MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS
February 2, 1999
Vol. IV, No. 2
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About Mexican Labor News and Analysis
Mexican Labor News and Analysis is produced in collaboration with the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Autentico 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.
MLNA can be viewed at the UE's international web site: HTTP://www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect/. For information about direct subscriptions, submission of articles, and all queries contact editor Dan La Botz at the following e-mail address: 103144.2651@compuserve.com or call in the U.S. (513) 961-8722. The U.S. mailing address is: Dan La Botz, Mexican Labor News and Analysis, 3436 Morrison Place, Cincinnati, OH 45220.
MLNA articles may be reprinted by other electronic or print media, but we ask that you credit Mexican Labor News and Analysis and give the UE home page location and Dan La Botz's compuserve address.
The UE Home Page which displays Mexican Labor News and Analysis has an INDEX of back issues and an URGENT ACTION ALERT section.
Staff: Editor, Dan La Botz; Correspondents in Mexico: Bob Briggs, Robert Donnelly, Peter Gellert, Jess Kincaid, Jorge Robles, Don Sherman, and Elyce Hues.
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Part 1: The Fight for the Teachers
Part 2: The Miners' Struggle
Part 3: The MST: The Founding of a Labor Party?
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Dear Reader,
Two tremendously important fights for social justice are taking place in Mexico at this time. First, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have demonstrated in several cities and states to demand freedom for five Mexican teachers and union leaders imprisoned for political reasons. Second, the miners and mining community of Cananea, Sonora are locked in a struggle with Jorge Larrea, one of the most powerful Mexican industrialists. We urge you to support these two labor movements in any way you can. At the same time, in what is a remarkable if still somewhat nebulous development, the year-old National Union of Workers (UNT) has founded a new political organization, the Social Movement of Workers (MST). We have devoted this issue to these three important developments.
We produce Mexican Labor News and Analysis in conjuntion with the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) and the United Electrical Workers (UE), inspired by their organizing alliance and their vision of international solidarity. We want to call your attention to the tour of FAT leader Bertha Lujan before proceeding on to the extremely important news from Mexico.
In solidarity,
Dan La Botz
From February 24th through March 2nd, Bertha Lujan, one of FAT's three top officers, will be touring the US at the invitation of the Mexico Solidarity Network. Other organizations are co-sponsoring local events. The schedule is as follows:
PART 1: The Fight for the Teachers
by Dan Leahy, Coordinator
During the first week of January, 1999, Mexico's Attorney General (PGR) arrested, jailed and charged five members of the elected leadership of Local 9 of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) with kidnapping, inciting to riot and robbery for leading a peaceful protest inside the chambers of the Mexican Senate in November, 1998. They face fifty year sentences. They are not allowed bail. The trial may be two years away.
We now need to focus our attention on our first legal appeal. Given the extraordinary international and national campaigns that have exposed these charges as purely political, it is quite possible the teachers will be freed on this appeal. The Senators who said they were "kidnapped" now say they weren't. The things that were reported stolen (documents and ashtrays) have now reappeared.
Within this week, a Tribunal of the Mexican Supreme Court will hear an appeal of the charges. The Tribunal could rule there is no evidence to support the alleged crimes and free the teachers, or it could charge them with lesser crimes and release them on bail.
We need supporters to fax letters immediately to the President of the Supreme Court. Ask him to enforce the law. Ask him to free the teachers since their accusers have not been able to support the charges against the them, yet the teachers remain in jail. Also, remind him that these jailed union leaders are teachers and are not common criminals. His fax numbers is: (525) 522-0152.
Ministro Genaro David Gongora Pimentel
Presidente de la Suprema Corte de Justicia
Av. Pino Suarez No. 2
Centro Historico, Mexico, D.F
Please fax copies of your letters to the newspaper, LA JORNADA (525) 262-4356, and to the Coalition's Mexican Section at (525) 207-8019 or US office (360) 709-9450.
The jailed teachers are: Blanca Luna, Secretary General; Maria Refugio Jimenez, Press Secretary; Elio Bejarano and Nestor Trujano, members of the Policy Commission; Raul Vargas, Legal advisor. They are all members of Local 9 of the SNTE. This local represents 58,000 preschool, primary and special education teachers in the Federal District.
For a more in depth report on this past month of organizing to free the teachers, e-mail: sanpatricio@igc.apc.org or mariluz@servidor.unam.mx
[Dan Leahy works with the TRINATIONAL COALITION FOR THE DEFENSE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION: Canada, the United States and Mexico.]
by Don Sherman
Some 50,000 teachers marched through the center of Mexico City on January 29 to demand freedom for five jailed leaders of Local 9 of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE). The teachers, joined by other union and community activists from throughout Mexico, marched three miles, from the Zocalo, Mexico's national plaza, to Los Pinos, the presidential residence, to present petitions to Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo demanding the release of the union leaders. This was the third such demonstration in less than a month organized by the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (la CNTE). La CNTE is a democratic union movement within the larger Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), which Local 9 and the jailed leaders have supported.
PRI Tried to Control Union
The jailing of the CNTE union leaders goes back to July, 1998 when Local 9, which has 58,000 members, held elections for its nine-member executive board. At that time the leadership of the national union (el SNTE) supported a small faction in the Local 9 election, and attempted to see some of its representatives installed on the local executive board. Since the national leadership of the SNTE is closely aligned with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party of Mexico, this effort to politically control Local 9 may come from officials in the PRI itself.
The primary reason the PRI would want to have effective control over this union of primary school teachers in Mexico City centers around the presidential elections to take place in Mexico in the year 2000. The national teachers union, after all, is the largest single union in Latin America and the political party that has control over the direction of the national and the larger local unions has one of the keys to an electoral victory in its hands.
