newly formed National Front for Unity and Union Autonomy (FNUAS), which includes the National Union of Workers (UNT), the Mexican Union Front (FSM), the CROC, Mineworkers and more than 400 labor organizations and social movements carried out a militant march and spirited rally in which they called President Fox the murderer of the SICARTSA steelworkers and called for an end to government involvement in the unions. Many delegations in the march called upon the Fox government to respect the autonomy of the Mine Workers Union and to recognize the elected leader, Napoleon Gómez Urrutia.

The May Day demonstration followed a one-hour strike in defense of the Mine Workers Union on April 28 that involved many of Mexico’s major unions and involved hundreds of thousands of workers in both cities and countryside.

A Broad Front of Unions Against Fox

Among the unions marching against Fox on May Day were the Telephone Workers, Social Security Workers and University Workers, all part of the National Union of Workers (UNT), the independent labor federation. But marching with them, now as part of the new FNUAS alliance, was the Revolutionary Federation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), formerly an official union. Also present was the Mexican Electrical Workers union (SME) which leads the FSM.

The Democratic Federation of Unions of Public Servants (FEDESSP), controlled by Elba Esther Gordillo, brought the Teachers Union (el SNTE), other Federal workers and the capital’s Metro workers.

Workers in Mexico not only marched in defense of the autonomy of the Mexican Mine Workers union, but also expressed their support for Mexican and other Latino migrants in the United States. As Latinos in the U.S. called for a “Day without Latinos,” so unions in Mexico called for a “Day without Gringos,” that is for a boycott of U.S. goods and services. They also voiced their view on the upcoming election, shouting one of the most popular slogans of the day: “Not one more vote for the PAN.”

Official Unions in Private Reception

Earlier in the morning the official unions, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Congress of Labor (CT), had had a private meeting with President Fox and members of his cabinet. For the last several years the official unions have chosen to hold such a private gathering rather than a public march, usually attended by several thousand workers who have been either forced to attend or come because of the free handouts of trinkets, food and beer.

As the independent National of Union of Workers became larger and tended to dominate the streets on May Day, the Congress of Labor and CTM decided a few years ago to withdraw and leave the street to the workers. Since then, May Day has become what it ought to be: a demonstration of workers’ power and pride and a statement of their desires and needs.

Marcos’s Other May Day

Subcomandante Marcos and his “Other Campaign” did not march with the unions whose leaders he considers to be corrupt. Rather, the leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), led a much small demonstration, estimated at 10,000 supporters in a down Avenida Reforma, the principal boulevard of Mexico City to demonstrate at the U.S. Embassy and then gathered in the Zocalo.

Marcos told the crowed, “We are here, in front of the diplomatic representation of George W. Bush’s government, but not of the north American people.” He described the Bush government as having brought “death and destruction on the whole planet.”

Marcos, whose “Other Campaign” is defined as an anti-capitalist alliance, denounced capitalism and promised to expropriate the capitalists. “We are going to take Telmex and Sanborns away from (Carlos) Slim. We are going to take away everything he has so that the workers, telephone workers, and the employees of these businesses will be the ones to manage them. We are going to take the lands away from the landowners so that the peasants can work them, with good prices for their products, without GM, chemicals… to work the way the peasants already work. We will take the schools away from the corrupt, mediocre and idiot functionaries, and will hand them over to the students. We will take the banks from the bankers; we will take the industries from the great businessmen, and we will take the governments away from the bad governors and take them ourselves. Yes we will!”

[For a fuller account of the other march see: “At the Zócalo, May 1st, Marcos Warns the Rich: “We’re Taking Everything” by Bertha Rodríguez Santos in Narco News at:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1757.html]

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Mexican Miners Continue Struggle for Union Autonomy

The Mexican Mine and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM) continued its fight for union autonomy, defying attempts by the Mexican government to replace the union’s top leader. Despite violent attacks on their union members at the SICARTSA plant in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán that left two workers dead and facing threats by mining companies to close mines, the miners nevertheless almost unanimously reelected their national leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who was removed from office by the Mexican government.

