* Mexico
In January the National Union of Workers (UNT) and other independent unions, particularly the university unions, created a new political organization, the Social Movement of Workers (Movimiento Social de los Trabajadores or MST). The MST plans to register as a political organization and may run candidates for office, raising the possibility that it could become something like a Mexican
Clearly the recent debate over reform of the Federal Labor Law (LFT) is one of the issues which has led some of the independent unions to decide that they should create an independent political organization of
Francisco Hernandez Juarez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and one of the three co-presidents of the National Union of Workers (UNT), the recently founded independent labor federation, told the press: "Until now there has not been any national organization which reflects the interests of the workers themselves in the legislative arena. In fact, at this moment we are very aware that there is an attempt to reform the Federal Labor Law (LFT) without consulting the workers, and those who are writing it will do so on the basis of the position of their party, their particular government or business interests, without taking the workers into consideration."
But at the same time the founding of the MST both responds to other social pressures, and raises new political possibilities. The neo-liberal counter-revolution first inaugurated by President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88) and largely completed under President Carlos Salinas (198894) reorganized the economy, conveying state industries into private hands, privatizing many formerly public social services, and carrying out a tremendous transfer of wealth from workers and the middle class into a the hands new Mexican elite. Then, in December 1994 president Ernesto Zedillo's (1994-2000) devaluation of the peso, resulted in the worst depression in 60, dramatically worsening the living conditions of millions of Mexicans. A New Stage of Labor Organization 14 International Viewpoint #310 April 1999 economic crisis among rural people, from the Chiapas Rebellion of 1994 led by the Zapatista ment led by the once prosperous farmers of Zacatecas; second, electoral political shifts leading to increased votes first for the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and later for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Two yearsago the PRI lost its majority in the Mexican Congress's lower house to the PAN and PRD, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the PRD won the election as mayor of Mexico City.
There were some large and important labor struggles in the 1990sparticularly the fight by the Mexican City Bus Drivers Union (SUTAUR) to preserve their jobs. But the level of working class organization lagged behind, particularly in the political arena. But last year a group of unions broke from the Congress of Labor (CT) and joined with a number of independent unions to create the National Union of Workers (UNT) Now that same constellation of unions has created what could become some sort of working class political party. This may represent a new and important stage of labor organization, perhaps the entry of the unions into politics in a new way.
Yet many things remain obscure. Francisco Hernandez Juarez of the Telephone Workers Union (STRM) has been the personality in the UNT and now seems likely to be one of the major figures in the MST. Hernandez Juarez was a close associate of former president Carlos Salinas in the 1980s, and remains a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). How will Hernandez Juarez and other union leaders with ties to the PRI reconcile that political affiliation with their new role as organizers and
KENS OF THE The party, the state and the union: the pitfalls of labor politics in Mexico by Dan La Botz The Social Movement of the Workers (MST) is not the first attempt to forming a working class political party in Mexico, and there may be some lessons in the experience and history of earlier attempts made over the last 90 years.
In the past, workers, unions, and radicals failed in several attempts to create organizations independent of the ruling party and the state. Labor unions leaders tended to rope the unions into political movements which tied them to military or political leaders. Those leaders in turn transformed the unions and would-be labor parties into mechanisms for supporting the president, his party, and the government. Socialist and Communist Parties of the 1920s
While the anarchists and Roman Catholics dominated the labor movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. there were small socialist currents as well. The German-born Pablo Zierold, a brewery worker in Toluca, organized a Socialist Party in 1911, but that party never prospered. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), virtually every military and political leader called his faction "socialist," but the word had little meaning beyond a vague radicalism. Socialism just never took off in Mexican culture.
In 1918, a group of Mexicans and foreigners living in Mexico founded the Communist Party, which succeeded by
the mid-1920s in becoming a small organization based largely among petroleum and railroad workers, and peasants. At times the Communist received support from the new revolutionary nationalist Mexican government, and at other times in the 1920s and early 1930s the Communists were suppressed. Communist remained a small but significant tendency in the Mexican labor movement, but never proved successful as an independent electoral force. Mexico's First Labor Party
Meanwhile a group of anarchist union leaders headed by Luis N Morones had broken with their libertarian doctrine, rallied to the Constitutionalist government of Venustiano Carranza, and founded the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, the
A year later Morones used the CROM to establish the Mexican Labor Party (Partido Laborista Mexicano or PLM). Morones created that first Mexican Labor Party to support the candidacy of General Alvaro Obregon, and after Obregon became president, the PLM supported him in putting down the rebellion of
Obregon and his successor Plutarco Elias Calles, working closely with Morones, succeeded in turning the CROM and the PLM into the principal social support of the new ruling party and the state. What began as a labor party became the state-party.