Rowdy Protest at Senate
Because of the SNTE leadership's attempt at a power-grab in July, and its connections to the PRI, the leadership of la CNTE, the opposition group within the union, took its protest to the halls of the Mexican Senate on November 11, 1998. While there is no doubt that there was a noisy confrontation between several thousand CNTE supporters and Senate officials inside the chambers that night, supporters claim that it did not justify the later criminal charges leveled at five of the top union leaders of the CNTE in Mexico City. The January 1 charges against them brought by the Attorney General's office included kidnapping and robbery. Just last week the two ashtrays and a telephone that these union leaders allegedly had stolen were found in a desk in the Senate.
As for the kidnaping charges, six out of seven officials who claimed to have been "kidnaped" have retracted their accusations and admitted they were always free that night to leave the Senate chambers. The criminal complaint filed against the CNTE union leaders appears an attempt by the ruling PRI to weaken the grass roots movement within the Mexican Teachers Union (SNTE).
Delegations from Many States
By the time the demonstration began its march in a direct path through the streets of Mexico City to Los Pinos, there were nearly 50,000 demonstrators. Present with their banners were a number of CNTE and teacher delegations from various areas of Mexico. There were delegations from the states of Zacatecas, Michocan, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Morelos, Guerrero and Chiapas. The delegation from Local 22 of the CNTE was particularly impressive. Although most teachers and other educational workers around the country make $300 a month at most, some 15,000 demonstrators came the 250 miles from Oaxaca to support their jailed colleagues. For the most part they spent their own money to get to Mexico City, as well as losing a day's pay.
There were also delegations numbering in the thousands from Mexico City including teachers from Local 10, the secondary school teachers, and of course from Local 9. However, it is a reasonable certainty that more teachers from these two locals would have participated in the march had it not been for threats made earlier in the week by Benjamin Gonzalez Roaro, the sub- secretary for Educational Services in Mexico City, a PRI official. Gonzalez Roaro indicated publicly that those teachers involved in the demonstration not only would lose a day's pay, but also their teaching contracts could be indefinitely suspended. Still many thousands chose to ignore these clear threats to their jobs, attesting to the strength of the democratic teachers' movement as well as to the anger every demonstrator seems to feel on the jailing of their union leadership.
Zapatista Front Presents Demands
While this demonstration was called for the purpose of demanding the immediate release of the jailed union leaders, it also had become an act of broader social protest. More than a dozen social organizations took part in the march, including the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (FZLN), the supporters of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) which led the Chiapas Rebellion in 1994. Their demands, which were incorporated in a petition by la CNTE presented to President Zedillo by the march organizers, focused on the need for political, economic and social change and a halt to the privatization of state enterprises.
The delivery of this petition, which also called for increased spending on the nation's schools and the release of the jailed teachers, ended the March. However before it ended, thousands of teachers, social activists and educational workers confronted a line of helmeted riot police behind large plexiglas barriers in front of the entrance to Los Pinos. The intense mid-day heat had taken a toll on the marchers, and many thousands just rested in the shade of the trees in Chapultepec park. But thousands of others gathered around a van that was parked in front of the plexiglas barricade, and for several hours, mostly women union leaders mounted the van and exhorted the crowd to continue their demand for the immediate release of their colleagues and an end to PRI control of their union. The demonstration ended peacefully with the assurance that President Zedillo would reply to the demands of the marchers by the following night, Saturday, January 30.
As of the date of the writing of this article, Monday February 1, 1999, President Zedillo still had not replied to the demands on the petition. Four teachers on a hunger strike for justice for the jailed union leaders are on their twelfth day. A call has gone out for another demonstration in the capital for Sunday, February 7th unless the CNTE unions leaders are released. At this moment it appears that instead of intimidating and quashing a democratic movement within the SNTE, the government has only strengthened it.
by Elyce Hues
The five teachers who were imprisoned in early January on charges of kidnaping, robbery and riot against the Mexican Senate remain in jail without bail, despite new evidence exonerating them of most of the charges. The arrested teachers are all top officials in Local 9 of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), democratically elected in July of 1998, but still not recognized by the National Executive Committee of the SNTE. They are: Blanca Luna Becerril (General Secretary), Maria del Refugio Jimenez Floreano (Secretary of Press and Publicity), Alfonso Raul Vargas Vallejo (Judicial Advisor), Nestor Manuel Trujano Molina (Policy Commission), and Elio Bejarano Martinez (Policy Commission). The five were arrested by the General Attorney of Mexico (PGR) one and a half months after having forced their way into the Senate with approximately 500 other teachers to demand a response from Senator Elba Esther Gordillo, former head of the SNTE, regarding the refusal of the SNTE to recognize the elected Local leadership. The teachers accuse Gordillo of using her legislative position to continue to influence the direction of the union.
Charges Out of Line
The charges brought against the teachers seem far too serious for the supposed misdeeds that actually occurred. If found guilty, they could be sentenced to as many as 50 years in prison. Even Thomas Vasquez Vigil, the national general secretary of the SNTE and an opponent of the Local 9 leaders, stated that the charges were "exaggerated". New evidence has made the accusations appear even less plausible. For example, the charge of theft is based on a number of items reportedly missing after the teachers' occupation of the Senate. However, all but a photocopy of a historical document have since turned up. The most serious of the charges, those of riot and kidnaping, were based on testimony by Senators affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But the Senators' revised testimony deny that they had been deprived of their liberty to leave the building, or that the teachers had carried out any sort of physical violence against them. In spite of this, the teachers have not been released.