Meeting in their 34th Regular Convention in Mexico City with 80 delegates from 67 of the national union’s 73 locals present, the miners reelected Gómez Urrutia as the union’s general secretary, the union’s highest office. The delegates represented 270,000 miners in 22 states.

Speaking via a 10-minute videotape to the convention, Gómez Urrutia called the Fox government “a government of employers, for employers and by employers” and compared the government’s attack on the Miners union to dictator Porfirio Díaz’s attack on the Cananea miners in 1906 when troops suppressed a mining strike. He accused the Fox government of joining with employers to murder workers.

“What a shame! What an indignity!” said Gómez Urrutia. “To think that the highest levels of government have taken these decisions, that they have stained their hands with the miners’ blood, with the blood of workers who have day after day given their effort and courage to increase the wealth of this country! But history will make them pay, because now history has recorded them as the real repressors with the face of fascists which they had attempted to hide.”

Gómez Urrutia, who studied economics at Oxford University, never actually worked as a mineworker. He inherited the union leadership from his father, Napoleon Gómez Sada, the union’s former general secretary. While he seemed destined to become simply another corrupt union bureaucrat, a few years ago he began to chart an independent course. He fought for a new direction in the Congress of Labor and began to take a more militant stand against the mining companies. Both of these made him persona non grata with the administration of President Vicente Fox.

Fox Against Hedgehog

President Fox, through his press spokesperson, denied the legitimacy of the convention that had elected. Gómez Urrutia. The Fox administration had removed Gómez Urrutia from office in March, arguing that he had not been appropriately elected, and replaced him with a new general secretary, Elías Morales Hernández. Morales was said to be close to Grupo Mexico, one of the country’s largest mining companies. Morales, who has the government’s support, has admitted that he has been receiving union dues and other financial support from some mining companies.

The President’s decision has been strongly supported by most Mexican employer associations, though employers say they would prefer labor stability rather than the current conflict. Mittal Steel, which has multi-million dollar investments in Lázaro Cárdenas, said that it fears losing contracts because of the continuing government-union conflicts.

Meanwhile, the Fox administration has pursued its investigation of Gómez Urrutia on charges of corruption. The Miners’ union leader was indicted on January 20 for an alleged fraud involved 55 million dollars. Subsequently, a judge issued a warrant and government agents searched Gómez Urrutia’s mansion in Tepóztlan, his home in the elegant Las Lomas neighborhood of Mexico City, and another home in Monterrey. Investigation of the union leader has been accompanied by press and television reports of the union leader’s wealth in the form of expensive homes and luxury automobiles.

After the events in SICARTSA, president Fox, through his press spokesperson, has accused Gómez Urrutia of having masterminded the organization of a violent conflict there by instructing a small minority of workers to engage in violent acts. The Mexican government says that Gómez Urrutia is in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from whence he is orchestrating a political struggle for control of the union.

Since the Miners Union’s Convention, Secretary of Labor Francisco Javier Salazar has proposed a secret ballot election between the two rival presidents of the union. Salazar says his proposal would offer a really democratic resolution of the conflict.

Struggle Continues at Many Levels

Gómez Urrutia is represented in Mexico by the famous labor attorney Nestor de Buen, who argues that the government has illegally removed the union leader from office. De Buen has taken legal action in the courts to demand that Gómez Urrutia be restored to his office. The union leader is also involved in several other legal battles related to government charges against him.

In mining districts throughout the country, miners continue to face threats from both government authorities and from their employers. In four states miners struck mines either over local contracts and conditions or over the national issue of control of their union, though some of those strikes were settled. In some mines employers refused to recognize the elected Miners’ union officials, preferring to deal with the officials supported by the government. In other mines the bosses have chosen to deal with both sets of officials, while in yet others the previously elected union officials have sway.

