The Mexican State has aggressively stimulated
capital accumulation with subsidies to private
enterprise through the electrical, oil and rail
industries, protective tariff barriers, generous
concessions to exporters and one of the lowest
tax rates in Latin America. However, it is the
State’s tight control over the labor movement
which has allowed General Electric, Westing-
house and other private companies to impose the
levels of exploitation described above.
When the world-wide economic crisis hit
Mexico in the early 1970s, workers responded
with a wave of labor insurgency far greater in
intensity and consequence than any mobiliza-
tions since the national railroad strike of the late
fifties. With each attempt to defend their
standard of living, Mexican workers, like their
counterparts in the United States, found them-
selves thrown into immediate conflict not only
with the companies, but with the traditional
labor bureaucracy of union officials who had
become increasingly separated from the rank and
file. As the union officialdom sided consistently
with the companies and the State, democratic
challenges to the traditional bureaucracy
emerged among the rank and file in several of
Mexico’s largest industry-wide unions of rail-
road, mine, and telephone workers, and ironical-
ly, among the relatively well-paid oil and
electrical workers.
To a much greater extent than in the United
States, however, the class consciousness of the
Mexican workers – the result of the higher levels
of exploitation and oppression, the unbroken
Sept./Oct. 1977 2526
NACL Repor
tradition of anti-imperialism, and the relatively
more advanced development of forces in the
Mexican left – poses a real challenge to bourgeois
rule. As the “democratic tendencies” within the
trade union movement demonstrated their abili-
ty to mobilize hundreds of thousands of workers,
peasants, and students in militant protests across
the nation, they threatened to topple one of the
central pillars of the Mexican state, its labor
bureaucracy. In Mexico, the labor bureaucrats
are called charros, and the undemocratic, pro-
capitalist unionism they promote is known as
charrismo sindical.
ORIGINS OF THE
STATE LABOR BUREAUCRACY
To understand the full impact of the recent
labor insurgency, it is necessary to review quickly
the structure and history of Mexico’s trade
unions and the process through which they
became iricorporated into the state apparatus.
The first craft unions – that is, unions organized.
among workers of a specialized skill, such as
typographers, carpenters, and mechanics, as
opposed to industry-wide unions – were formed
during the Mexican Revolution after 1910. But
as imperialist expansion into Mexico increased
the process of industrialization and concentra-
tion of industry, the first industrial unions were
organized within the large foreign monopolies by
1916.
One of the first national unions of significance
was the SME (Sindicato Mexicano. de Elec-
tricistas, Mexican Union of Electrical Workers), organized within the foreign-controlled Mexican
Light and Power Company. The SME was key in
organizing the general strike of 1916 which
paralyzed Mexico City and alerted the bour-
geoisie to the need for new forms of control over
the emerging industrial proletariat. The Revolu-
tionary Confederation of Mexican Workers
(CROM, Confederacion Revolucionaria de
Obreros Mexicanos) was organized under the
auspices of the government in 1918 – one of the
first attempts by workers to form a national
confederation, and the first effort of the newly
consolidating State to bring the trade union
movement under its wing. All efforts by workers
to organize independently of the CROM after its
establishment were brutally fought by the
government.
However, as foreign monopolies continued to
expand their control over the mines, railroads, oil
fields and electrical industry, ever greater num-
bers of workers were brought together in
industrial unions through a period of courageous, anti-imperialist struggle in the twenties and
thirties. The CROM was increasingly incapable of
containing the militancy of these new unions
which sought organization independent of the
state.
The 1930s marked a turning point for the
Mexican labor movement. Two hundred strikes
rocked Mexico in 1934 and another 600 in 1936, with general strikes called in several cities across
the country. 1 In the midst of the Great Depres-
sion, with nationalism running high throughout
all classes in Mexico, the major industrial unions
(including the electrical workers’ SME) called a
national congress in 1936 for the formation of an
organization with the potential for uniting the
Mexican working class into a powerful force
during such a period of revolutionary upheaval.