Local 9 Part of la CNTE
The SNTE, as the largest union in the country, has historically been a politically important union, controlled for decades by the PRI. Local 9 broke away from the institutional leadership in 1989, and has since been functioning as a "dissident" local. Along with three other locals (located in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Michoacan), Local 9 forms part of the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (la CNTE). Although only four of el SNTE's 55 Locals are officially affiliated with la CNTE, many other locals contain large factions of CNTE sympathizers, and at least nine locals have run announcements in national newspapers, demanding the release of the unjustly imprisoned teachers. All of the locals that form part of the CNTE have been victims of repression by the SNTE leadership, and it is precisely Chiapas, Oaxaca and Michoacan which are said to have the poorest educational systems in the country.
Local 9 in particular has been subject to abuse. Since the Local leadership elections in July of 1998, el SNTE has not only refused to recognize the results, but has used tactics such as retention of union dues moneys, use of these dues to pay for strikebreakers, obstruction of the management of the Local by refusing to process paper work, as well as the retention of committee members' salaries. According to Thomas Vasquez Vigil, national general secretary of the SNTE, the national executive committee is refusing to accept the election results because the elections of Local 9 were held in a "coercive, rather than a democratic, atmosphere." In response, Blanca Luna Becerril, General Secretary, insists that the local is democratic, and says that "for Vasquez, democracy means that his candidates get elected."
Maria del Refugio Jimenez Floreano, the local's press secretary, explains, "the problem with Local 9 is that it is located in the Federal District," a more politically sensitive area. It is also the largest in Mexico. The Local has 58,000 members, and pays $150,000 monthly in union dues to the national executive committee. Luna Becerril says that such a large amount of money can buy anything, from newspapers to politicians. It is a corporativism [state-party control of unions] that knows no equal, she says. Imagine what the poor teachers are able to do. According to Jimenez Floreano, leaders in the SNTE have been known to pay up to one-thousand dollars per vote against democratic initiatives.
National and International Support
Since the arrests, there has been a great response nationally and internationally, demanding the release of the teachers, and arguing that this is a political and not a judicial matter. Among the teachers' many supporters are El Barzon, the debtors' movement; the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) of Mexico City; the Labor Party (PT); the National Assembly of Workers (ANT); the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (FZLN); the "Francisco Villa" Popular Front (FPFV); the Canadian Teachers Federation; as well as many other social groups, unions, and legislators. These supporters maintain that the teachers are innocent of the crimes they have been charged with, and that their arrest seems to set a precedent for the use of the penal process to control social conflicts and to repress progressive movements.
Democratic Attorneys on the Case
The National Association of Democratic Lawyers (ANAD), the organization defending the teachers, points to the unusual swiftness of the courts in this case--as opposed to the delays in the cases of the Acteal massacre in Chiapas one year ago, or last fall's FOBAPROA bank scandal. This demonstrates the political manipulation of the judicial system, say the ANAD attorneys. Senator Jose Trinidad Lanz Cardenas (PRD) expressed his concern that in this case, the principle of the division of powers is "openly disregarded." The Revolutionary Workers Organization, in a letter to the editor, called the arrests "an extremely grave precedent in the direction of reestablishing a systematic policy of repression."
Attack on Local 9 Part of Political Plan
According to Luna Becerril, the PRI is confronting its problems (growing nationwide electoral failures and loss of popularity as a result of their 1999 budget proposal released in December) by trying to win back power by buying delegates that they didn't win. Bertha Lujan of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) affirms that the leaders of the SNTE have "tried to gain by pressure what they were unable to get through democratic means." The strategic aspect of the arrests cannot be overlooked: of the 500 or so teachers that entered the Senate in November, the five arrested are all top leaders of their union.
Government-affiliated organizations and PRI senators, on the other hand, are standing firmly against the release of the teachers, and insist that the case is purely judicial. These include the Attorney General, the leadership of el SNTE, the Senators of the PRI, and the Minister of the Interior (Gobernacion), all of whom Rep. Jesus Martin del Campo (PRD) accuses of plotting to control the Local leadership.
While SNTE head Vasquez Vigil, for his part, announced on the 14th that he would seek to have the PRG withdraw the charges, he maintains that the case is purely judicial and should not be solved politically, and he continues to demand the acceptance of seven institutionally aligned teachers to leadership positions in exchange for recognition of the elected leadership. Overall, he has not offered anything to the teachers that would mean a serious change in the relationship between the Local and the SNTE. The Secretary of Public Education (SEP) also refuses to recognize the elected Local 9 leadership. It has repeatedly discouraged any type of political mobilization on the part of the nation's teachers, and has given unrealistically low figures of protest turnouts and work stoppage results.
Losing Pay to March for Justice
The mobilizations in support of the teachers, however, have been large and on-going. There have been three marches in the D.F., most recently on January 29, in which an estimated 10 to 13 thousand people from all over the country, mostly teachers, walked from the city center to the presidential residence. It is estimated that 80% of the schools in the D.F. were closed during these marches. According to figures by the CNTE, around 300,000 teachers nationwide did not attend work on January 13, and that in Oaxaca and Michoacan, the education system was effectively paralyzed. The massive support of the nations' teachers in the mobilizations must be weighed more heavily, in recognition that the teachers who do not attend work are technically violating their labor contract, which means that besides not being paid for that day and being put on a black list, they face losing their jobs. Also supporting the imprisoned teachers are four teachers in the D.F. who have been on a hunger strike since the 19th of January.
The teachers of Local 9 remain hopeful that their imprisoned union leaders will be freed, but say that after the new evidence, which frees the teachers of all but the charges of riot, the Attorney General is now dragging the case out as long as possible. This is a matter of concern especially for the teachers participating in a hunger strike, who have pledged to continue fasting until their fellow teachers are freed. Another concern is that when the teachers are freed, it will be under various restrictions, since the riot charge is, as of yet, unresolved.
