Mexican Labor News and Analysis is produced in collaboration with the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Aut‚ntico del Trabajo - FAT) of Mexico and with the United Electrical Workers (UE) of the United States and is published the 2nd and 16th of every month.
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For the last two weeks, Mexican and some U.S. newspapers have featured the struggle of the Tabasco sanitation workers to win back their jobs from which they were fired two years ago. As we go on-line with this issue of MLNA, two Tabasco workers have been on a more than 90-day hunger strike. Others have been jailed and beaten. This issue we focus on the Tabasco workers' struggle, and have dropped for this issue the regular feature "Social Statistics" which will return next issue. - DL
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Two Tabasco street sweepers continue a more than 90-day hunger strike, but negotiators report that the Secretary of the Interior (Gobernacion), the sanitation workers, and the state of Tabasco have reached agreement on "99 percent" of the issues under discussion. At the same time Tabasco workers who attempted to enter the parking lot of the Mexican house of representatives with Senator Felix Salgado Macedonio of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) ended up in a fight with guards, resulting in 10 persons being injured.
Two years ago the street sweepers of Tabasco began a struggle for the reinstatement of more than 300 workers who were arbitrarily fired by the Mayor of Villahermosa, Tabasco. In the course of this prolonged labor-management-government confrontation, police arrested and beat the workers, and at least three workers have died from a variety of causes.
Does it seem strange that a group of workers would have to fight for two years, risking beatings and death to overturn unjustified firings? Not in the Mexico of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. This is a classic case of the Mexican labor and justice system.
Workers sought redress from the Conciliation and Arbitration Board, from the mayor of Villahermosa, from the Governor of Tabasco, from the Mexican Senate, from the Mexican government's National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH), and from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. But ultimately, as in so many Mexican labor cases, it is not the legally constituted labor authorities who resolve the issue but rather the Secretary of the Interior.
The Secretary of the Interior (Secretaria de Gobernacion), directly responsible to the President, is the political and secret police organization which deals with all important and politically significant and sensitive issue. Gobernacion is now, for the third time at least, mediating talks between the workers and the state of Tabasco.
Why should the struggle of a few hundred public sanitation workers become such an important national issue? In part, because the Mexican state simply refuses to allow the existence of independent, democratic, or really militant unions. But also in part because of the political implications of this particular battle.
The Tabasco workers' struggle happens to run parallel to a fight between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in Tabasco, and recently elected national president of the PRD, and Roberto Madrazo Pintado, leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Tabasco.
The PRD's Lopez Obrador, who ran for governor of Tabasco against Madrazo, discovered that his PRI opponent had been elected by illegally spending 237.8 million (new) pesos on his election. According to former national Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia, this money may have come from drug trafficking, money laundering, embezzlement and tax evasion. The Mexican Supreme Court did not remove Madrazo. But Lopez Obrador and Madrazo became the bitterest of enemies.
` Then, throughout 1996 Lopez Obrador led a tremendous series of protest demonstrations in the state of Tabasco, involving the Party of the Democratic Revolution, Chontal Indians, environmentalists, citizens groups, and oil workers in a struggle against the Mexican Petroleum Company and against the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Lopez Obrador and the movement accuse the Mexican Petroleum company (PEMEX) of destroying the environment, Indian communities, and poor farmers. Once again Lopez Obrador and the PRD were locked in a struggle against Madrazo and the PRI.
The struggle of the Tabasco workers was led by Aquiles Magana Garcia, the president of the Broad Front for Democratic Struggle (Frente Amplio de Lucha Democratica), who was identified with the opposition to the PRI. The National Association of Democratic Attorneys, another opposition group, provided legal advice to the street sweepers. When the cleaning workers came to Mexico City, they found support among other democratic or opposition unions in Mexico City. Section 9 of the teachers union (SNTE) housed the workers and gave them one meal a day. The Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent labor federation, offered its support as well, as did the independent university unions (SITUAM and STUNAM).