However, in just two short years after its
founding, this organization, called the Confeder-
ation of Mexican Workers (CTM, Confederacion
de Trabajadores Mexicanos), was transformed
into the opposite of what the workers had
envisioned: the primary mechanism of bourgeois
control over the labor movement for the next
half a century. How was this possible? Three
crucial factors were the quick consolidation of
collaborationist leadership, the efforts of the
Mexican state to guarantee capitalist develop-
ment despite the depression, and the ideological
weaknesses of theMexican left.
Collaborationist leadership: Within the
founding congress of the CTM, the industrial
unions like the SME, with significant left and
especially Communist Party (PCM) influence, were pitted against the likes of Vincente Lom-
bardo Toledano, perhaps the best known of the
social democratic trade unionists in Latin Ameri-
ca, and Fidel Velazquez, the current “George-
Meany-and-then-some” of Mexico.*
* Both Lombardo and Velazquez have main-
tained very close working relations with the
conservative leadership of the U.S. trade unions
from Samuel Gompers through Meany and have
been key in promoting a collaborationist union-
ism through the various regional labor institutes
established over the years in Latin America, including the CIA-supported ORIT. 2
26 NACLA Reportt
127
Despite the strength of the PCM-led unions,
Lombardo and Velazquez gained control of the
CTM at its inception, through manipulations and
the support of the labor bureaucrats who
controlled the federations of small “company
unions” – a term used in Mexico for unions
organized within a single company, as opposed to
industry-wide. As a consequence, to this day only 24 percent
of the economically active population of Mexico
is unionized, 4 and the majority of the unionized
workers are organized into “company” unions
whose small size and isolation prevent any real
challenge to the labor bureaucrats of the
federations to which they are affiliated. It is the
bureaucrats of these federations, rather than the
leadership of the industrial unions, who have
made up the top leadership of the CTM since the
forties.s
The State: As in the United States, the depression of the 1930s brought about in Mexico
new challenges to bourgeois rule from the
working class, and as a consequence gave rise to
the populist government of Lazaro Cardenas.
Unlike Roosevelt in the U.S.,however, Cardenas
faced not only challenges from the working class
and very serious divisions within the bourgeoisie, but also an imperialism made ever more vicious
by foreign monopolies seeking to maintain profit
levels through the depression. In his efforts to “modernize” the political system, foment eco-
nomic growth and thus assure the survival of
capitalism in Mexico, Cardenas sought to rebuild
the base of social support among the workers and
peasants which had been largely eroded by
policies of the bourgeois governments after the
Revolution. On the one hand, he implemented a
sweeping agrarian reform, 6 and on the other hand
he supported crucial labor conflicts with foreign
companies, as in the case of the oil industry
which he nationalized in 1938 after a long
conflict with the foreign monopolies. In the
electrical power industry, Cardenas supported
the two major unions in their negotiations with
the foreign companies, Mexlight and Ebasco. As
a consequence, workers in the key oil and electrical power industries made gains far greater
than other workers during the period, a fact
which helped create a relatively privileged sector
which Cardenas could count on in his conflicts with the right and the foreign companies.
Cardenas also threw his support behind
Lombardo in the CTM, and, in 1938, manipulat-
ing the genuine anti-imperialism of the workers,
negotiated the formal incorporation of the CTM
into the reorganized ruling party (predecessor of
the current PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institu-
cional). Since then the CTM has remained one of
the three institutional structures which forms the
PRI, along with the peasant and business sectors.
As a result, the trade unions have been vertically
tied to the state via the ruling party for forty
years. (Though the electrical unions remained
outside the CTM, they, too, eventually affiliated
with the ruling party – the SME during WWII and
the STERM, called FNTIE at the time, in the
’50s.)
The Left: A key factor in allowing the
incorporation of the labor movement into the
state structure was the ideological weaknesses of
the Mexican left. Lombardo, as well as the
Mexican Communist Party, promoted an ideolo-
gy of what in Mexico is called “revolutionary
nationalism” – that is, the view that a potentially
revolutionary force existed within the state and
the ruling party, as a result of the revolutionary
struggle initiated in 1910. Fierce contradictions
did exist between imperialism and sectors of the
bourgeoisie, and the left hoped to exploit those
to their advantage. Instead, however, Cardenas
managed to use the left and the trade unions to
the advantage of the bourgeoisie.