Grupo Mexico has threatened to close several mines rather than see production continue to be disrupted by strikes, work stoppages, and slowdowns. In fact, at least one mine in San Martín, Zácatecas has been shut down, resulting in a rise in copper prices on the world market, and, therefore, ironically a rise in the stock of some copper companies, including Grupo Mexico. In several mines workers fear that the local, sate or federal police may be used to dislodge them. Workers meanwhile have taken some steps to defend themselves against attack while working with the national union and its attorneys for the recognition of their elected leadership.

The United Steel Workers (USW) has led a campaign with the support of the AFL-CIO, one of two labor federations in the United States, strongly supporting Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, and insisting that the Mexican government recognize him as the legitimate, elected leader of the union. The United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Electrical Workers (UE), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), and Syndicat des Professeurs et professeures de l’Universite du Quebec à Montréal (SPUQ) have also demanded respect for freedom of association and the reinstatement of the Mexican union leader.

At the request of the FAT, LabourStart began an e-mail campaign which to date has generated over three thousand messages. If you have not already sent a message, please do so now by clicking here !

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The Origins of May Day – International Workers Day

by Dan La Botz

May First, International Workers Day, which is celebrated in Mexico, throughout Latin America and around the world, is not a holiday alien to the United Status. On the contrary, International Workers Day has its origins in a movement in Chicago in the year 1886. At that time, the city of Chicago was the center of the Great Lakes industrial region of the United States. Located there were an enormous concentration of factories, the great knot of railroad lines that connected the urban centers of the nation, and millions of immigrants who had come from Europe, giving their sweat and blood for the progress of the country. One of the most important industries in Chicago was the manufacture of harvesting machines at Cyrus McCormick’s factory. That factory would become the center of a social upheaval that would become known throughout the world.

During the decade of the 1880s, the young labor union federation, the Knights of Labor, organized a campaign to reduce working hours. At that time, many workers labored 10, 12 and even 14 hours a day, six days a week. The result, of course, was fatigue, sickness, workplace injuries, and often a brutal and short life. The Knights of Labor argued that each worker should work no more than eight hours. As their slogan said: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” All of the labor groups, the Knights, other trade unionists, the socialists and anarchists supported the movement for a shorter work day. And the struggle for a more reasonable work day attracted hundreds of thousands of workers. But, it is not surprising that the employers said that they had the right to use their workers as they wished and to work them as many hours as the liked.

Finally, the Knights of Labor and the other unionists decided to inform the employers that after the first of May, 1886, they would not work more than eight hours. The labor unions issued a call for a general strike throughout the country and more than 350,000 workers in various cities responded. The strike went on in Chicago and in particular at the factory of Cyrus McCormick. There the police fired on a group of unarmed strikers. The massacre at the McCormick Works caused a national scandal, angering workers and causing indignation among many people. The events also caused fear in the upper classes who saw workers challenging their wealth and power.

The next day, a group of anarchist labor activists, immigrants from Germany, called for a mass meeting in Haymarket Square in the center of Chicago. May 4, 1886 was not a very nice day; there was drizzle, so many people stayed away from the meeting. The mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, passed by the plaza on his way home and found everything quiet. The police captain sent a lieutenant Bonifield to investigate what was going on, and he reported that the situation was calm. Nevertheless, police captain Shaack sent 200 police to the square. As the German speakers were finishing their speeches, someone threw a bomb. Seven policemen later died of their wounds.

The police detained eight organizers of or participants in the demonstration:, , George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab, and August Spies. Of the eight, five were German immigrants and one was the son of an immigrant. All were accused of being responsible for killing the police officers —though the identity of the person who threw the bomb has never been established. At the time some thought that the bomb was thrown by the anarchists. Others have suggested it was thrown by someone working for McCormick or for the government in an attempt to discredit the unions. The prosecutors offered no evidence to connect the men with the bomb, for they had none. Nevertheless the men were convicted.

The governor of Illinois, Richard James Olgesby, commuted the sentences of two (Fielden and Schwab). Lingg committed suicide in his cell. On November 11, four of the labor organizers, Engel, Fischer, Parsons and Spies were hung. According to witnesses their hanging went badly and rather than having their necks broken by the fall they were slowly strangled. Since that time, they have been known throughout the world as the martyrs of Chicago.

