MEXICO CITY - "Our workers have never had it so good," affirmed 96-year-old Don Fidel Velazquez, the Czar of the Mexican labor movement for more than half a century, to the dismay of attending reporters, at a recent ritual press conference. The conferences, which have the aura of Papal audiences, have been held for years each Monday morning at the headquarters of the confederation the nonagenarian labor leader still commands - the CTM or Mexican Workers Confederation, with 10 million claimed members, by far the biggest union alliance in the nation. Following these session, reporters who have attended such rituals for years gather at the end of the conference table to decipher what the barely-audible Velazquez has been trying to tell them.
Often disoriented in public and infirm (he cannot walk without assistance), with fawning successors always vying for his faltering attention, Velazquez has become a vivid metaphor for the increasing feebleness of organized labor here. Political cartoonists and comedians cruelly poke fun at him and, during a Monday morning press conference just prior to May 1st this year, a theater group held a mock funeral for the CTM leader in the street below.
Like his decaying body, Velazquez's perceptions of the well- being of the workers he purports to represent seem a symptom of advanced senility. Crushed by the on-going crisis that began with the December 1994 peso collapse, at least 2.4 million Mexican workers have lost their jobs in the past two years - a third of the economically active work force of 38 million are estimated to have no fixed employment. Although wages inch up from year to year, gains are always obliterated by soaring annual inflation (50% in 1995), and workers have lost 37% of their real buying power since Ernesto Zedillo became president. 21% of the work force toils for one minimum salary daily, a paycheck that now buys only a fifth of the basic food basket. The red and black strike flags that used to be hung over struck business establishments are rapidly becoming historical relics - only 17 out of 1400 threatened job actions actually resulted in a work stoppage in 1995. The most militant union in the nation - the Mexico City Bus Drivers' - is being converted into a workers' cooperative, and anti-union legislation passed this year with Velazquez's complicity privatizes workers' pension funds and rubber-stamps the sale of the nationalized petrochemical industry to foreign owners - a venture vehemently opposed by the powerful Oil Workers Union.
One further insult piled upon these injuries: Velazquez and the Congress of Labor (CT) - of which the CTM is a controlling force -, this year forbade Mexican workers from taking to the streets May 1st, International Workers Day, under threatened penalties that include fines and expulsion from their respective unions. Ever since the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40), during which the CTM was created, Mexican workers have traditionally paraded into the great central square of Mexico City - the zocalo - to give thanks to their President for all he has done to better their situation in the past year. More often than not, over the course of the past nine presidencies, Velazquez has been mounted on the National Palace balcony, at the side of the most powerful man in the nation, waving to his troops as they pass by. But in 1995, with the economy crashing all around freshman president Ernesto Zedillo, Velazquez abruptly called off the official May 1st obeisance because "workers have nothing to celebrate this year." Privately, Don Fidel expressed fears that workers' anger might get out of hand. In 1984, a fire bomb was tossed at then-President Miguel De la Madrid during May Day festivities, and, ever since, the official workers march has been strictly policed, with all independent unions excluded from the zocalo by thousands of security forces, a situation that has frequently led to violent confrontation.
Last year, however, with the zocalo abandoned by Velazquez and the institutional labor movement, 100,000 members of independent unions and alliances, led by the Mexico City Bus Drivers Union (SUTAUR) - 12,000 of whom had just been fired by the Mexico City mayor - poured into the great square to manifest their irritation at what they perceived to be the Zedillo government's offensive against Mexican workers.
This May 1st, SUTAUR workers once again led an enormous assemblage of independent unionists up Reforma Boulevard to the zocalo - but, one year and a month after Mayor Oscar Espinosa declared their bus lines bankrupt and their collective bargaining contract terminated, SUTAUR members are preparing to turn in their union cards for ownership papers. An April 18th-inked preliminary resolution of this long and bitter dispute, in which a dozen union leaders remain imprisoned, gives the drivers two out of the ten newly-privatized bus routes in the city but leaves thousands of union members without a job. Nonetheless, the bus drivers' dogged struggle - which included countless marches, constant clashes with the police, several 40-day hunger strikes, and an offer from a union leader to crucify himself on Good Friday - set a combative tone for the 1996 May Day march of the independent unionists. But independents like the SUTAUR and the Authentic Workers Front (FAT) - whose commonalties have Marxist roots - did not march alone this year. Despite the injunctions of Velazquez and CT president Rafael Rivapalacios Pontones, nine Congress of Labor affiliates, joined with 12 other dissident mainstream unions to form "The Syndicalist Forum Before the Nation" and took to the streets May 1st, filling the zocalo on their own. Led by public sector unions such as the social security workers who have been battling the privatization of the health and pension systems, and the telephone workers under Francisco Hernandez Juarez, the Syndicalist Forum is openly critical of the neo-liberal model embraced by Zedillo and his two predecessors and demands a "new development model." The Forum's big turn-out May 1st (150,000 unionists) enhances the new alliance's viability as a center-left challenge to the Velazquez- Rivapalacios axis within the mainstream labor movement.