That the left allowed itself to be used in this
way is partially explained by the Communist
Party policy of the “united front against
fascism” which, as implemented in Mexico, led
to discouraging any conflicts with the populist
government that supported the Allies. The SME-
and the PCM-led unions supported Cardenas, as
the CPUSA supported Roosevelt, as an alterna-
tive to the potential rise of fascism. And in 1936, when the SME and the Mexican Communist
Party unions left the newly organized CTM over
differences with Lombardo, Earl Browder of the
U.S. Communist Party attended an emergency
meeting with PCM leaders which resulted in the
reaffiliation of the Communist unions with the
Cardenas-supported Confederation.’
The critical question today, however, is not
whether the left and the trade unions should
tactically have supported Cardenas and the CTM, but to what extent the ideology of “revolution-
ary nationalism” limited the workers’ ability to
make an objective analysis of class forces and
formulate a revolutionary strategy appropriate
to the conditions of the day.
As it turned out, in fact, the relations between
the state and the labor movement changed
Sept./Oct. 1977 2728
NACLA Report
radically with the end of the Cardenas regime and
World War II. However, the CTM remained
locked into the apparatus. The bourgeoisie was
greatly strengthened by the Cardenas reforms
and by the opportunity provided by the Second
World War to expand industrialization via import
substitution. The CTM became less important as
a means of mobilizing workers’ support for
government programs, and increasingly impor-
tant as a mechanism to control the working class
which bore the brunt of development policies.
In 1947, with the recently initiated govern- ment of Aleman [one of Mexico’s most
powerful industrialists], the army and police broke a general strike of petroleum
workers; in 1948, the regime imposed and
sustained, with its ‘forces of order,’ a spurious leader in the Union of Railroad
Workers, and a little later did the same in the case of the mine workers. 8
CONTRADICTIONS IN THE
STATE LABOR APPARATUS
Throughout the fifties and sixties, the State
wavered erratically at times in its attempts to
maintain control over the labor movement. In
1959, for example, when a mass rank and file
movement called a national strike of railroad
workers and threatened to topple the bureau-
cratic leadership of the union, the government,
shortly after a meeting with President Eisen-
hower, 9 brutally smashed the strike and jailed
some 60 union leaders including PCM organizer
Valentin Campa and strike leader Demetrio
Vallejo who spent the next eleven years in prison.
A year later, however, the government needed to
mobilize the SME and the STERM electrical
unions to support its nationalizing of the foreign
power companies.
The government has continued to accede to
many of the militant demands of these two
unions since the time of the nationalizations, preserving the relatively higher wage status of
their workers in the hope of avoiding a major
conflict in this key industrial sector. Current
minimum wage for workers in the state’s
electrical power companies, for example, is twice
that of the national minimum, and 60 percent of
the employees of the government Federal Elec-
trical Commission have been able to buy their
own houses with company funds. 1 0 A similar
situation prevails in the nationalized oil industry.
The relatively good relations between the
electrical unions and the state since the period of
Cardenas have helped cushion the government-
employed electrical workers from the same
decline in wages and intensification of work that
we have seen affect workers in the private
monopolies like General Electric, Kelvinator and
Westinghouse. For this reason, the workers in the
electrical power industry have been more in-
clined to accept the theory of “revolutionary
nationalism.” And while this ideology has not
diminished their courage and militancy, it has led
them to support erroneous evaluations of the
class nature of the Mexican state put forward by
their unions’ leadership. (See next article for a
critique of this ideology.)
The special treatment afforded the state’s
electrical power workers, however, has been the
exception, and the state labor bureaucracy’s role
as policeman of the trade union movement has
been the rule – logically undermining its ability
to carry out its other important task of
legitimizing the rule of the PRI in the eyes of the
working class. The mechanism of control itself
has become a catalyst for discontent and
alienation. At the same time, the internal power
balance of the CTM has been threatened by the
growing importance of the industrial unions
throughout the rapid industrialization and
monopolization process. The growth of the
industrial unions has challenged the traditional
leadership, whose power rested on the multitude
of small, dispersed unions.
Consequently, when the recession of the ’70s
necessitated profound economic readjustments
initiated by the state – promotion of exports,
fiscal reforms, cuts in government spending, etc.
