This upturn in workers' struggles shows the depth of the regime's crisis. On the one hand, buying power has officially fallen by 50% in the last six years. On the other, the majority of trade unions in Mexico are affiliated to the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI), the ruling party since its foundation 60 years ago, so the majority of workers are nominally members of this party. Workers' leaders thus enjoy many economic and political privileges. In the SNTE for example, there are two senators, 16 federal deputies, 42 local deputies and 500 mayors. Added to this is the impunity with which leaders practise corruption and gangsterism to maintain their power. Carlos Jongitud took power at gun-point in 1982, and between 1980 and 1985 150 leaders were assassinated.
The teachers' movement represents a continuation of the defeat suffered by the PRI in the presidential elections in July 1989 (see IV 145 and 146, July 25 and September 19, 1988). The government attempted to call a halt to this succession of defeats when it imprisoned the leader of the oilworkers' union. However, the state cannot calm the democratic desires of the masses with superficial changes, such as changing the leadership of the SNTE. This measure, which it was forced to take by the pressure of the mass teachers' movement, is an indication of the possibility of major workers' struggles for the democratization of Mexican trade-union life. *
Hunger strike protest for José Ramon
ON MAY 4, leaders of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT, Mexican section of the Fourth International) announced at a press conference their intention to go on hunger strike from May 10 if