For Blanca Luna Becerril, the greatest concern is returning to her children, since she has not seen them since she was forcefully taken from her home by police agents who did not identify themselves, while she was preparing her youngest child for his baptism the following day.
The teachers' struggle, says Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, national director of the PRD, forms part of the "great disagreement and protest of the Mexican people against the economic policies which have been applied for the past 16 years." Indeed, the teachers have used their situation to demand social justice for the nation, in the form of greater social spending and an end to government repression in Chiapas.
International Solidarity Still Needed
Especially useful in this struggle, according to the teachers, is the international support they have received. They say that in the face of globalization, international worker solidarity is essential to avoid division and fragmentation. They continue to ask for support in the form of letters, participation in marches, and financial contributions. Money can be wired to the following bank account: Cuenta de Inversion Inmediata BANCOMER No. 0011737273-1 in the name of: Paula Martinez, Ana Maria Lara.
Letters should be sent to:
Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon
President of Mexico
tel-fax: 011- (525) 277-2376
Lic. Francisco Labastida Ochoa
Minister of the Interior (Gobernacion)
tel-fax: 011- (525) 546-5350
PART 2: The Miners' Struggle
by George Shriver [Special to MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS]
TUCSON, AZ -- January 28 --
A coalition led by the Arizona State AFL-CIO, the Central Arizona Labor Council (CALC) in the Phoenix area, and the Southern Arizona Central Labor Council (SACLC) in Tucson held a successful rally and food drive on January 27 to benefit striking miners in Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. The state of Sonora borders Arizona to the south, and the Sonora desert stretches across both states, oblivious of borders.
Union leaders declared that they too had no regard for borders. They would continue to aid the Cananea strikers for as long as they needed. Until they got a fair contract. They repeated a common theme: Corporate greed doesn't stop at the border. And union solidarity won't either.
As Ted Murphree, president of the Central Arizona Labor Council, put it. "The Cananea miners are being forced to choose between two things: surrendering their right to have a union, or starving."
The January 27 rally and food drive touched a chord in the Tucson community. Many Tucson residents have direct family and personal ties with Cananea. A member of the Letter Carriers union at the rally told me, for example, that he himself had worked at the Cananea mine for over thirty years.
The Letter Carriers were only one of many unions present at the rally. Nineteen different union locals had people there. Speakers from the Steel Workers local at a copper mine north of Tucson said their local had voted to give the Cananea strikers $200 a month for the duration of the strike. A rail worker told me the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers sent the Cananea miners a check for $500.
The time set for the rally and food drive was 5-7 p.m., but people kept showing up with contributions late into the evening, until the 10 p.m. closing time of the Kino Community Center, site of the rally. Over the course of the evening an estimated two tons of food piled up in the trailer truck which local Teamsters had obtained for storing and transporting this vital aid for Cananea.
Kathy Campbell, a Teamster activist and state ALF-CIO vice- president, coordinated labor's part in the action together with SACLC President Ian Robertson and Jimbo Watson of the SACLC's community services.
Besides food, the several hundred people at the rally donated a thousand dollars cash. Earlier money donations -- to the address of Labor's Community Services Agency in Phoenix -- added up to $3,000, which CALC President Ted Murphree brought to Tucson with him. He reported that this included $150 from a union local in Alaska. Word of the Cananea struggle was reaching far and wide.
Through supermarkets organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers, this money bought larger amounts of food than usual because of discounts given to the union. Other activists solicited donations for the Cananea miners from supermarkets whose customers are mainly Mexican Americans. A caravan was scheduled for Saturday, January 30, to bring the collected food, clothing, blankets, etc., from Tucson to Cananea.
The diversity of the groups supporting the rally and food drive was impressive. Derechos Humanos, a mostly Chicano human rights group in Tucson that focuses on border rights issues, played a big part in organizing the action and spreading the word. Rabbi Weisenbaum, formerly active in the sanctuary movement for refugees from U.S. government-funded death squads in Central America, chaired the rally. He introduced the writer Demetria Martinez, a former sanctuary activist who teaches at Arizona State University. She read her poem -- dedicated to the Cananea miners who came in December to Tucson seeking aid for their struggle -- as an invocation to begin the rally.
City, county, and state officials declared their support for the Cananea miners. One city official stated he would introduce a motion to stop any purchases by the city of Tucson from any source connected with sweatshop labor or child labor.
Several environmental groups attended -- including Earth First, Student Environmental Action Coalition, and Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. They met the next day with the three Cananea miners who spoke at the rally. They wanted to discuss common concerns. Environmental damage and dangers caused by the company that runs the Cananea mine are a big issue for the miners, especially the company's plans to close a waste water treatment department, eliminating nearly 200 jobs.
Members of the Arizona Chapter of the Labor Party actively built the rally and food drive and turned out for the January 27 action. So did the local Jobs with Justice chapter. The poverty organization Project PPEP, which mainly aids impoverished farm workers, has also helped gather aid for Cananea from the start.
Old and young, male and female, black, brown, and white -- the turnout showed that the Arizona labor movement is reaching out and making links with the community at the same time that it's setting an example of international labor solidarity.
As one activist from the Machinists union put it, "No local can win a strike by itself anymore. It takes all of the labor movement. And all the allies we can get. The help we give now will come back to us when we need it." [George Shriver is a member of the Tucson sub-local of the National Writers Union, UAW 1981, and a delegate to the Southern Arizona Central Labor Council.]
by George Shriver
"You never know what you'll come across when you go to Mexico," said my friend, from behind the wheel of the pickup truck.