The Haymarket events, the so-called “Haymarket Riot,” was used by the business press to describe the labor movement as a violent anarchist movement that would lead to chaos. Employers took advantage of the situation to fire and blacklist activist workers and drive the union out of their plants. The eight-hour day movement was defeated and it would be another half century, until the 1930s, before workers won that demand.

Lucy Parsons, the wife of Albert Parsons, a woman of mixed race from Texas, continued her husband’s cause and dedicated her life to the labor movement and the struggle for the eight-hour day.

After those developments in Chicago, labor unions, labor parties and socialists from around the World adopted May 1, May Day, as the International Workers Day. The Socialist International adopted May 1 as International Labor Day in 1889 and it was celebrated in many countries in 1890. Russia adopted the day in 1891, China in 1920 and India in 1927. In some other countries the day was adopted a national holiday. Within a few years it was celebrated on a global level.

Ironically, in the United States May Day is not celebrated as the day to recognize workers. As it happens, since 1882 workers in New York had celebrated September 5 as their labor day. This custom was adopted by other cities and the day came to be a national holiday, though later celebrated on the first Monday in September. But there is no doubt that the bosses and the government of the United States wanted to forget May Day and the struggle for the eight-hour day and, most important, make their workers forget the day of the martyrs of Chicago.

Later, the Workers Day was kidnaped by Communist and nationalist governments who used the day to celebrate themselves. In the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, it came to be a day when the governments marched their troops and displayed their arms and nuclear missiles. In other countries, like Mexico, it became (until quite recently) a day to salute the president and promise loyalty to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. In such countries the workers and their struggle and his sacrifice for a better life were forgotten.

But in all countries some workers and unions and social movements preserved the true meaning of the day: that the men and women workers who do all the work of the world should have a living wage and a decent life, should have rights and dignity, should have a voice and vote, and ultimately should have the power to assure a future of peace and justice for themselves and for the world.

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President Speaks to New Government-backed Union Federation

With the Congress of Labor involved in serious internal conflict and the Miners’ union under violent attack by the government, President Vicente Fox gave his blessing at the laying of the cornerstone of a new labor federation, the Mexican Union Alliance (Alianza Sindical Mexicana or ASM). Some 1,500 delegates attended the founding convention in Mexico City on April 26.

The ASM results from the fusion of several unions and confederations, principally the Authentic Confederation of Workers (Confederación Auténtica de Trabajadores – CAT) led by Ricardo Espinoza, and the National Confederation of Mexican Union Groups (Confederación Nacional de Agrupaciones Sindicales Mexicana - CNASM) headed by Juan Alberto Escamilla. The new federation is headed by Espinoza. Also involved is the Federation of Workers of Independent Unions (CTSI). [“Independent” in this context should be understood to refer to company unions. - ed.]

Espinoza told the founding convention, “We plan to refurbish the image of real union leaders, who are not the sort we see today in the newspapers. Real union leaders are those who see the well-being of the working class down at the grassroots which means jobs and wages. We are basically unionists with a democratic, productive and pluralist vision.”

Juan Alberto Escamilla Garza of the CANSM outlined the new federation’s basic political position. “Since 1931, while other union organizations preached the class struggle, we have preached extremes of collaboration and participation, which have given us very good results. We have always known that the enemy is never to be found in the company.”

Roberto Ruiz Ángeles, a former leader of the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) and former deputy for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, now a leader of the new federation, praised Secretary of Labor Francisco Javier Salazar for his role in promoting labor law reform. [When the CROC split, one part joined the ASM and the other joined FENUAS, both keeping the name CROC – ed.]

