Jun 8, 2012
With the safety and security of staff under increasing threat, the Worker Support Center (CAT, Centro de Apoyo al Trabajador) in Mexico has been forced to close its office in Puebla. The decision was based on a risk assessment conducted following the kidnapping and torture of one of CAT’s human rights defenders, Enrique Morales Montaño, on May 15, and ongoing threats against other CAT staff.
The director of CAT, Blanca Velázquez Díaz, who received a death threat in 2011, received a text message just hours after the kidnapping saying that she would be next. CAT’s office also was robbed and vandalized in December 2010.
Mexico’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (Proyecto de Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culurales, ProDESC) and CAT, with broad national and international support, last year requested that the National Commission of Human Rights and the Puebla State Commission of Human Rights grant immediate precautionary measures to protect CAT members in their work. While this request was granted and implemented in 2011, the Puebla State Commission suspended the measures in April 2012 without any headway having been made in the investigations of these threats and without having conducted a risk analysis that would have justified the decision, according to the CAT and ProDESC. The attack on Morales took place one month later. An online petition campaign to the Mexican government on behalf of CAT has gained more than 5,000 signatures.
The Mexican mineworkers union, Los Mineros, together with national and international human rights groups including ProDESC, the UN Office for the High Commission on Human Rights, and Amnesty International, held a press conference last week in Mexico City, calling on the federal government to protect human rights defenders. Despite complaints filed with numerous government agencies and with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States, the culprits remain at large.
“The systematic campaign against worker rights defenders must end—and the only way that will be done is if the Mexican government opens an investigation into the kidnapping, the break-in, and death threats and brings these violent and dangerous perpetrators to justice,” said Lorraine Clewer, Solidarity Center country program director in Mexico.
CAT has led multiple successful worker organizing drives at auto parts and garment assembly factories in the state of Puebla. Formed in 2001, CAT has developed strong relationships with unions and human rights organizations in Mexico, Europe and North America, including the mine workers union of Mexico. Many of CAT’s organizing initiatives have sought to oust protection unions and replace them with democratic, independent organizations. Blanca Velázquez is CAT’s founder and current director.
May 18, 2012
Three days ago, four masked men kidnapped human rights defender José Enrique Morales Montaño, of the Center of Support for Workers (CAT) in Puebla, Mexico. For 16 hours, his captors physically tortured Morales, kept a gun pressed to his head for extended periods, and threatened to kill him and the other CAT members. Then they took his cell phone and backpack and left him on an abandoned highway to make his way home.
At the moment of his kidnapping, Morales was headed to the local labor board in the city of Puebla to accompany a group of textile workers who were fighting a case against a factory in the region. CAT, a longtime Solidarity Center partner, has led multiple successful worker organizing drives at auto parts, maquila, and textile factories in Mexico. Formed in 2001, CAT has worked closely with the United Steelworkers and Los Mineros, the mine workers union of Mexico. Many of CAT’s organizing initiatives have sought to oust protection unions and replace them with democratic, independent organizations. CAT’s founder and current director, Blanca Velázquez Díaz, is a former Solidarity Center local program consultant in Mexico. Two hours after Morales was left by the roadside, she received a text from his cell phone. “You will die, bitch,” it said.
As a non-governmental organization whose mission is to promote the exercise and defense of worker rights, CAT has raised awareness of the precarious conditions that workers in Puebla face every day, but it has also drawn the ire of multinational companies. Morales’s kidnapping is only the latest in a series of systematic attacks. In 2010, CAT’s offices were burglarized and staff was threatened via email and threats painted on the office walls. After intense advocacy efforts, CAT staff received protection from the state of Puebla, but a year later it was removed without explanation or investigation into the threats. Last year, the president of the National Chamber of Industry of the Transformation (Canacintra) publicly called CAT “a threat to Puebla.” In April 2012, the head of the Congressional Labor Committee of Mexico’s House of Deputies pledged to “defend businesses where we have collective bargaining agreements no matter what the cost, even if there is violence.”
Feb 21, 2012
Four years after 400 workers at a bottle manufacturing plant in Mexico were fired for trying to form a union, their wives released a documentary about their lives that recounts a bitter-sweet experience of worker struggle, family survival, and community empowerment and their ongoing case through the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the federal labor authorities.
Just days after workers at the San Luis Potosi bottling plant, owned by Grupo Modelo, overthrew a longtime “protection” union, voted for true democratic union representation, and negotiated a 19 percent salary increase, the leaders and most outspoken supporters of the new union, Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la Empresa Industria Vidriera de Potosi (SUTEIVP), were fired and told they would never work again in their town. Thousands of livelihoods were on the line as families and their communities buckled under the stress of unemployment, discrimination, and intimidation.