The political issue has thus proven to be inseparable from the labor issues, yet at bottom this is a struggle of workers for dignity, job security, decent wages and working conditions. The fight has been a long and complicated one.
Toward the end of 1995 the street sweepers and other cleaning workers of Villahermosa, Tabasco refused to act as private servants for Jesus Taracena Martinez, Villahermosa's municipal president or mayor. Taracena Martinez used the public employees to clean his house and work in his garden. Until these workers balked it had been common in Tabasco for public officials to demand that public employees perform chores at their homes. This refusal of public employees to be treated as personal slaves started the struggle.
As early as 1989 the Tabasco cleaning workers had begun to demand a reduction in their long work days and the payment of overtime pay. In 1995 Tabasco workers were still struggling to reduce their work day--sometimes as long as 18 hours with no over-time pay--for which they were then earning 560 pesos or about 80 dollar per month. Then, perhaps because the workers fought back, the city decided to lay off between 400 and 600 workers in a six months period during 1995. That same year, the state government called for the arrest of 45 of the workers for their protest activities.
On July 10, 1995 nine workers were arrested. In response, on July 17, some 320 of the Tabasco street sweepers began a 49-day walk from Villahermosa over the mountains to Mexico City to protest their treatment to authorities there. The three hundred workers then set up a planton or sit-in (a traditional form of labor protest in Mexico) in front of the Secretary of the Interior and in front of the Mexican Senate.
One of the workers who had made the march, Roberto Morales Hernandez died suddenly of internal bleeding shortly after arriving in the city. He was 22 years old and left behind two daughters then aged 3 and 7 years. Worker leader Aquiles Magana attributed his death to poor working conditions.
On October 20, 1995 police in Villahermosa arrested Gumersindo de la Cruz Garcia on charges of organizing a sit-in (planton), kidnapping government officials and suspending work in government offices." At the time de la Cruz Garcia was the secretary of information of the Broad Front of Democratic Struggle, a local group supporting the Tabasco street sweepers.
Several of the nine arrested Tabasco workers were released on bond on October 23.
Some 300 police used billy clubs to remove a group of the Tabasco cleaning workers from a sit-in (planton) in front of the Senate on October 26, injuring 20 of them. One of the workers, Juan Perez Armando, was taken to the hospital because his head was bleeding badly. He received 8 stitches. Some 120 of the workers were forcibly put on buses and driven to Villahermosa and dropped off at the Bull Ring of Tabasco.
The violent removal of the street sweepers led to protests by some legislators and to calls for the intervention of the Mexican government's National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH). Felix Salgado Macedonio, Senator for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) went to the podium of the Senate to present the issue of the Tabasco workers to his colleagues and to the nation. The workers meanwhile carried out protests before the Attorney General and the Secretary General of Justice of Mexico City.
A couple of days later, on October 28, 1995, a group of the Tabasco workers were violently attacked by riot police on the steps of the Government Palace in the Plazas de Armas in Villahermosa of Tabasco where they were engaged in a protest. The police injured Candelaria Perez and her daughters Veronica and Carolina, while another daughter Maria suffered emotional distress from witnessing the beating of her mother and sisters. Raful Teran Sanchez of the National Association of Democratic Attorneys protested the workers' treatment to the Public Judge (Ministerio Publico).
Eduardo Miranda Esquivel of the National Association of Democratic Attorneys filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District, which declined to accept it saying he should file with the government's National Commission of Human Rights. The Independent Union of Workers of the National Autonomous University (STUNAM) expressed its support for the Tabasco workers.
The Fray Francisco de Victoria Center for Human Rights, a Roman Catholic human rights organization, sent a letter on October 30, 1995 to president Ernest Zedillo; Secretary of the Interior Emilio Chuayffet; governor Roberto Madrazo Pintado, and Mexico City's appointed-mayor Oscar Espinosa calling for "an immediate end to the persecution and harassment of the workers."
