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 Business News | May 2006 
Labor's Role in Mexico's Vote Altered in Fox Era
 David Gaddis Smith - SD Union-Tribune
| | The PRI got about 71 percent of the rural vote in 1991. That fell to 50 percent in 2000, when Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, was elected president. |
Mexico's labor union and agricultural sectors have fractured in the six years since the former ruling party was voted out of power, experts said yesterday at the University of California San Diego.
During its 71-year hold on Mexico's presidency, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, largely held sway over Mexico's farmworker and labor union sectors. Horacio Mackinlay, a researcher at the Autonomous Metropolitan University Iztapalapa in Mexico City, said the PRI got about 71 percent of the rural vote in 1991. That fell to 50 percent in 2000, when Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, was elected president.
Mackinlay told the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies that in 10 states run by the PAN, new agricultural organizations have been formed to supplant the National Farmworkers Confederation that long worked hand in glove with the PRI.
Mackinlay said the PRI still would probably get about half the rural vote in the July 2 presidential race, even though it is mired in third place in nationwide polls. He said he expected Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party to get more of the remaining rural vote than the PAN's Felipe Calderón, who has a slim lead in the polls.
James Samstad of the University of South Carolina Beaumont said it wasn't clear how unions and an ongoing mineworkers' strike would affect the election.
He said that in the aftermath of economic crises that began in the 1980s, the PRI-led government essentially threatened to take away all union privileges if union leaders did not accept major wage concessions. The concessions were made.
But under Fox, “The government can twist arms less than it used to,” Samstad said.
He said that while unions were able to help persuade Congress to stop some unfavorable bills, substantial divisions have left labor in a weak position. |
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