[News] Mexico - Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10192009.html
October 19, 2009


"With One Stroke of the Pen Calderon Has Ruined Our Lives"

Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

During the first week of October, the increasingly unpopular 
government of Felipe Calderon stepped up its ongoing war of words 
against the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), one of the 
nation's oldest labor organizations founded at the apogee of the 
landmark Mexican Revolution in 1914 when workers repeatedly shut down 
the Canadian-owned Mexican Light & Power Company.  Now with the 
centennial of the Revolution on deck in 2010, the SME's survival as a 
union is in jeopardy and it may never make it to the birthday party.

Following the nationalization of electricity generation and 
distribution under President Adolfo Lopez Mateos in 1960, the SME 
("Esmay") won collective bargaining agreements for the newly created 
Luz y Fuerza Del Centro that distributes about a fifth of the 
nation's energy to Mexico City and four surrounding states.  Mexico's 
second power utility, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) 
services the rest of the country and its workers are represented by a 
"charro" (company) union under the thumb of the Institutional 
Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ran the lives of Mexicans from the 
cradle to the grave for 71 years until it was displaced from power by 
Calderon's rightist PAN in 2000.

Although the SME had longstanding ties to the PRI, it maintained a 
modicum of critical independence.  Communists and Trotskyists wielded 
influence in union circles and decorated the walls of the union 
headquarters with proletarian murals.  The Sindicato Mexicano de 
Electricistas has always been good for 40,000 boots on the ground 
when it comes to social protest.  After the 1985 Mexico City 
earthquake that took up to 30,000 lives, SME workers rescued victims 
trapped in the rubble of fallen buildings and worked tirelessly 
around the clock to restore power in working class colonies.  In 
contrast, the PRI-run government abandoned "los de abajo" ("those 
down below") to their own fate.

Three years ago, after hotly contested presidential elections, the 
SME cautiously lined up with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) after 
Calderon was awarded victory over the leftist leader in fraud-marred 
balloting.  Calderon has never forgiven the union's 66,000 members - 
44,000 active workers and 22,000 pensioners - for this partisan sin.

The Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas is built on a democratic 
structure although it has not always been a paragon of 
democracy.  Strikes can only be called by referendum and plebiscite 
and negotiated settlements are ratified by general assemblies in 
which every vote is counted.  Union officials and members of its 
executive board are elected every three years but the vote-taking is 
staggered and the union always seems to be in the process of electing 
its officials.

When last spring Martin Esparza, a 45 year-old veteran official, 
sought a third term as SME secretary-general, he was opposed by union 
treasurer Alejandro Munoz in an election that was redolent with 
mudslinging. Esparza accused Munoz of playing footsy with Calderon's 
then-personal secretary Cesar Nava, now president of the PAN, and 
Munoz charged that his rival had pocketed moneys set aside for the 
construction of a new union office building.  When Esparza was 
re-elected by a little more than 300 out of 66,000 votes, Munoz 
appealed to Calderon's hardnosed Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano not 
to recognize Esparza as secretary general of the SME.  Lozano was 
eager to comply, refusing to sign a "nota de toma" or official 
recognition of Esparza's re-election.  As a result, Luz y Fuerza del 
Centro cut off all check-off dues and subsidies to the SME and the 
union was unable to meet its payroll.

As is union tradition, Esparza mobilized his loyalists and 10,000 
workers encamped outside the Labor Secretariat in the south of the 
city adjacent to the Periferico or ring road, this megalopolis's most 
vital traffic artery, threatening to shut it down.  Rumors circulated 
that SME workers would "baja el switch" (diminish electricity 
distribution) and security forces were put on alert at the end of 
September - the criminalization of social protest has been the most 
salient feature of Calderon's three rocky years at the wheel of state.

Javier Lozano is Felipe Calderon's hatchet man.  For the past few 
years, he has been seeking (with little success) to dismember the 
Miners and Metalworkers Union that, like the SME, dates back to the 
Mexican revolution.  His encounters with the Chinese businessman Ye 
Gon are the stuff of legend - Mr. Ye alleges that the labor secretary 
forced him to stash $200 million USD from a Calderon slush fund in 
his palatial Mexico City mansion, ordering the pharmaceutical kingpin 
who was granted citizenship by the president's predecessor Vicente 
Fox, to either "cooperate" ("coopeles" in fake Mexican Chinese) or 
have his throat slashed ("cuello.")  When Ye Gon rebelled, he was jailed.

The Lozano-Calderon assault on the SME obeyed the same logic.  At the 
nub of the dispute is 1100 kilometers of fiber optics that would be 
run through Luz y Fuerza power lines by a private Spanish 
transnational. The concession was handed down by 1998 by then 
president Ernesto Zedillo to the Madrid-based WS Communications 
Corporation whose chief Mexican stockholders are two ex-energy 
secretaries Ernesto Martens and Fernando Canales Clariond.  For 
arcane reasons probably related to the reluctance of Carlos Slim, 
owner of the near-monopoly phone company Telmex and the richest 
tycoon in Latin America, the concession was repeatedly modified and 
did not kick in until 2008.  By then, Esparza, in his second term as 
boss of the SME, was proposing that Luz y Fuerza be awarded the fiber 
optics concession for the so-called "triple play" (telephone, 
television, and internet) connection.  WS Communications' legal 
representative Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the bristly-bearded PAN 
fixer and former presidential candidate from whose law firm Calderon 
has drawn two key cabinet members - Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez 
Montt, the second most powerful politico in Mexico, and Attorney 
General Arturo Chavez Chavez - went to work.  Calderon and Fernandez 
offered the union two options: "Cooperate or Cuello."  The stage was 
set for an epic showdown.