At the end of October PRD deputy Armando Quintero and two of the Tabasco workers, Jose Luis Montero and Miguel Antonio Benitez Martinez, began a hunger strike in front of the Mexican house of representatives and then continued it in front of the National Palace, center of the executive branch of government. They called for freedom for the four remaining prisoners, for the dropping of 45 arrest warrants, and for the resolution of the problems of the 320 fired cleaning workers.
On November 5 a judge ruled that the four remaining prisoners should be released, saying that none of them had committed the crimes for which they had been jailed. But the government of Madrazo refused to release them from jail. Meanwhile in protest, Yoland Dominguez Sosa, state congresswoman of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) began a hunger strike with cleaning workers in Villahermosa.
Riot police once again, on November 15, 1995, used their billy clubs to remove the Tabasco workers from their sit-in in front of the National Palace, leaving 16 workers injured. Others were roughed up or beaten in front of the Senate and in front of the office of the Secretary of Interior. One of the workers Domingo Arias later died as a result of the blows he received from the police.
At noon on November 23, 1995, 25 of the Tabasco street sweepers peacefully entered the Swedish Embassy in Mexico City asking for political asylum in order to escape from the "political and labor persecution against them." The Swedish Ambassador Bo Torsten Hendrikson refused to grant the workers political asylum on the ground that their problem was an internal matter of Mexico. PRD Senator Auldarico Hernandez Jeronimo asked the Mexican Senate to take up the issue.
On December 26, 1995 the Secretary of the Interior, the government of Tabasco and the cleaning workers reached a tentative agreement that was supposed to resolve most of the problems. But the state of Tabasco reneged.
In January of 1996 the Tabasco cleaning workers took their problem to the National Indigenous Forum organized in Chiapas by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN). The Forum's plenary secession voted to include the Tabasco workers' issue in the resolutions presented to the Commission of Concord and Peace in Chiapas (Cocopa) and to the National Mediation Commission (Conai). Workers also received a sympathetic hearing form EZLN advisors Rosario Ibarra de Piedra (Mexico's first woman candidate for president in 1982) and Amado Avendano Figueroa. The indigenous forum demanded freedom for the Tabasco workers who remained in jail.
In early January another cleaning workers, Clemente Arias Dominguez, age 39, died from carbon monoxide poisoning while riding in a vehicle returning from a protest in Mexico City; 10 other Tabasco workers were also poisoned, but survived. A wake was held for Arias Dominguez in the Plaza de Armas, the public square of Villahermosa on January 13, 1996. On January 14 the protestors in the plaza were attacked by police who once again attempted to remove them from the plaza. Several workers were beaten.
Toward the end of January some of the Tabasco cleaning workers took over the offices of Papal Nuncio Geronimo Prigione, the representative of the Vatican in Mexico. The workers were forcibly removed from the Roman Catholic diplomatic office by the police. Meanwhile others began another hunger strike this time in front of the Mexican government's National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH). Some workers continued in hunger strikes in the plazas of both Mexico City and Villahermosa, Tabasco.
On the last day of January, 1996 the Tabasco workers were forcibly removed from a sit-in in front of the offices of the Secretary of the Interior.
By March of 1996 two of the Tabasco workers, Orlando Benito Martinez and Martin Ramirez Herrera, had been on hunger strike for nearly 60 days and were in a "delicate condition." Two of the workers' wives, Luz del Alba Garcia Perez and Guadalupe Mendez Rodriguez had chained themselves to the governmental palace in Villahermosa and had been there in protest for two months.
On March 13 a priest came to give last rites to Orlando Dante Benitez, a 19 year old Tabasco street sweeper engaged in a hunger strike for 51 days and in bad health. The worker, however, did not die. The Mexican Academy of Human Rights (AMDH), a non- governmental organization, in a letter published in LA JORNADA on March 16, 1996, called upon the responsible authorities to deal with the workers' problems.
On March 19, 1996 the Mexican government's National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) declared that it could not deal with the Tabasco workers' problems because Article 102, Part B of the Constitution forbade the CNDH from dealing with labor matters.
