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 Editorials | Opinions | July 2006 
Lopez Obrador: The Choice for Mexican Workers
 David Bacon - t r u t h o u t
| | Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate for Mexico's left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), speaks during a rally at Plaza Civica in Mexico's state of Jalisco. (Mario Castillo/Reuters) |
As Mexico heads for the polls, Mexican workers and unions have a chance to win a change in direction for their country - a government that would serve their interests instead of those of their employers. For six years, the economic and labor policies of current President Vicente Fox, a former Coca Cola executive, have been intent on creating a friendly environment for big investors. Fox's National Action Party (PAN) has been even better for business than the party that began the country's neoliberal shift during its last decades in power, the Party of the Institutional Revolution. The PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, has been largely abandoned by Mexico's corporate elite, and the PRI's long history of austerity programs and repression have cost it its populist base. Instead, the country's largest corporations are now financing the campaign of Fox's preferred replacement, the PAN's Enrique Calderon.
The candidate of the left - Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City - is still Mexico's most popular politician, even after a yearlong media and government campaign to discredit him and knock down his poll numbers. "As mayor, he ran a boom government," explains Alejandro Alvarez, an economics professor at the National Autonomous University, "which promoted public works in the midst of economic paralysis. He criticized the voracity of the banking system and Fox's free trade policies, he has an austere style in a country accustomed to the excesses of imperial presidents, and above all, he shows solidarity with the poor." Lopez's most popular acts as mayor were paying a small pension to all the city's aged residents, and providing school supplies to its children.
Nowhere did the choice in direction become clearer than in Oaxaca's main square two weeks ago. On June 14, at 4:00 in the morning, less than three weeks before presidential balloting was due to start, helicopters began spraying tear gas over the tents of the sleeping teachers, who had occupied the zocalo for three weeks. As parents woke their children, and the cobblestone streets filled with billowing clouds of suffocating fumes, hundreds of police charged into them. Within minutes, scores had been beaten.
Teachers eventually overpowered the police and retook the plaza. Oaxaca's Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers is the most militant teachers' union in Mexico, and has been battling the conservative state government for years. Conflict became so bitter that, during the occupation of the city center, one demonstration brought out 120,000 educators and supporters - the largest in Oaxacan history up to that point. Teachers were demanding not just higher salaries or a more progressive school curriculum, although they want those too. They sought an end to state violence and violations of human rights so serious that Amnesty International investigated the administration of Governor Ulisses Ruiz a year ago, after scores of activists had been jailed.
As teachers fought police in southern Mexico, copper miners in the north shut down two of the world's largest mines. Their union also stopped the steel mill in Lazaro Cardenas in April, where workers occupied the factory floor in the same kind of planton, or tent city, used by school workers in Oaxaca. Although Michoacan's left-wing governor refused to send troops to retake the mill, local police beholden to its owners launched an unsuccessful battle to dislodge the strikers on April 20, shooting and killing two steelworkers.
In Mexican mines, mills and classrooms, unions seek to roll back the conservative economic and social reforms of the Fox era. This upsurge is an attack on his administration's bedrock policies, and he and his allies vow to put it down. Ulisses Ruiz belongs to Mexico's old governing party, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, while Fox heads the right-wing National Action Party. But both parties support the reforms that created dozens of billionaires in Mexico in the 1990s. Three days before the Oaxaca confrontation, Ruiz promised the state's business owners that he would use the "mano dura," or heavy hand, to put down protest.
With popular discontent at record levels, Fox also seeks to reassure the business class. The beneficiaries of the privatization landrush of the 1990s are afraid of the changes a change in government may bring. The Villareal family, for instance, were small metal merchants when former President Carlos Salinas virtually gave them the Sicartsa steel mill for a tenth of its real value in 1992, making them instant billionaires. The Larrea family's Grupo Mexico became one of the world's largest mining companies when they got Mexico's two huge copper mines at Cananea and Nacozari.
With an election approaching, images of violence on national TV from Oaxaca and Michoacan dovetail with corporate-funded commercials for Fox's would-be successor, Felipe Calderon, predicting chaos if Mexico changes direction. Huge sums of money are at stake. In mid-June Ford Corporation, while moving to close 14 US plants, laying off tens of thousands of workers, announced it would invest $9 billion in Mexico.
Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, head of the Mexican Union of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers, says of the country's wealthy elite: "They think we're like a cancer, and should be exterminated. This is no longer a country that can be called a democracy." Urrutia is one of the main reasons why Fox and his corporate friends look at labor with new eyes. His father was head of the miners' union before him, a corporatist leader in the old style, with a reputation for cooperation. Gomez Urrutia is different.
Fox pushed hard to reform the country's labor laws, at the behest of the World Bank. Mexican labor law gives workers rights far in advance of US legislation, which Fox seeks to emulate. In a Mexican strike, all work must stop and strikebreaking is illegal. Mexican law gives workers the right to health care and housing, protects job security, mandates strict hours of work, and imposes severance pay for laid off employees. Gomez helped to bring even conservative unions into a coalition that finally spiked the proposals last year.
Then 65 miners died on February 19, in a huge explosion in the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in the northern state of Coahuila. Two days after the explosion, Gomez Urrutia accused the Secretary of Labor and Grupo Mexico (the mine's owner) of "industrial homicide." The Fox administration filed corruption charges against him less than a week later. Two federal judges in Mexico City refused to cooperate, so Fox had to find one in the northern state of Sonora who would. Labor Secretary Francisco Xavier Salazar Sαenz, with support from Grupo Villacero and Grupo Mexico, then appointed an expelled leader to replace Gomez as head of the union. Salazar owns two companies that supply chemicals to Grupo Mexico's zinc refinery in San Luis Potosi.
When Salazar tried to replace Gomez, workers reelected him twice, and then struck the Nacozari pit and the Sicartsa mill. And when work stopped at Cananea, on the hundred-year anniversary of the uprising there that started the Mexican Revolution, miners announced they too wouldn't resume work until Gomez was reinstated. Most Mexican unions say the charges against Gomez are bogus, and they have organized huge demonstrations to protest, knowing that the government has done the same to other unions that have challenged its policies.
As the country heads for the polls, unions like the miners are supporting Lopez Obrador in hopes for a change. While Fox was trying to oust Gomez Urrutia, Lopez Obrador outlined his labor policy on a campaign swing through Sonora, where miners are striking Cananea and Nacozari. "We will promote respect for union democracy," he told reporters, "and there will be no intervention in the life of the unions. Workers can freely elect their own leaders."
In Oaxaca, on the day after the bloody confrontation, over 300,000 marched through the city to defend the teachers. If their upsurge, and that of the miners, is translated into votes, they may help put Lopez Obrador into the presidency.
David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border was published last year by University of California Press. http://dbacon.igc.org |
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