We were part of a caravan of a dozen pickups, vans, and a rented truck taking food, blankets, clothing, Christmas toys, etc., to the families of striking copper miners in Cananea, Mexico.
My friend knows what he's talking about. His family roots go back to both sides in the Mexican revolution. Spanish is his native tongue, and he has traveled in Mexico frequently. The miners walked out on November 19. (A fact sheet with their grievances and demands accompanies this article.) A strike at Cananea is big news in Mexico -- a workers' revolt there in 1906 helped ignite the Mexican revolution of 1910. The prison at Cananea, where rebel miners were held, is now a museum, a kind of shrine to the area's revolutionary history.
At another stage in that country's history the Mexican army was sent in to occupy the mine, the fifth largest copper-producing operation in the world, we were told. The mine had been government-owned. It was privatized in 1990 under President Salinas, and sold to a group of financiers led by a notorious Mexican billionaire, Jorge Larrea. Larrea's financial group promised to invest in modern equipment and to pay bonuses for increased production. But they didn't keep their promises, one of the reasons for the strike. Cananea is less than an hour south of the U.S.-Mexican border, traveling from Bisbee, Arizona, also a copper-mining town of considerable notoriety in labor history.
Many Surprises
One surprise we came across involved a Mexican highway patrol car with flashing lights, which appeared at one point. Its driver's intention seemed to be to pull over one of the vehicles in our caravan. The next thing we knew, the patrol car had parked off to the side and sat there quietly as we all continued on our way.
We learned later that the governor and the state legislature of the state of Sonora, as well as the public in general, support the Cananea strikers. Our guess is that the cop was "called off."
Another surprise -- quite a thrilling one -- was the reception waiting for us as we drove up to the mine entrance. A crowd of thousands of miners, family members, and supporters, lining both sides of the street, greeted us with cheers and chants and waving hands and fists.
The supplies we brought were collected mainly by the Southern Arizona Central Labor Council (SACLC) and the Arizona AFL-CIO, whose mobilization director was part of the caravan. He is Jerry Acosta, of Yaqui Indian heritage. By coincidence, he has family members who work at the Cananea mine and/or live in Cananea. (The Yaqui people live on both sides of the border, surviving centuries of Spanish, Mexican and Yankee oppression.)
Also collecting supplies, doing support work, and helping to publicize the striking miners' cause were the American Friends Service Committee and their Border Rights project; the (mainly Chicano) Derechos Humanos human rights group in Tucson; and others, such as the poverty agency Project PPEP. USWA-organized copper workers at the Asarco and San Manuel mines near Tucson sent large quantities of supplies, as did Tucson area Teamsters, Operating Engineers, Postal Workers, and many other unions. One pickup truck load was driven by Ray Figueroa, a top officer of the AFSCME District Council in the Tucson area. Figueroa is a former president of the SACLC. The current SACLC president, Ian Robertson, is a working miner at Asarco and was unable to take part in the caravan. Jimbo Watson, who heads community services work for the SACLC and has been an officer of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers at the Raytheon plant in Tucson (Lodge 933), brought greetings from Ian Robertson on behalf of the Southern Arizona labor council.
Also representing Southern Arizona labor in the caravan were Eduardo Quintana, executive board member of IAM Lodge 933; and Nancy Hand and myself from the Tucson sublocal, National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981. Members of the Arizona Chapter of the Labor Party have made support to the Cananea miners a priority, and several LP members took part in the caravan. Among other activist participants were: Demetria Martinez, an outstanding Mexican -American poet and novelist, whose prize-winning novel Mother Tongue is a powerful account of the Central America sanctuary movement of the 1980s; attorneys Isabel Garcia and Jesus Romo, longtime human rights activists in the Tucson area; and Jon Miles, of Veterans for Peace.
Greetings to Miners Rally from John Sweeney
A rally in a large union hall near the mine -- with most of the 2,100 striking miners and their supporters attending -- heard Tim Beaty, a representative of the AFL-CIO who is stationed in Mexico City (and speaks excellent Spanish). This was another, and a pleasant, surprise. Beaty announced personal greetings from President John Sweeney on behalf of the 13 million workers organized by the U.S. labor federation. He promised that the AFL- CIO would put pressure on any U.S. investors involved in ownership of the Cananea mine.
This quite unusual development -- open support for a strike in Mexico from the top levels of the AFL-CIO while the strike is in progress -- was obviously very encouraging to the Cananea miners.
In early January, the Arizona AFL-CIO sent out a notice to all its affiliates. It described the December 18 caravan, but noted "the food shipment made [only] a small dent in a town dependent on its copper mine...Recently [the company] sent out termination notices to union activists and strike leaders. This entire town...33,000 people are being forced to choose between their union (starvation) and old-fashioned union busting." The AFL-CIO statement went on: "WE MUST REDOUBLE OUR EFFORTS! INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY! NO BORDERS FOR CORPORATE GREED! Support Striking Miners and Their Families in Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. We are asking for donations and/or canned food." The statement gave the addresses of the Central Labor Councils in Phoenix and Tucson as drop-off points for food donations.
Owners of Cananea Also Provoked Rail Strike
Jorge Larrea, head of the financial group that bought the Cananea mine in 1990, was also part of a consortium that, in March 1997, bought the part of the Mexican national railway system (the Pacifico-Norte line) that runs through Sonora, as well as other areas. That privatization operation resulted in the firing of hundreds (if not thousands) of rail workers and abrogation of the existing labor contract for those workers.
The actions of the new private owners of the rail line caused a rail workers' strike in the spring of 1998, which centered around Empalme, Sonora. The Cananea miners told us they had supported the striking rail workers -- because they faced the same super-exploiting, union-busting owners. The giant U.S. corporation Union Pacific is, along with Larrea, a part of the consortium that now owns the former Pacifico-Norte rail line, which serves Cananea.