While the hunger strikes continued now into the 61st and 75th days, the Secretary of the Interior agreed to meet once again with the workers and Tabasco authorities. When the Tabasco state government agreed on March 24, 1996 to reinstate them within 90 working days, the workers ended their hunger strikes and sit-ins in front of government buildings in Mexico City and Villahermosa. After eight months of struggle--involving 25 police attacks and beatings, several hunger strikes, and three dead workers--the street sweepers seemed to have won a qualified victory by getting back their jobs. The agreement included an amnesty clause, promises to pay medical costs of workers who had suffered the health effects of the hunger strikes, and to pay pension contributions.
Nevertheless, the State of Tabasco once again reneged and did not reinstate the workers. So, on August 15, 1996 the workers began another march to Mexico City to demand that the government fulfill its promises. Not only did the government fail to reinstate the workers, but it also failed to comply with the amnesty, meaning that there were still warrants for the arrest of 44 of the workers.
The workers marched once again over the mountains, a nearly two-month trek. The 142 men, eight women and 11 children reached Mexico on October 10, 1996--several of them in quite bad health-- where they were again put up by Section 9 of the teachers union (SNTE). Once again the workers began their sit-ins in front of the Senate and in front of the Secretary of the Interior and the office of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Some of the workers also again began their hunger strikes. By the end of November, some of the workers had been on strike for over 40 days and were in bad health.
Eighteen Tabasco street sweepers standing on the steps in front of the Mexican Senate disrobed on December 3, 1996, a nude protest to demand that the Senate intervene in their struggle. They received support from Senator Emilio Goicoechea Luna, who read the agreement signed back in March to the assembled protestors and reporters. Hunger strikes went on meanwhile in front of other government offices.
The authorities in Tabasco informed the press on December 4 that the Conciliation and Arbitration Board "had absolved the Villahermosa authorities of the responsibility to reemploy the street sweepers."
The Mexican government's National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) sent a letter on December 5, 1996 to the authorities in Tabasco and Mexico suggesting that they resolve the problems of the Tabasco cleaning workers. At the same time, congressional representative of the three major parties (PRI, PRD and PAN) from Tabasco offered to mediate the conflict. Representative Yolanda Dominguez Sosa and Julio Alvarez Santos also brought up the issue in the Tabasco legislature. The central demand of the workers remained the reinstatement of the laid off workers.
On December 10, 1996 a commission of Senators and 438 workers met with the general secretary of the Government of the State of Tabasco, Victor Manuel Barcelo, and with the former director general of government of the Secretary of the Interior, Juan Bustos Pinto. At that meeting, Barcelo told the workers that the Tabasco government had proposed that it create a broom factory to give employment to the laid off workers.
While those negotiations went on 40 Tabasco workers drew blood from their arms, collected it in plastic bags and then threw it against the doors of the Senate. Some guards were bathed in blood. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, head of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), visited the hunger strikers in front of the National Commission of Human Rights, and expressed his solidarity with their struggle.
On December 11 one Tabasco worker was reportedly beaten by security guard of the Secretary of the Interior, while 20 others were threatened by riot police.
The sub-Secretary of Gobernacion reported on January 5, 1997 that progress had been made toward an agreement between the Tabasco street sweepers and the government of Tabasco. But Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo rejected the draft agreement reached by the workers, the Secretary of the Interior and his own representatives.
At this point, that is January 5, 1997, two of the Tabasco street sweepers had been on a hunger strike for 83 days. PRD leader Lopez Obrador and twice presidential candidate of the PRD Cuauhtemoc Cardenas visited the hunger strikers, whose lives now appeared to be in danger because of their fast. Sit-ins continued in front of the Senate, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Doctors recommended that the hunger strikers be hospitalized. after 80 days of fasting, the doctors said, the workers could have suffered irreversible damage. The newspapers began to report the vital signs of the hunger strikers.