President's Words

As his government pursued a violent battle with the Miners’ union over its right to chose its own president, President Fox promised the new federation democracy and dialogue. President Fox told the new federation, “Brothers and Sisters, in a democracy it is by way of dialogue that differences are resolved. We are a democratic government; yours are democratic unions and this is our personal and shared conviction….We do not intervene and will not intervene in the internal affairs of the unions of Mexico. This government will not maintain nor promote clientalist or corporativist relations with any union organization.” Turning from platitudes to time-tested clichés, the president told the union delegates, “Mexico needs an up-to-date unionism, as modern as the twenty-first century, in which the relations between workers and business can be, as I’ve already said, a win-win situation.” In the new tasks, he said, the Mexican Union Alliance would surely be “in the vanguard.” Francisco Hernández Juárez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and a leader of the National Union of Workers (UNT) described the new federation as made up of the most servile union leaders who had always put themselves at the disposal of the government and the employers. The Fox administration, he said, was clearly attempting to make it appear that it had good relations with some unions, and so chose to promote this new labor federation.

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Rights Group Issues Critical Report on NAFTA In Mexico

By Dan La Botz

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) published on May 11 a 40-page report that condemned the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on workers’ well-being and on human rights in Mexico. Made public on the occasion of the 36th session of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), the document argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) contributed to increased poverty among Mexican workers in the countryside and the cities, while at the same time worsening the human rights situation, particularly workers’ rights.

(The document, “Mexico: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): Effects on Human Rights, Violation of Labour Rights,” (FIDH No. 448/2, April 2006) can be found at: http://www.fidh.org/article.php3?id_article=3304 )

Based on a mission carried out between August 22 and 31, the document argues that since NAFTA, and to a large degree because of NAFTA, Mexico has seen:

A severe decline in agricultural production, causing mass migration from rural areas to the cities.
A reduction of national manufacturing production.
An increase in the role of multinational corporations.
Integration into and subordination to the U.S. economy.
Job insecurity, lower wages, and widespread poverty, with women and children being particularly hard hit.
Government or employer control of pseudo-labor unions with phony contracts that do not protect workers.
Government and employer pressure to change labor laws to favor employers.

The FIDH report accuses the Mexican government of failing to take steps which would have protected workers’ well-being and workers’ rights. The document argues that, on the contrary, “Since coming into power, President Vicente Fox has tried to further weaken labour law protections,” and that his Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal “has repeatedly proposed legislation to strip Mexican workers of their rights.” (18)

The report contains a chapter analyzing the exploitation and oppression of workers in the maquiladora plants on the U.S.-Mexico border, focusing on Ciudad Juárez.

The FIDH report summarized here represents the latest in a series of such reports on Mexico’s failure to protect workers’ standards of living, social welfare or workers’ rights. My own book, Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today (Boston: South End Press, 1992), originally written for the International Labor Rights Fund, made a similar case 15 years ago. María Xelhuantzi-López made many of the same arguments in her book Democracy on Hold: The Freedom of Union Association and Protection Contracts in Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Communications Workers of America/CWA, 2002). The Mexican Center for Labor Reflection and Action (Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral - CEREAL) also made the case in its 2004 report, “Informe Sobre la Situación del Derecho a la Libertad Sindical en Mexico.” (Report on the Situation of Labor Union Freedom in Mexico).

All of these studies have shown conclusively that Mexican workers do not enjoy the basic rights to organize unions of their own choosing, to bargain collectively and negotiate contracts or to strike in defense of those rights. This new study makes an important contribution by putting those well known facts into the broader context of the deleterious effects of NAFTA on Mexico as a nation and on its working people.

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Resources

The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center has made available on its website the entire text of an important study by Enrique de la Garza and Carlos Salas, State of Working in México, 2003. (At: http://www.solidaritycenter.org/content.asp?contentid=506 )This book-length study discusses and provides statistical information on all of the most important aspects of work in Mexico, with a final chapter discussing the nature of Mexican labor unions and the possible future development of trade unionism in Mexico. Any one interested in workers and unions in Mexico will find this book invaluable.

Back to May , 2006 Table of Contents

Back to Table of Contents of Mexican Labor News & Analysis articles.

Archived MLNA issues.