Obregon was assassinated in 1928, and Calles broke the alliance with Morones. Without government support Morones, the CROM and the PLM went into decline, and soon into oblivion. By 1932 the CROM had broken up into rival factions, and the first Labor Party ceased to be a factor in Mexican politics. The Popular Front in Mexico
The 1930s produced a working class upsurge in Mexico just as in the United States and France, with a similar though often subterranean political alliance between Socialists, Communists and liberal capitalist parties.
In Mexico, the more militant wing of the labor movement reorganized under the leadership Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Once Morones's house intellectual, Lombardo Toledano had become a Marxist and an admirer of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, though not a member of the Communist Party.
Lombardo joined with Velazquez, a former milk wagon driver, and the leader of a coalition of small labor unions in the Federal District, and then with the Communist labor unions, and together they formed Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Under Lombardo, the CTM became closely allied with General Lazaro Cardenas, who had been chosen by Calles to become president in 1934.
The Communist wanted Lazaro Cardenas to form a Popular Front Coalition, so that they could represent the labor-left component of such a front. But Cardenas ignored their entreaties and went ahead and rather than forming a popular front, reorganized the state-party, calling it the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM).
Cardenas organized the PRM on the basis of three social pillars: the labor unions of the CTM, the peasants of the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC), and the government employees and the self-employed grouped in the National Confederation of Peoples' Organizations (CNOP).
All workers who joined the CTM thus automatically became members of the PRM. Cardenas stepped down from the presidency in 1940, and the party turned to the right, later becoming the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or the PRI. Labor had become submerged in the state-party oriented toward domestic and foreign capital.
ARAJO -50. . AUSTERIDAD PRUSTA The Cold War and CTM Purges
In about 1948 the Cold War reached Mexico, and largely under the influence of the U.S. State Department, Fidel Velazquez and his groups (known as the five wolves) organized the purge of Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Communists, expelling them from the CTM and therefore from the PRI as well. The PRI-state carried out its own simultaneous purge of reds, though never with the intensity or thoroughness of the Truman-MeCarthy period in the U.S.
Lombardo and his followers, now out of the PRI, organized their own rival union federation and a new political party, the People's Party (Partido Popular, the named was later changed the Partido Popular Socialista or PPS).
The PPS had the character of a working class political party, with an ideology that proclaimed loyalty Mexican Revolution and to Stalin's Russia. Ironically, over the years the PPS became a satellite of the PRI, fiercely loyal to the Mexican government, while retaining its Stalinist rhetoric and support for the Soviet Union-the worst, one might say, of both worlds.
During the 1950s and 60s the PRIstate succeeded in suppressing or coopting most opposition movements. The biggest labor explosion of the 1950s,
ROSARIO
IBARRA
La la
Camara
Trota asil el 7 de julio ear the national railroad workers' strike of 1959, was suppressed by the Mexican Army, its leaders were jailed. No political movements could bloom in such a climate of repression.
But after the Mexican Army massacre of hundreds of students of Tlatelolco or the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City in 1968, new radical movements appeared. The Electrical Workers Union (SUTERM) and the Democratic Tendency of unions and social movement which it led might have grown into some sort of working class party, had it not been suppressed by the Mexican Army in the mid-1970s. The Labor-Left in Congress
In the 1970s the Mexican government legalized the Communist Party, permitting it to run candidates in national elections. The Communists joined with other small leftist groups to form the Mexican Unified Socialist Party (PSUM) and succeeded in winning election of a few members of the lower house.
At about the same time Heriberto Castillo organized the Mexican Workers Party (Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores or PMT), really a radical, nationalist and populist party.
Then several small Trotskyist groups joined together to form the Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido Revolutionary de
By the early 1980s there were three leftist labor parties in parliament representing about 10 percent of the vote in national elections, not far behind the National Action Party (PAN).
In 1987 Cuauhtemoc Cardenas led a split in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an event which electrified the Mexican left and attracted most of the left-labor parties. The PSUM and the other left-labor parties supported the Cardenas and the National Democratic Front in the 1988 elections, and then after the election was stolen from him, went on to join him in founding the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989.
International Viewpoint #310 April 1999 15
* Americas
Some have called the PRD the euthanasia of Mexican Communism, since the Communist (then called the Mexican Socialist Party or PSM) voted themselves out of existence to join the PRD.
(Carlos Salinas and especially his brother Raul, recently convicted of murder, had alliances with several Maoist and other radicals groups in Mexico. Salinas encouraged one of them, Land and Liberty in Monterrey, a kind of political machine based on an urban poor, to become a political party, the Workers Party [Partido de Trabajo or PT]. The PT never represented a working class or labor union party, and became a satellite of the PRI until the exile of Salinas the jailing of his brother.
serious reversals in
The PT suffered recent elections.)
The PRD, despite the participation