In Mexico City, women and young people threw garbage into the office of the state of Tabasco. On January 8 a group of the Tabasco workers entered the Mexican Senate, climbed to the podium and stripped completely naked, and spent five minutes in the nude before being removed. Members of the PRI and the PAN reported that they were shocked and scandalized by the workers' nudity. Newspaper columnists suggested that they should have been shocked and scandalized by the condition of these and other Mexicans workers.
Letters in support of the Tabasco workers poured into national newspapers, particularly the left-wing LA JORNADA, as individuals and dozens of organizations pledge to join the Tabasco workers in their hunger strike for at least 12 hours.
On January 9 Mireille Roccatti, president of the National Commission of Human Rights, visited the sit-ins of the Tabasco workers. Roccatti had been pressured to visit the hunger-strikers by a protest demonstration of activists from the May First Inter- Union groups who invaded the CNDH offices. The Tabasco government also suspended the warrants for arrest against the street sweepers.
Participating in the May First visit to the CNDH offices were the Independent Union of the National Autonomous University (STUNAM), the Independent Union of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (SITUAM), representative of Sections 9, 10 and 11 of the teachers unions (SNTE), telephone and electrical workers, and other unions, social movements and political parties. Attorneys of the National Association of Democratic Attorneys also sent letters to the newspapers supporting the workers.
The response of the governor Roberto Madrazo Pintado was to accuse Aquiles Magana, advisor to the street sweepers of being an "instigator."
As the workers' hunger strike reached 90 days, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), contacted Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and asked him to intervene to resolve the situation. Once again, PRD senator Felix Salgado Macedonio took the podium of the Senate to explain the workers' demands.
On January 14, 1997, LA JORNADA and other newspapers carried an announcement from the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) signed by the counselors and president Mireille Roccatti. First the CNDH noted that it was legally not permitted to handle labor issues. Second the statement called upon the parties to reach a solution, given the 92 day hunger strike. Third the statement said that human life was more precious than any political, ideological or labor issue.
The hunger strikes put their labor issue, however, above human life, saying that they were prepared to die if Madrazo would not meet their just demands.
We ask that you publish the following letter directed to Emilio Chauyffet, Secretary of the Interior:
Dear Mr. Chuayffet
We have received news about the grave situation of brothers Jorge Luis Alamilla Magana, Venancio Jimenez Martinez, Augustin Vincent Sanchez and five other people, all street sweepers in Tabasco, who have been on a hunger strike for at least 44 days. Jorge Luis and Venancio Jimenez have now been on strike for 84 days. We demand that you intervene immediately in this case, since their lives are in extreme danger.
The Tabasco street sweepers demand: the immediate reinstatement of their 336 brothers and sisters; pay of their lost wages; the dropping of the 46 arrest orders against them.
As a union with more than 40,000 members in the United States, we express out absolute solidarity with these brothers and sisters who were fired from their jobs without any justification. You must understand the risk they are taking for this just cause. We urge your immediate intervention in order to meet their demands. We will be following this case closely and we will support their struggle until it comes to a just resolution.
In solidarity with the Tabasco street sweepers,
David M. Johnson,
International Representative of the UE,
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
(A letter of protest was also sent by UE National Secretary-Treasurer Robert L. Clark).
The Trinational Election Observers Committee "Cleto Nigno" has called for new elections at the Ford Cuautitlan plant because of the gross irregularities in the August 1996 election. The group also condemned the failure of the Mexican government to bring to trial the assassins of Cleto Nigno, the Ford worker murdered in 1990 by thugs of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM).
The Committee, made up of observers from Canada, Mexico and the United States, among them several Canadian and U.S. labor union members, declared that the election violated the union statutes, the Mexican Constitution, the American Convention on Human Rights and Convention 87 of the International Labor Organization. Convention 87 is a workers' rights convention which provides that workers shall have the right to organize or join unions of their own choosing. Mexico has signed and is party to the convention.
