Labor Realignment Opens Space for Radicals
Leaders of Mexico's labor unions have begun a process of political and organizational realignment which may open space for democratic workers' initiatives from below.
by Dan La Botz At the end of 1995, during a debate over the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government proposal to "reform" and in part privatize the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), a political split developed within the Congress of Labor (CT) between the long-dominant Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the young Federation of Unions of Goods and Services (FESEBES). While the CTM fundamentally supported the PRI's IMSS reform, FESEBES was more critical and helped to organize a large public demonstration against the PRI-government proposal. Now the split has deepened, and the half-dozen unions which form FESEBES have been joined by a number of others to create a loose coalition of 21 labor unions, some members of the PRIcontrolled Congress of Labor (CT), and some independent. FESEBES is led by Francisco Hernandez Juarez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM), a former radical who because labor's closest collaborator with former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari during the 1980s and early 1990s. Hernandez Juarez has been the leading Mexican advocate of a "new unionism" predicated upon union cooperation with the employers operation with the emp overs to increase productivity. He to increase productivity. He
24 International Viewpoint also played a key role in Salinas' privatization of TELMEX, the Mexican Telephone Company. But also in the 21 union coalition are unions such as independent Union of Workers of the Metal, Steel and Iron Industry (STIMHCS) which is affiliated with the independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT). The new group is frequently referred to as the "Foro" or Forum because of a number of public forums on labor and social issues which they have organized. Veteran labor bureaucrat Fidel Velazquez is watching the unfolding reorganization of the Mexican labor bureaucracy from hospital. Velazquez, who will be 96 years old in April, has played a leading role in the Mexican labor bureaucracy since the mid 1930s, and has been the dominant figure since the late 1940s in the PRI-government-controlled CTM. If pro-longed illness or death removed Velazquez from the scene, a struggle for control of the CTM and the CT would immediately develop. Velazquez has promised in any case to step down in 1998. Velazquez and other CTM leaders have criticized Hernandez Juarez, FESEBES, and now the Foro group as "those who seek to divide the labor movement," while callina upon the unions to calling upon the unions to maintain their "historic alliApril 1996 ance" with the PRI. But it seems as if for the first time in decades, some section of Mexican labor officialdom is now prepared to look for a new strategy. What that strategy will be is not yet clear. One of the central questions facing the Foro group is whether or not to remain within the Congress of Labor (CT). Several of the Foro's 21 member unions are independent of both confederations. So far Hernandez Juarez, FESEBES and the Foro have not laid out a clear program of action, but have confined themselves to a critique of positions take by the CT and the CTM. Some of the independent unions within the Foro group are also members of the independent and more radical "May 1st Inter- Union Coalition" which formed late last year. The May 1st coalition grew out of the 1995 May Day demonstrations in Mexico City and out of union solidarity with the 13,000 bus drivers who were fired when the government of the Federal District (Mexico City) privatized the Route 100 bus company. Independent unions and democratic currents within the official unions see this realignment within the labor bureaucracy as opening up space for discussion and debate, and perhaps in the future for joint action. * discuss within it the kind of international relations it should establish, as well as the relationship its members maintain with international organizations. The EZLN's position is to maintain fraternal relations with all international currents and to work towards the structuring of a new international which they define as the international of hope. Whilst the FZLN is taking form and these discussions are in course, we will continue to orient our action on the basis of the programme of the IVth International and the theory of revolutionary marxism, struggling for the elimination of exploitation and oppression in all its forms, for the organization of free men and women freely associated, against the bureaucratic and substitutionist deformation of political organizations, and for the building of a mass revolutionary international. In this process, we ask for your understanding and support.
Lastly, and even though this not quite usual, we want to say to you, and through you to all our comrades in the IVth International, that we hold you all very dear; that we have always had your support and solidarity, that you are as human beings the best in the world, and what unites us is not just words or pieces of paper but a vision of the world as radically different, that is radically humane. 34 years of membership of the IVth International has left us only conviction, commitment and confidence; there will be not a single act of any one of our ex-militants which is not influenced by this example and these motives. * Long live the Fourth International! Long live the Zapatista National
Liberation Front! Notes 1 J. C. Mariategui was a founder of the communist movement in Peru and is often described as the first and most original theorist of an authentically Latin American marxism. His attention to the cultural specificities of marxist strategy has led to frequent comparisons with Antonio Gramsci, working in Italy at about the same time. He was politically and theoretically hostile to the development of soviet marxism under Stalin and adhered to something like a version of permanent revolution for the reality of Latin American societies 2 The reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution were a key part of the neo-liberal programme pursued by the administration of Carlos Salinas (1988-1994). They sought to enable increased privatization and concentration of land ownership, in particular by breaking up the "ejidos" or communal lands which derived originally from pre-colonial forms of social organisation and the right to which was nhrined in this article of the Mexican Constitution, as a central plank in the social pact emerging from the "interrupted" Mexican Revolution.
USA *