More Surprises
On our way back from Cananea to the border crossing near Bisbee we had another, not so pleasant surprise. We were stopped by a Mexican army roadblock. The teenage soldiers in olive green uniforms asked if we had any matches. It was cold and they wanted to light some heating device. We were allowed to go on without any difficulty, but rumors we had heard of the army closing off the area around Cananea echoed in our heads. The army had occupied the Cananea mine during a labor dispute in 1989, we were told. (This roadblock may have had nothing to do with the Cananea strike. Army roadblocks, it seems, are fairly routine now as part of "anti-drug" operations along the border.)
At the border crossing a U.S. official (obviously Mexican -American) asked us where we had been and where we were going. My friend driving the pickup told him we had been part of a caravan bringing aid to the Cananea strikers. The border official asked if it was going to be a long strike. We said it looked like it. (Miners told us they could hold out for several months, longer if they got more aid.) The border official joked: "You should contact Clinton. If there's a problem he'll solve it. He'll drop a bomb on it." We were back in the land of impeachment and cruise-missile bombing.
Back in Tucson the local media have been reporting regularly on the Cananea strike and aid efforts in the area. Several Cananea miners have come to Tucson, told about their strike to supportive organizations and audiences, helping the campaign to publicize the struggle and win more aid for the miners. At Christmastime the Arizona Star reported that an anonymous donor, a former San Manuel copper mine worker who more recently has been successful in real estate, gave $10,000 for Christmas toys for the children of Cananea. One more surprise. Now we hear there is dissidence in the Mexican army itself, a protest demonstration of fifty uniformed personnel led by a lieutenant colonel of indigenous background, a man of the Otomi people, expressing solidarity with the struggle of the indigenous people of Chiapas, the Zapatista rebellion that began on New Year's Day five years ago. And from the state of Chiapas we hear unconfirmed reports of a protest among the police, the ranks objecting to corruption among their leaders.
Who knows what surprises may come next? Surprises, we hope, that cruise missiles cannot stop.
The following information, drawn from material distributed by the Cananea miners' Comision de Difusion (Information Distribution Committee), was selected and translated by Eduardo Quintana. Some information from a fact sheet circulated by the Arizona AFL-CIO has been added.
1. Name of Mine: Mexicana de Cananea.
2. Owner: Grupo Mexico, a financial group headed by the Mexican billionaire Jorge Larrea.
3. Union: Seccion 65 (Local 65) of the Sindicato Minero-Metalurgico Nacional (Mexican Miners Union). Seccion 65 represents 2,100 workers.
4. Grievances: the strike began over (1) violation by the company of 53 sections of the collective bargaining agreement; (2) company violation of the 1995 productivity agreement; and (3) company violation of the 1990 purchase-and-sale agreement, under which it was supposed (a) to remit 5 percent of the sale price, or $20 million, to the workers after the sale, but did not do so; (b) invest $251 million in plant improvements (not done); and (c) implement measures to prevent environmental contamination (not done).
5. Background to Strike: the strike was originally called for October 19, but was canceled after intervention by the Mexican secretary of labor; at that time the company agreed to act on the miners' grievances. But since October 20, the company has instead increased production without paying previously agreed-on bonuses, in effect cutting wages by 10 percent. It also threatened to close the smelter and other departments, threatening the jobs of 435 workers, and it began bringing charges against union activists without just cause.
6. Earlier History: since buying the mine in 1990, Larrea's group has fired 600 workers without just cause; closed the construction department; closed the maintenance department; closed the security department; closed the forge and iron works; closed the boilermakers' shop; and closed the machine shop. Also, the company has refused to support the town of Cananea by making purchases locally, buying instead from Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, hundreds of miles away.
7. Support for Miners: the Sonoran Congress has unanimously expressed solidarity with the miners and urged the national government to act in support of the miners' demands.
8. Danger of Army Intervention: in 1989, on the eve of the privatization of the mine, the Mexican army sent parachute troops in to break up a labor dispute.
9. Miners' Demands: that the company should (a) stop violating the labor agreement and start implementing the October 19 agreements made with the secretary of labor; (b) comply with federal labor law; (c) stop the political repression against union activists; (d) stop closing mine departments (listed above); and (e) pay miners the money they are owed. Also, that the Mexican Congress should form an investigating commission to review the 1990 purchase-and-sale agreement and call on the secretary of labor to take action obligating the company to keep its end of the bargain.
10. Environmental Concerns: the workers consider the closing of the waste water sluice department an ecological disaster. The waste water dam is located a scarce 300 meters from the spring of the Sonora River, which feeds the oldest cities in the state of Sonora, Mexico. The river ends in Hermosillo, the capital. Without the work of the waste water department (nearly 200 employees) the underground water and the river water will be quickly contaminated. The company has also reneged on promises to replant trees, and disciplines any workers' efforts aimed at protecting the environment.
PART 3: The MST: The Founding of a Labor Party?
by Dan La Botz
In a remarkable political development, the National Union of Workers (UNT) and other independent unions, particularly the university unions, have joined together to create a new political organization, the Social Movement of Workers (Movimiento Social de los Trabajadores or MST). The MST plans to register as a political organization and may run candidates for office, raising the possibility that it could become something like a Mexican labor party--though the real meaning and significance of this development is not altogether clear at this time.
Some Basic Principles of the MST
The founding documents of the MST declare:
In Part a Response to Labor Law Reform Debate
Clearly the recent debate over reform of the Federal Labor Law (LFT) is one of the issues which has led some of the independent unions to decide that they should create an independent political organization of their own.