The committee in a long document explained that the election committee of the local union had not been chosen in a general union meeting and that the list of union members eligible to vote had not been reviewed by the members of all candidates as provided in the union by-laws. The principal objection is that the CTM union excluded the "brown slate" made up of a rank and file, democratic opposition group within the union.
The Committee was joined by 22 other organizations, many of them labor unions, in expressing their "indignation" at the manner in which Mexican labor authorities and criminal courts have treated matters at the Ford Cuautitlan plant since 1987.
As Mexico prepares for congressional elections, the "official" unions affiliated with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) are gearing up.
The "official" unions traditionally get out the vote for the ruling party, turn out the members in massive numbers for PRI political rallies and demonstrations under threat of losing pay or jobs, and act as shock troops to break of the meetings of rival political groups or to threaten and assault their candidates. This year seems like it will be the same, despite President Ernesto Zedillo's recent statement that 1997 will be a "celebration of democracy" (fiesta democratica).
In 1997 Mexican voters will elect 32 senators, 300 federal deputies through direct election and 200 deputies through proportional representation, 179 state deputies, and 517 mayors. The PRI suffered setbacks recently in elections in Guerrero and the State of Mexico, and plans to mobilize its forces to push back the opposition from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Also involved in the elections is the misnamed Workers Party (PT), really a small satellite of the PRI, and the Mexican Green Ecology Party (PEVM). Both the PAN and the PRD believe it may be possible to break the PRI's congressional majority.
At a national meeting of CTM leaders, Fidel Velazquez, now 96 years old, was unanimously reelected to head the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) by the 32 state federations and 9,500 unions. Velazquez then pledged the national federation's support to the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Victor Flores Morales, head of the railroad workers union and rotative president of The Congress of Labor (CT), an umbrella organization made up of all of the "official" federations and unions, pledged seven to eight million votes to the PRI. Flores Morales said workers would not be pressured into supporting the PRI, but in workplace and union meetings would be presented with all three alternatives. But doing so, he said, he would be able to guarantee 90 percent of the CT members' votes for the PRI.
Leaders of the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers (CRT), the Revolutionary Workers Confederation (COR), the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), as well as the CTM all pledged their support to the PRI.
At the same time, Elba Esther Gordillo, former head of the teachers union (SNTE) and a leader of the Foro group of unions accepted leadership of the National Front of Organizations and Citizens (FNOC), one of the principal constituent organizations of the PRI. So, while remaining a leader of the Foro group, Gordillo is now also a leader of the PRI during this crucial electoral period. (There is a lengthy interview with her, "Necesita PRI Voces Criticas," in REFORMA 11 January 1997, p. 8A.)
The leaders of the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC), one of the major pillars of the PRI, met with President Zedillo in the presidential residence Los Pinos to pledge their loyalty to the chief and their support for the PRI in the coming elections.
Meanwhile in Cancun, Quintana Roo the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) sent 100 goons to break up a PRD meeting and prevent local PRD leader Salvador Ramos Bustamante (former head of the CROC in Quintana Roo) from taking the oath of office as representative to the National Executive Committee of the PRD. The CROC goons threatened to enter the Hotel Margarita in Cancun where the PRD was meeting, and when PRD Andres Lopez Obrador and Ramos Bustamante attempted to leave, the CROC thugs surrounded their car. In 1994 Ramos Bustamante resigned from the CROC and joined the PRD.
So, while the elections are several months away, the "official" unions are already flexing their muscles for the coming great "celebration of democracy," as Zedillo called it.
The government seems to have launched another wave of repression aimed at the leaders of social movements and local activists. Leaders of El Barzon, of the Tepoztlan town council, and peasants leaders and activists in Guerrero and Oaxaca have been detained and jailed. These new arrested take place within the context of the on-going militarization of the country which began last summer after the appearance of the Peoples Revolutionary Army (EPR), a guerrilla group which has killed a number of police and soldiers.
In Guadalajara, Jalisco, the police arrested Maximiano Barbosa Llamas and six other leaders of El Barzon, the debtors movement, charging them with conspiracy, riot, gangsterism, crimes against the authorities, robbery, property damage and intimidation. Witnesses said that when being arrested the El Barzon leaders were roughed up by police.
