Report
The Dignity Campaign, FIOB, and AFSC proposals, are not just alternative programs for changing laws and policies, but implicit strategies of alliances based on mutual interest.
The violence and climate of fear that pervade large parts of Mexico affect everyone, but the effects and intensity typically depend on one’s economic position and political influence.
On the first anniversary of Bernardo Vásquez’s murder, I was asked to do a photo exhibit in Vásquez’s hometown of San José del Progreso, featuring movements in opposition to mining in Mexico and Guatemala. When I arrived at the town, I was greeted by more than 100 people who had blockaded the entrance to the mine.
Robin Alexander and Dan LaBotz
How Mexico's recently reformed labor law weakens workers’ bargaining power.
On December 21, 2013 Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, gave the official decree ending the 75-year history of the national oil company, PEMEX, which coincided with the privatization of Mexico’s electrical generating and distribution system. The geopolitical implications may be sweeping, with the NAFTA bloc quickly becoming the globe’s most important energy power. For roughly a quarter-million employees, the likelihood of massive layoffs and benefits cuts is unknown, but widely anticipated.
Mexico’s energy reform is a historical rupture with its nationalist past. In spite of popular opposition, it has been pushed through by a powerful elite consensus in the United States and Mexico and by an alliance among all three major political parties.
Most of the unions that exist in Mexico’s maquila sector—the duty-free assembly plants that import raw materials and intermediate goods, and then export final products for consumption elsewhere—exist only on paper.
Outside the Washington beltway, a loose network of groups has grown that has generally opposed most "comprehensive immigration reform" bills and their provisions, and that has organized movements on the ground to oppose increased enforcement and repression directed against immigrant communities.
Richard Roman and Edur Velasco
By incorporating low-wage, low-rights Mexico into the continental production system, a process that was well under way before NAFTA, big business sought both to discourage labor militancy as well as to harmonize labor costs downward in Canada, the United States, and in the older industrialized and unionized regions of Mexico. NAFTA “constitutionalized” these transformations by treaty.
Robin Alexander and Dan LaBotz
Mexico recently passed a labor law that will make jobs less secure by, among other things, permitting greater outsourcing as well as temporary and part-time work. The law is the result of 40 years of struggle among political parties, rival unions, employers, and workers.
SINHAMBRE (National Crusade Against Hunger) continues the historic anti-democratic approaches to anti-poverty policy by taking a charity-based approach that excludes workers, consumers, and campesinos from the decision-making process.
José Antonio Almazán González
In October 2009, with Mexico facing severe repercussions from the international economic crisis—its GDP contracting by nearly 6%—the government of President Felipe Calderón organized a takeover of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME).
Mexico’s miners have long fought for higher wages, better working conditions, and for the right to unionize independently. At every turn, they have encountered resistance from the government, from mining corporations, and from government-controlled unions.