Francisco Hernandez Juarez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and one of the three co-presidents of the National Union of Workers (UNT), the recently founded independent labor federation, told the press: "Until now there has not been any national organization which reflects the interests of the workers themselves in the legislative arena. In fact, at this moment we are very aware that there is an attempt to reform the Federal Labor Law (LFT) without consulting the workers, and those who are writing it will do so on the basis of the position of their party, their particular group or of government or business interests, without taking the workers into consideration."
But at the same time the founding of the MST both responds to other social pressures, and raises new political possibilities. The neo-liberal counter-revolution first inaugurated by President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88) and largely completed under President Carlos Salinas (1988-94) reorganized the Mexican economy, conveying state industries into private hands, privatizing many formerly public social services, and carrying out a tremendous transfer of wealth from workers and the middle class into the hands of the new Mexican elite. Then, in December 1994 president Ernesto Zedillo's (1994-2000) devaluation of the peso, resulted in the worst depression in 60 years, dramatically worsening the living conditions of millions of Mexicans.
A New Stage of Labor Organization
The greatest responses to the economic crisis came in two forms: first, militant mass movements among rural people, from the Chiapas Rebellion of 1994 led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) to the El Barzon debtors' movement led by the once prosperous farmers of Zacatecas; second, electoral political shifts leading to increased votes first for the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and later for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Two years later the PRI lost its majority in the Mexican Congress's lower house to the PAN and PRD, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the PRD won the election as mayor of Mexico City.
While there were some large and important labor struggles in the 1990s--particularly the fight by the Mexican City Bus Drivers Union (SUTAUR) to preserve their jobs--the level of working class organization lagged behind, particularly in the political arena. Then a year ago a group of unions broke from the Congress of Labor (CT) and joined with a number of independent unions to create the National Union of Workers (UNT). Now that same constellation of unions has created what could become some sort of working class political party. Clearly this seems to represent a new and important stage of labor organization, perhaps the entry of the unions into politics in a new way.
Yet many things remain obscure. Francisco Hernandez Juarez of the Telephone Workers Union (STRM) has been the dominant political personality in the UNT and now seems likely to be one of the major figures in the MST. Hernandez Juarez was a close associate of former president Carlos Salinas in the 1980s, and remains a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). How will Hernandez Juarez and other union leaders with ties to the PRI reconcile that political affiliation with their new role as organizers and members of the MST?
How will the MST become a legal political organization?
The MST must produce 7,000 sympathizers in ten states to become a legal party. (Presumably it had done so by January 31.)
Who can join the MST?
According to Agustin Rodriguez Fuentes, the head of the Union of Workers of the National Autonomous University (STUNAM) and one of the three co-presidents of the UNT, membership in the MST will be individual, not by unions or other organizations. "This will avoid any temptation to recreate corporativism [state- control]," Rodriguez Fuentes told the press.
Will the MST be the political arm of the UNT?
No, say UNT leaders Hernandez Juarez and Rodriguez Fuentes. The MST is meant to be a political expression of the independent union movement and the working class, not just of the UNT. No active union leader will be permitted to head the MST, and the UNT and MST will have completely independent structures. The MST will work independently of the UNT, they say.
Will the MST run candidates for the House of Representatives (Camara de Diputados) and for the Senate (Senado)?
The MST, as a bona fide political organization, should be able to run candidates, though it is not clear whether or not the party would do so.
What's in the name or the initials MST.
One has to wonder if the organizers chose MST to coincide with the acronym of the MST of Brazil, the Movement of the Landless which has been the most dynamic social movement in Latin American for the last few years.
But what exactly will this new political organization do? Does it represent a new political party? Will it run candidates? Will it be allied with the PRI, the PRD, or the PAN?
Those are some of the big questions which remain to be answered.
by Dan La Botz
The Social Movement of the Workers (MST) is not the first essay at forming a working class political party in Mexico, and there may be some lessons in the experience and history of earlier attempts made over the last 90 years. In the past, workers, unions, and radicals failed in several attempts to create organizations independent of the ruling party and the state. Labor unions leaders tended to rope the unions into political movements which tied them to military or political leaders. Those leaders in turn transformed the unions and would-be labor parties into mechanisms for supporting the president, his party, and the government.
Socialist and Communist Parties of the 1920s
While the anarchists and Roman Catholics dominated the labor movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were small socialist currents as well. The German-born Pablo Zierold, a brewery worker in Toluca, organized a Socialist Party in 1911, but that party never prospered. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), virtually every military and political leader called his faction "socialist," but the word had little meaning beyond a vague radicalism. Socialism just never took off in Mexican culture.
In 1918, a group of Mexicans and foreigners living in Mexico founded the Communist Party, which succeeded by the mid-1920s in becoming a small organization based largely among petroleum and railroad workers, and peasants. At times the Communist Party received support from the new revolutionary nationalist Mexican government, and at other times in the 1920s and early 1930s the Communists were suppressed. Communists remained a small but significant tendency in the Mexican labor movement, but never proved successful as an independent electoral force.
Mexico's First Labor Party
Meanwhile a group of anarchist union leaders headed by Luis N. Morones had broken with their libertarian doctrine, rallied to the Constitutionalist government of Venustiano Carranza, and founded the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, the (CROM) in 1918. A year later Morones used the CROM to establish the Mexican Labor Party (Partido Laborista Mexicano or PLM). Morones created that first Mexican Labor Party to support the candidacy of General Alvaro Obregon, and after Obregon became president, the PLM supported him in putting down the rebellion of Adolfo de la Huerta. Obregon and his successor Plutarco Elias Calles, working closely with Morones, succeeded in turning the CROM and the PLM into the principal social support of the new ruling party and the state. What began as a labor party became the state- party.