Over the last two years El Barzon has engaged in a variety of social protests including the seizure of banks and government buildings. Most recently El Barzon has interfered with evictions and with the auction of property to pay loans or taxes.
Near Cuernavaca, Morelos, the State Judicial Police arrested four members of the Committee for the Unity of Tepoztlan (CUT). Since August 1995 the Tepoztlan community has been fighting to prevent the construction of a golf course in their community, arguing that it would make the small town outside of Cuernavaca into a playground for rich Mexicans while transforming their community. Tepoztlan became a symbol of the struggle of Mexican communities against neo-liberal economics.
The Judicial Police claimed that the CUT members had kidnapped and beaten Jose Nativida Adama. The arrested CUT members are Guarneros Sandoval, police commander for the Tepoztlan municipality, Juilo Bello Palacios, Remigio Ayala Martinez, and Ricardo Ruiz Camacho.
In the state of Oaxaca and Guerrero, the police and the army continue to arrest, kidnap, disappear and torture local leaders of social movements and organizations and peasants, claiming that they are associated with the Peoples Revolutionary Army (EPR) or some other guerrilla group. These events are too numerous and detailed to count here, but we give a few examples.
The Attorney General of Oaxaca had Irineo Ortega Antonio, the mayor of San Augustin Loxicha, Oaxaca arrested as a presumed member of the EPR. At least 48 indians from communities around San Augustin Loxicha are being held in different prisons throughout the country as presumed EPR members. They are accused of having been involved in a shoot out in Bahias de Hautulco.
The Mexican Army arrested four peasants of Ocoapa, Guerrero, accusing them of working with the EPR. Army units surrounded the town of Ahuacuotzingo, Guerrero, and soldiers arrested Paul Venegas Diaz a local PRD leader. Soldiers and federal judicial police surrounded the town of El Salto in Cuautepec, Guerrero and arrested the PRD president of the Municipal Committee, Felipe Candelario Meza, accusing him of being linked to the EPR.
On the highway between Oaxaca-Tlaxiaco, four men dressed in black, carrying firearms and presumed to be police officers, kidnapped Jose Martinez Espinoza, a leader of the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the People. The unidentified men held Martinez Espinoza for 30 hours, and tortured him.
The Independent Proletarian Movement (MPI) led a march from the Monument of the Heroic Children (Ninos Heroes) to the Zocalo or Plaza of the Constitution in the center of Mexico City to demand that the government fulfill its agreement with the Route 100 Bus Drivers Union (SUTAUR), to call for labor and constitutional rights, and to demand higher wages.
The demonstration involved the MPI, SUTAUR, the Union of the College of Post-graduates (Sintcop) the union of the Veracruz Industrial Company (Sindicato de CIVSA) and the Frente Popular Francisco Villa, and the School Front (Frente de Escuelas). All of the organizations which participated are either controlled by the MPI or closely allied with it.
In a speech at the demonstration, Barco called upon workers to defend their collective bargaining agreements, the right to strike and the unions. Barco also repeated that the MPI would not become involved in "politicking." Also speaking at the rally was Carlos Ramos of the Broad Front for the Construction of a National Liberation Movement (FAC-MLN). Ricardo Barco, and other leaders of the MPI, were also the principal leaders of the important Ruta 100 Bus Drivers Union (SUTAUR) struggle in 1996 against privatization and an attempt to destroy that independent union.
Rosado Garcia, a leader of the Social Security Workers Union, announced that he was opposed to the union's participation in the Front for the Defense of Social Security which had been organized by the former director Ricardo Garcia Sainz.
The Social Security Workers Union represents 300,000 workers and forms part of the Foro group of unions. Garcia Sainz in a recent interview in PROCESO, a weekly political magazine, criticized the unions for their role in creating the current crisis in Social Security. Also participating in the Front for the Defense of Social Security is the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).