Today, the 40 workers and their family members who have been able to hold out without accepting severance or other forms of buy-out from the company are optimistic that victory is in sight. Their cases are advancing at a torturously slow pace through the federal labor system, but the International Labor Organization recently called for an immediate legal resolution, and the factory has received a reinstatement order from the Labor Board in favor of one worker.
On January 26, the fourth anniversary of the firings, SUTEIVP launched a video produced by the wives of the men who had been fired. The day began as leaders and activists from Mexico’s largest independent and democratic unions traveled hundreds of miles to join SUTEIVP members in a rally outside the factory and ended in a gala presentation of the video, “The Other Face of the Resistance: Women’s Role in the San Luis Potosi Glass Makers’ Struggle.”
SUTEIVP leaders read a statement of support from United Steelworkers Union President Leo Gerrard. After that came speeches by Mexican unions representing teachers, municipal employees, tire workers, oil industry engineers, electricians, and power station and railway workers. The Solidarity Center’s country program director for Mexico, Lorraine Clewer, encouraged Grupo Modelo to do the right thing and break with protection unionism. Finally, the SUTEIVP leaders addressed the workers behind the heavily guarded perimeter fences of the bottle factory, letting them know that they are not alone in their struggle against workplace corruption and fear.
At the shift change, busloads of workers stopped to watch the rally, which transformed into a caravan of strength and solidarity as participants marched to the city center. Then at 5:30 p.m., the wives of the fired activists welcomed hundreds of guests from San Luis Potosi´s university, feminist, environmental, and other community groups to the premiere of their self-directed video. Supporters acknowledged in discussion afterward that by making visible the firings’ impact on women’s lives, livelihoods, and relationships, and by illustrating the positive transformation that the women and their families had gone through in order to get beyond surviving to fighting for their right to have a public voice in a male-dominated, classist society, the documentary provided a much needed example of female empowerment that should open doors for new alliances and new victories for working families in San Luis Potosi and other sites of conflict in Mexico.
Concepción López Pardo, the unofficial spokesperson for the wives, who admits she had never raised her voice to defend herself in public before her husband was fired, told the audience as she brushed away tears, “My son was hit by a pickup truck recently. As I rode to the hospital in the ambulance with him, I thought ‘why us?’ My husband said that he’d go and get his severance pay in order to pay the bills, but I said no. I’d rather sell our house than our dignity. I won’t accept any crumbs that the factory will throw to us.”
Another wife, Rosa Rodríguez, described a woman who offered to give the men free haircuts. until they had their jobs back and could afford to pay. “There are so many other stories like this that we could tell,” she said.
Feb 21, 2012
Trade unionists around the world are mobilizing this week, calling on the Mexican government to stop its attack on workers and implement steps to allow for workers to organize independent democratic trade unions of their choosing. In Washington, DC, union members and worker and human rights activists will rally at noon on Thursday, February 23, in front of the Mexican Embassy, located at 1911 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Last year, more than 50,000 union members, students, and human rights activists from some 40 countries participated in the Global Days of Action. For six days, union members came together in an unprecedented show of solidarity. They wrote thousands of letters to the Mexican government, organized more than 50 meetings at Mexican embassies throughout the world, and held massive demonstrations, inside and outside Mexico. Their urgent message: STOP the attack on workers. We demand trade union rights in Mexico, NOW!
The impact of these global actions was felt around the world. On February 24, just weeks after the Global Days of Action launched, political prisoner Juan Linares of the National Miners’ and Metalworkers’ Union of Mexico was released from jail after being unjustly imprisoned for more than two years.
Building on the 2011 actions, independent unions in Mexico, together with their respective global union partners, have come together as a movement of force, challenging retrogressive labor legislation, confronting Mexico’s scandalous “protection contract” system, and exposing corporate and political corruption.
Despite an escalation in action and outcry from unions in Mexico and at theinternational level, workers continue to be denied fundamental rights, independent unions face violent and political attack, and corporate impunity is at an all-time high.
During the week of February 19–25, 2012, in honor of the Pasta de Conchos miners who died in a mine blast on February 19, 2006, members of the international labor movement are again asked to take action.
Feb 24, 2003
The first report in the Solidarity Center’s “Justice for All” series, takes a hard look at Mexico’s century-long fight for independent, democratic trade unions and social justice. Author Lance Compa puts Mexico’s labor law and practice to the test against international worker rights standards reflected in International Labor Organization
conventions and the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
Download here.