– and as President Echeverria found himself in
conflict with important sectors of national and
foreign capitalists, the logical place to which he
could turn for support, the state labor bureaucra-
cy, was wracked by the challenge from mass rank
and file movements.
Relations between the Echeverria government
and the state labor bureaucracy fall into two
distinct periods. 1 2 The first, from 1971 to
mid-1973, was characterized by serious conflicts
between the President and the labor bureaucrats,
as he attempted to force a “modernization” not
only of the too-long-protected private companies
and the unwieldy state enterprises, but also of
the state labor apparatus, as part of his plan to
rebuild once again the drastically eroded social
base of the state. The efforts to reform the labor
28 NACLA ReportSept.Oct.197729
apparatus largely failed, due to the relative
independent power of the labor bureaucracy and
to the negative impact of Echeverria’s economic
policies on the working class.
By 1973, inflation had seriously eroded the
workers’ buying power and unemployment ran
high for the first time even among the unionized
workers.'” At the same time, the democratic
tendencies within various unions, especially
within the STERM, had gained tremendous
momentum and popular support, while reaction-
ary sectors of the bourgeoisie strongly opposed
the government’s attempts to restructure the
traditional economic and political models of the
country. Thus, in 1973, Echeverria was forced to
seek a rapprochement with the state labor
bureaucrats, relying on them once again to bring
the labor movement under control and to
strengthen the government’s position vis-a-vis the
right-wing sectors of the bourgeoisie. Over the
years that followed, in the attempt to reestablish
the legitimacy of the CTM in the eyes of the
workers, Echeverria granted the bureaucrats
three important concessions with which to
respond to popular demands: emergency wage
hikes, the forty-hour week for government
employees, and the establishment of INFO-
NAVIT, a low-cost housing agency.
The serious challenge faced by the Mexican
state and the ways in which it responded to the
labor insurgency are illustrated most vividly by
the struggle of the electrical workers whose
victories and setbacks, struggles and limitations
are analyzed in the following pages.
LABOR BUREAUCRACY
1. Mark Elliott Thompson, The Development of
Unionism Among Mexican Electrical Workers (unpub-
lished Ph.D. dissertation), Cornell Univ., September
1966,p.157.
2. For more about Lombardo, Velasquez and the
Mexican trade unions’ relations with U.S. labor and
intelligence organizations, see: Philip Agee, Inside the
Company: CIA Diary, Penguin, England, 1975; Fred
Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin
America or Under the Covers with the CIA, San Jose,
Ca., 1974; Harvey A. Levenstein,Labor Organization in
the U.S. and Mexico: A History of Their Relations,
Greenwood Press, 1971; and Jose Steinsleger, Imperial-
ismo y sindicatos en America Latina, Universidad
Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico, 1976.
4. Juan Felipe Leal and Jose Woldenberg, “El
sindicalismo mexicano, aspectos organizativos,” Cua-
dernos Politicos (Mexico), #7, January-March, 1976, p.
37.
5. Ibid., p. 48.
6. For more about Mexico’s agrarian reform, see
“Harvest of Anger,” NACLA ‘s Latin America & Empire
Report, July-August, 1976.
7. Thompson, op. cit., p. 184.
8. Rolando Cordera in Mario Huacuja R. and Jose
Woldenberg, op. cit., p. 2 6.
9. NACLA interview with Demetrio Vallejo, Mexi-
co, 1975.
10. NACLA interview with employee of the Co-
mision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), Mexico, 1977.
11. For more about the current economic crisis and
Echeverria’s policies, see, “Balance de 6 anos de lucha de
clases,” Punto Critico, 1/31/77; “Notas para el estudio
de la conyuntura mexicana,” Punto Critico, #s 19, 22,
and 23; Roberto Castaneda, “Los Limites de reform-
ismo: la crisis del capitalismo en Mexico,” Cuadernos
Politicos, #8, April-June, 1976; Rolando Cordera, “Los
limites del reformismo: la crisis del capitalismo en
Mexico,” Cuadernos Politicos, #2, October-December,
1974; and Carlos Peyrera, “Mexico: los limites del
reformismo,” CuadernosPoliticos, #1, July-September,
1974.
12. See Punto Critico, 8/73, and 1/31/77.
13. Cordera, op. cit., p. 56.