The emergence of a critical current within the Mexican labor movement mainstream parallels upheaval in Big Labor across the northern border, where the success of rebel rank-and-file forces within the staid U.S. AFL-CIO labor federation culminated in the 1995 election of an activist leadership slate, committed to mobilization and union organizing as a strategy for strengthening labor's hand in a rapidly globalizing world. Hernandez himself is a pioneer in meeting the challenge of globalization, opening up cross-border ties with U.S. telephone workers, and even utilizing the NAFTA labor complaint mechanism to demand compensation for 300 San Francisco California Hispanic telephone operators fired by the Sprint Corporation for seeking to join the Communication Workers of America - a union with which the Mexican telephone workers leader has often collaborated.
Don Fidel, who once treated Hernandez like a favored nephew, has publicly broken with the rising young (40ish) telephone workers leader and called for the expulsion of his FESEBES federation, composed of unions in recently privatized industries, from the ranks of the Congress of Labor. The ancient Velazquez is also critical of efforts to form alliances with U.S.-based unions, which, he thinks, is a violation of Mexican sovereignty.
While Velazquez and Rivapalacios paid homage to President Zedillo at Congress of Labor headquarters before a small, hand- picked audience of government sympathizers, the two massive protest marches snaked through the city to form one great stream of protest on May 1st. Yet despite common opposition to the Zedillo government's neo-liberal economic policies, the marches by the Syndicalist Forum and the independent unions were unified only in spirit and logistical coincidence. Each contingent took the streets separately, carefully avoiding stepping on each other's toes, and each held separate zocalo rallies honoring "the Martyrs of Chicago" (where International Workers Day was born 110 years ago) with their own speeches and banners. While the combined totals of the two massive rallies that jammed the zocalo an hour apart May 1st, with an estimated quarter of a million participants, certainly represent the largest outpouring of dissatisfied Mexican workers to protest government economic policies in recent years, the emergence of a new, combative, and united labor movement here is by no means guaranteed. HUNTING ALTERNATIVES TO NAFTA, MEXICO LOOKS ACROSS THE WATER
The threat to sovereignty posed by overwhelming commercial dependence on an oft-fickle United States has motivated Mexico's leaders to seek alternative trade routes. Although ex-president Carlos Salinas was considered one of NAFTA's principle architects, he also struck parallel free trade agreements with Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, and Chile - all to Mexico's advantage.
Despite free trade with Chile that has yielded a tidy - if low volume - Mexican surplus, the Zedillo administration reportedly has been cool to the admission of that southern cone country into the North American Free Trade Agreement. Chile's incorporation in the trade treaty appears to be another casualty of the coming U.S. presidential election - at the late March Cartagena, Colombia summit of 34 American commerce ministers, diplomats confided to the press that there would be no progress on Chile's bid until the U.S. presidency is decided in November.
Rather than looking south for trade alternatives where the pickings are slim (less than 5% of all Mexican exports), President Ernesto Zedillo has turned towards the powerful European Union as an antidote to alliance with an overweening, erratic U.S. Last January, Zedillo flew to the old continent to campaign for a NAFTA-like trade treaty with the UE's 15 member nations. Unfortunately, the Mexican president flew right into a stormy controversy about the nature of the European alliance - should it remain a regional trade bloc or enter into multi- lateral agreements with non-member trading partners. "What is at stake for Europe is not just a trade pact with Mexico but its commercial future in a globalized world," writes Socorro Lopez in the Mexican weekly "La Crisis."
At present, Mexico does only 8% of its total commerce with Europe (and runs a $3 billion deficit on that). Nonetheless, the UE wants to get its foot in the Mexican door before NAFTA slams it shut completely - a pretension that makes the U.S. uneasy. "We don't condemn" an eventual Mexico-UE trade pact, U.S. Ambassador James Jones recently told this reporter, clearly stopping short of support.
But reaching out across the ocean involves convincing 15 separate governments of the benefits of mutual free trade and will require an extended diplomatic effort by the Zedillo administration and, in the end, such a treaty could cause more problems than it is worth. Unlike NAFTA, which is exclusively a commercial accord, a trade treaty with the UE requires strict compliance with human rights provisions and a commitment to democratic reform, a price the Mexican government may not want to pay. [NAFTA special coming next week.
*** FREE SAMPLE *** FREE SAMPLE *** MEXICO BARBARO by John Ross John Kenneth Turner wrote MEXICO BARBARO as the Diaz dictatorship was crumbling back in 1910. John Ross reincarnates MEXICO BARBARO as the PRI dictatorship comes tumbling down nearly 90 years later. Copyright 1996 by John Ross. Please do not reproduce before end of period in head. Distributed by WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE ON THE AMERICAS. 48 articles per year; for subscription (postal or email) contact: Weekly News Update on the Americas, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012, 212-674-9499, fax 212-674-9139, email nicanet@nyxfer.blythe.org, home page http://homebrew.geo.arizona.edu/wnuhome.html