Saturday, October 10: Something odd was in the air.  Weather 
forecasts prognosed a 40 per cent  chance of "tormentas electricas" 
(electric storms.)  That afternoon, Mexico would face off against El 
Salvador at the mammoth Azteca Stadium in the run-up to next year's 
World football Cup in South Africa.  The home team had already 
clinched a ticket to Jo'berg and the outcome against the hopelessly 
outgunned Central Americans was never in doubt.  Nonetheless, the 
nation's two-headed television monster Televisa and TV Azteca, both 
of which had spent the past week trashing the SME for its workers' 
"exorbitant" salaries (6000 pesos a month, about $500 Americano) and 
Luz y Fuerza's over-the-top rates (the government sets the rates), 
launched into hours of relentless ballyhoo replete with Mariachis, 
fight songs, and scantily-clad cheerleaders.

The contest cted was no contest,  with Mexico's national team pouring 
in four quick goals.  After the lopsided victory, as is traditional 
is this football-obsessed country, tens of thousands of fans 
descended on the monument to the Angel of Independence on posh 
Reforma boulevard to celebrate and  Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard 
dispatched city cops to police the party which often gets 
unruly.  Around 11 PM, the police moved in to wind down the fiesta.

At the same hour and just blocks away, 5000 Army and Federal Police 
troops (the Federal Police is drawn from the military) were forcing 
their way into the central Luz y Fuerza installation and 103 other 
power stations in the capital and adjoining states at gunpoint.  They 
met with little resistance from the SME skeleton crews inside the 
plants on a Saturday night.  One worker, Fernando H., a 22-year 
veteran of Luz y Fuerza, had only time to grab his jacket before he 
was pushed into the street, leaving a mountain of memorabilia he had 
accumulated down the years behind.  Once the plants were cleared, the 
Army threw up metal barricades to keep the workers at bay.

By midnight, an extraordinary edition of the Official Diary (one had 
never been published on a weekend before) was rolling off government 
presses containing President Felipe Calderon's decree dissolving Luz 
y Fuerza del Centro and, as a consequence, the union that kept the 
state company running. Striking such a low blow on a Saturday night 
when no one was watching constitutes a "Sabadazo." Remember Richard 
Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre?

Sunday, October 11: Word of the takeover flared like wildfire in the 
colonias where SME workers live.  Everyone in Mexico but me has a 
cell phone now and the shocking news spread from ear to 
ear.  Thousands were gathered outside the Sindicato's downtown 
offices on Antonio Caso Street by 3 AM.  Martin Esparza closeted with 
his executive committee to decide on a plan of action.  By first 
light, the crowd had spilled out onto the nearby esplanade of the 
Monument of the Revolution where the bones of the heroes of that 
glorious struggle are entombed.

In mid-morning, the Secretary General emerged from his inner sanctum 
arm-in-arm with his rival Alejandro Munoz and the two led 20,000 SME 
members to the heavily barricaded Interior Secretariat several blocks 
away.  Fenced off from the old colonial building by thousands of 
police and army troops, the workers sat down in the street.

Meanwhile, inside the complex, Calderon's braintrust was trying to 
put a happy face on the seizure of Luz y Fuerza at a tightly 
controlled press conference during which only the "prensa vendida" 
(bought-off press) was allowed to ask questions.

Gomez Montt, Cevallos's burly law partner, postulated that the 
President had been forced by limited government resources to shut 
down the company because it had become a bottomless sinkhole of 
subsidies in the midst of a crushing economic downturn that had left 
the government without sufficient funds to even buy a fresh batch of 
swine flu vaccine.  The President would no longer tolerate throwing 
good money after bad to sustain the privileges of "elite" workers at 
the expense of 26,000,000 poverty-stricken Mexicans. The Calderon 
bureaucracy counts 26,000,000 extreme poor but most workers live in 
and around the poverty line and would indeed themselves descend into 
"extreme poverty" if deprived of their jobs as Calderon had just ordered.

Then the 350-pound finance minister Augusto Carstens took the mic to 
sweeten the pot.  Workers who signed off on their own liquidation 
would receive two and a half years worth of salary - an additional 
bonus if they did so in the next 30 days.  Carstens presented a 
blizzard of data to justify the 20,000,000 peso boodle that it would 
cost the government to shut down Luz y Fuerza - the money is thought 
to be drawn down from nearly a billion dollars in World Bank credits 
granted last April for environmental mitigation. The World Bank and 
the International Monetary Fund have a track record for favoring the 
privatization of state electricity companies in Latin America.

There were few questions from the prensa vendida.

By nightfall, once the workers had retreated from the Interior 
Secretariat, Felipe Calderon went on national television to explain 
the flimflam to the nation.  His conscience was clear. He was doing 
the right thing for Mexico - despite the fact that he had just 
deprived 66,000 workers of their livelihood (the number is closer to 
300,000 since each Mexican family has an average five members) in a 
country that has been whacked by the steepest economic downslide 
since the Great Depression and where unemployment now exceeds 16 per cent.

SME veteran Fernando H. stood stiffly across the avenue from the 
central Mexico City Luz y Fuerza plant, staring forlornly at his now 
police-occupied former place of employment. "With one stroke of his 
pen, Calderon has ruined our lives."

To be continued.

John Ross's "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption in Mexico City" will be 
published by Nation Books November 3.  Northern Californians can get 
an earful Friday the 13th at Northtown Books in Arcata and Modern 
Times on the 18th in San Francisco's Mission District. Ross, who will 
also be traveling with his recently published "Iraqigirl", the highly 
praised diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation, is 
scouting venues for 2010.  Write 
<mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org if you have any bright ideas.




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