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.