The strengthening of the repressive apparatus within Mexico
and along the border with the U.S. has been the subject of
several past Update articles. (July-August 1977; January-February and March-April 1978)
Below we will review what these policies have meant for workers south of the border, and highlight in particular the government’s attack on the electrical and nuclear workers, who were the focus of our September-October 1977 Report.
To carry out the austerity plan of the IMF and Mexican business interests, Lopez Portillo designed the “Alliance for Production” – a “gentlemen’s agreement” between capitalists
and officials of government-controlled unions ostensibly to
keep both price and wage hikes below 10 percent.
In fact, however, prices on basic consumer goods have soared while wages remain virtually frozen, forcing a 30 percent plunge in real wages between January 1977 and January 1978. Massive layoffs have pushed the combined unemployment and underemployment rate to over half the working age population, and police repression against strikes and democratic unionists mounts daily.
The first year of policies worked out between Mexican President Lopez Portillo and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have had a disastrous impact on the Mexican working class, a recent study by the Mexican news jdurnal Punto Critico has shown.
“In the second year,” the magazine predicts, “social conflicts will increase as the regime is shown to be incapable of
offering concessions to the masses, foreshadowing the toughening of repression against workers, campesinos, students
and the poor in general.”
More than 11 million persons are now unemployed or severely
underemployed in Mexico. Over a million have been laid off in
recent months due to the recession and cutbacks in public
spending. Construction of low-cost housing has been frozen by
presidential decrees, intensifying the urban overcrowding. And
reduction in public spending on essential services has produced a “significant increase in the mortality rate.”
The Alliance for Production has also had a devastating effect
on workers who have retained their jobs – including the 16
percent of industrial workers employed by primarily U.S.-
based transnational corporations. Wage increases for most of
1977 were held to 10 percent, in spite of peso devaluations in late 1976 that cut workers’ buying power in half. Independent
unions, such as those at Nissan, Uniroyal, Volkswagen and the
National University, that struck to break the 10 percent limit
May/June 1978 were dealt with harshly by government troops and goons. The ongoing wage controls coupled with increased prices
and trade union collaboration have provoked a rash of wildcat
strikes in the first months of this year – labeled “acts of social terrorism” by Sanchez Mejorada, wealthy industrialist and head of a powerful new grouping of national capitalists, the Executive Coordinating Board (CCE).
Attempts at unionization were also dealt with harshly during this period. Troops were called in last May to break the
organizing attempts of construction workers at PEMEX, the
state-owned oil company, leaving eight workers dead amid the
rich oil fields of Chiapas. And when 600 maintenance workers
on Mexico City’s metro subway threatened to unionize to win
higher wages, the managers of the metro organized goon squads
and detention centers in the underground stations to intimidate and harass the employees.
ENCAMPMENT AT LOS PINOS
Mexico’s militant electrical workers, most of whom are employed in the state-owned Federal Electrical Commission(CFE) have also been in the forefront of struggle in recent months.
In September 1977 five hundred electrical workers and their
families, protesting their firing for earlier strike activities with the Democratic Tendency, erected an “encampment for labor dignity” outside the presidential residence of Los Pinos in Mexico City. The campamento families became the focus of labor solidarity and resistance for over a month until they were driven away by club-swinging police, thereby becoming a symbol of the new president’s attack on workers and their families.
The Democratic Tendency responded to the aggression with a
march and demonstration in downtown Mexico City that drew some 20,000 supporters. In the days following, the leaders of the Democratic Tendency made an offer to the CFE and the president to formally dissolve the Tendency in exchange for the reinstatement of the fired workers and for guarantees that Mexico’s two electrical unions would be united into one. But their proposal fell on deaf ears and was retracted by the Tendency in a flurry of angry exchanges in the national press.
NUCLEAR REACTION
In fact, one of the main concerns of President Lopez Portillo in recent months has been to wipe out one of the strongholds of the Democratic Tendency, the employees of the National Institute of Nuclear Energy (INEN). Lopez Portillo has sent legislation to the Mexican Congress that would reorganize the federally controlled nuclear industry, splitting up the INEN into three separate institutions and opening it up to private capitalists. The new law, if passed, would remove the nuclear workers from the SUTERM electrical union to which they are affiliated, and place them in separate unions under tight government-imposed no-strike restrictions. The nuclear workers say that this is being done to silence their opposition to Mexico’s strategic uranium resources being sold off to U.S. and other private buyers-instead of developing a nationalistic nuclear energy plan favored by the Democratic Tendency.
In a December 20, 1977 declaration published in the Excelsior newspaper, the nuclear workers revealed who would really benefit from the new law:
1- private interests such as American Smelting and Refining
(ASARCO), Frisco and Penoles, who with the new law would be
given free hand to exploit the extensive and valuable uranium
deposits.
2-“Those interested in the business of selling nuclear plants to Mexico,” that is, General Electric and Westinghouse.
3-“The reactionary sector of the so-called ‘scientific community’ ” whose spokesman, Elias Sefchovich, is an ex-sales
agent for General Electric in Mexico.
4-The Mexican government, private and foreign interests who would like to see the Democratic Tendency liquidated “because of its struggle for an independent nuclear policy and for all the democratic struggles of the working class and poor.”
The nuclear workers are literally fighting for the life of
their independent union to stop this initiative, with a so-far
successful lobbying effort in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, a mass educational campaign and a united front with left and democratic trade union forces – including those who oppose the
U.S. grab of Mexico’s oil.
STANDOFF AT LA BOOUILLA
The focus of the electrical workers struggle has not only been in the crowded streets and factories of Mexico City, but in
recent months has shifted to the mountain town of La Boquilla in northern Chihuahua, where 150 electrical workers have occupied a hydroelectric plant. After months of minor confrontations between the CFE and electrical workers loyal to the Democratic Tendency, the CFE on February 8 ordered three hydroelectric plants in the La Boquilla region to be closed down, leaving 150 workers without jobs, 60 small towns and mines without electricity, and assuring that La Boquilla would soon become a ghost town.
The CFE rationalized the move as eliminating an “unprofitable enterprise,” but the workers of La Boquilla tell a different story.
“The CFE is trying to disperse this group of workers because we won’t go along with their underhanded activities,” explained the local head of the union. “They attack the Democratic Tendency because it is a group that defends our union rights.”
To defend their jobs, their union and town, the 150 workers armed themselves and occupied the power plant, while the entire community braced itself for a long fight. The wives
and children of the workers formed brigades to go out and
shine shoes in surrounding villages to collect money, while
fishermen from the coast supplied rations of fish. When the
government sent in troops and scabs in early March, it was the
women and students of La Boquilla who commandeered the buses which had been used to bring scabs and drove them out of the region.
In spite of the determined resistance and an outflowing of
support from all corners of the republic for the actions at La
Boquilla, the government seems intent on closing it down. But in the electrical workers and families, plus their local and national supporters, the CFE will find a tenacious opposition: La Boquilla is the birth place of Democratic Tendency leader
Rafael Galvan and thus its survival is symbolic of the survival of the entire democratic trade union movement.