Obregon was assassinated in 1928, and Calles broke the alliance with Morones. Without government support Morones, the CROM and the PLM went into decline, and soon into oblivion. By 1932 the CROM had broken up into rival factions, and the first Labor Party ceased to be a factor in Mexican politics.
The Popular Front in Mexico
The 1930s produced a working class upsurge in Mexico just as in the United States and France, with a similar though often subterranean political alliance between Socialists, Communists and liberal capitalist parties. In Mexico, the more militant wing of the labor movement reorganized under the leadership Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Once Morones's house intellectual, Lombardo Toledano had become a Marxist and an admirer of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, though not a member of the Communist Party. Lombardo joined with Fidel Velazquez, a former milk wagon driver, and the leader of a coalition of small labor unions in the Federal District, and then with the Communist labor unions, and together they formed Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Under Lombardo, the CTM became closely allied with General Lazaro Cardenas, who had been chosen by Calles to become president in 1934.
The Communists wanted Lazaro Cardenas to form a Popular Front Coalition, so that they could represent the labor-left component of such a front. But Cardenas ignored their entreaties and went ahead and rather than forming a popular front, reorganized the state-party, calling it the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM). Cardenas organized the PRM on the basis of three social pillars: the labor unions of the CTM, the peasants of the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC), and the government employees and the self-employed grouped in the National Confederation of Peoples' Organizations (CNOP). All workers who joined the CTM thus automatically became members of the PRM. Cardenas stepped down from the presidency in 1940, and the party turned to the right, later becoming the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or the PRI. Labor had become submerged in the state-party oriented toward domestic and foreign capital.
The Cold War and CTM Purges
In about 1948 the Cold War reached Mexico, and largely under the influence of the U.S. State Department, Fidel Velazquez and his group (known as the five wolves) organized the purge of Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Communists, expelling them from the CTM and therefore from the PRI as well. The PRI-state carried out its own simultaneous purge of reds, though never with the intensity or thoroughness of the Truman-McCarthy period in the U.S.
Lombardo and his followers, now out of the PRI, organized their own rival union federation and a new political party, the People's Party (Partido Popular, the named was later changed the Partido Popular Socialista or PPS). The PPS had the character of a working class political party, with an ideology that proclaimed loyalty Mexican Revolution and to Stalin's Russia. Ironically, over the years the PPS became a satellite of the PRI, fiercely loyal to the Mexican government, while retaining its Stalinist rhetoric and support for the Soviet Union--the worst, one might say, of both worlds.
During the 1950s and 60s the PRI-state succeeded in suppressing or coopting most opposition movements. The biggest labor explosion of the 1950s, the national railroad workers' strike of 1959, was suppressed by the Mexican Army, its leaders were jailed. No political movements could bloom in such a climate of repression.
But after the Mexican Army massacre of hundreds of students of Tlatelolco or the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City in 1968, new radical movements appeared. The Electrical Workers Union (SUTERM) and the Democratic Tendency of unions and social movement which it led might have grown into some sort of working class party, had it not been suppressed by the Mexican Army in the mid-1970s.
The Labor-Left in Congress
In the 1970s the Mexican government legalized the Communist Party, permitting it to run candidates in national elections. The Communists joined with other small leftist groups to form the Mexican Unified Socialist Party (PSUM) and succeeded in winning election of a few members of the lower house. At about the same time Heriberto Castillo organized the Mexican Workers Party (Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores or PMT), really a radical, nationalist and populist party. Then several small Trotskyist groups joined together to form the Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido Revolutionary de los Trabajadores or PRT), so that by the early 1980s there were three leftist labor parties in parliament representing about 10 percent of the vote in national elections, not far behind the National Action Party (PAN).
In 1987 Cuauhtemoc Cardenas led a split in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an event which electrified the Mexican left and attracted most of the left-labor parties. The PSUM and the PMT and other left-labor parties supported the Cardenas and the National Democratic Front in the 1988 elections, and then after the election was stolen from him, went on to join him in founding the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989. Some have called the PRD the euthanasia of Mexican Communism, since the Communist (then called the Mexican Socialist Party or PSM) voted themselves out of existence to join the PRD.
(Carlos Salinas and especially his brother Raul, recently convicted of murder, had alliances with several Maoist and other radical groups in Mexico. Salinas encouraged one of them, Land and Liberty in Monterrey, a kind of political machine based on an urban poor, to become a political party, the Workers Party [Partido de Trabajo or PT]. The PT never represented a working class or labor union party, and became a satellite of the PRI until the exile of Salinas the jailing of his brother. The PT suffered serious reversals in recent elections.)
The PRD, despite the participation and leadership of figures who came out of the Communist Party, the Mexican Workers Party, and the Trotskyists, has never had the character of a labor union or workers party. The PRD represents a kind of political griffin, various animals joined together, part populist, part social democratic, and entirely electoral. From time to time the PRD attempts to support one or another labor union movement, but could not be called a political expression of the unions.
That's what makes the organization of the Social Movement of the Workers or MST such an interesting development. The MST raises the possibility that the Mexican working class might be in the process of creating its own political party. Labor creating its own party anywhere in the world must inevitably mean myriad problems, and no doubt, many mistakes. But nothing could be more important for labor unions and workers than to learn about politics through their own mistakes, and to go forward to attempt to reorganize government and society and make them more just and more democratic. We will all be watching to see whether the MST becomes a genuine independent political labor party, or if it succumbs to common problems facing all unions in capitalist society, and the particular historic problems of Mexico and finds itself dragged by political gravity back into the black hole which is the PRI.