Protest Cop Killing of Steel Workers

Mexico

The following statement, translated from Spanish, was issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

APRIL 20—This morning, state and federal authorities stepped up their anti-union, anti-worker campaign, launching a murderous attack to break the strike at the Sicartsa steel plant in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. At least two workers, members of SNTMMSRM Local 271 [miners and steel workers union affiliated with the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)], were killed and dozens were wounded during the siege by 800 federal and state police. As we write, workers still hold the plant at Lázaro Cárdenas, having beaten back the police attack, and the union local has vowed to continue the strike begun on April 2 in opposition to the government’s replacement of the national union leader [Napoleón Gómez Urrutia].

Attacks by the bosses and the state on the union have been steadily mounting; the siege takes place just one day after the strikes carried out by the miners union in five locations were declared illegal by the Federal Council of Conciliation and Arbitration. A week ago, a special delegate of the union’s National Executive Committee, Indalecio Pérez Morones, was jailed on trumped-up charges in transparent retaliation for leading a strike at the La Caridad mine in Nacozari de García, Sonora, that has gone on since March 24. He could be sentenced to 45 years in prison, and there is an order for the capture of 22 members of the strike committee. As we wrote in an 11 March statement (printed below), “The target of this attack is the labor movement as a whole. An injury to one is an injury to all! We call on all working people and opponents of capitalist exploitation to oppose this attack.”

Many striking workers Espartaco recently talked with in Lázaro Cárdenas expressed their hope that a PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] federal government would represent a change for the better. But the PRD, a bourgeois party, has joined forces with the federal PAN [National Action Party] government in carrying out this attack on the union through the state government of Michoacán that it heads. After the death of 65 miners in Coahuila in February, AMLO [PRD leader López Obrador] expressed his anti-union position, stating that union leaders are merely “contract traffickers” (La Jornada, 24 February). During a campaign stop in Lázaro Cárdenas on April 7, López Obrador claimed that he would respect trade-union autonomy—there you have the PRD’s notion of union autonomy! As we warned in Espartaco No. 25 (Spring 2006), the PRD “is an enemy of the working class. As it has already done in Mexico City, in the event of winning the presidency it will administer brutal capitalist exploitation on a national level and will not hesitate for a second to unleash the repressive force of the state against those who support it today.” The PRD, like the other parties of capital, defends only the interests of the capitalist class and its state, seeing workers’ lives as worthless in its attempts to put an end to a strike that has already cost the company some $80 million. Mobilize the power of the working class to defeat this deadly anti-union offensive! Break with all the bourgeois parties: PRI, PAN, PRD! Workers to power!

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Government Hands Off the Miners Union!

The Grupo Espartaquista de México, a revolutionary Marxist organization, strenuously protests the attack by the government on the miners and steel workers union and fully solidarizes with these workers’ struggle. The mining bosses’ insatiable drive for profit drove 65 workers to their deaths in the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila, in an explosion on February 19. Faced with the anger and indignation of the miners’ families, co-workers, important sectors of the working class and of the population as a whole, the government launched a union-busting attack, removing the national leader of the SNTMMSRM to replace him with a bureaucrat more to their liking, filing charges against the union leader, and freezing the union bank accounts. This is a transparent and calculated move by the government to shift attention away from itself and the Grupo México mining company, who are directly responsible for this atrocity. Not satisfied with having driven the miners to their deaths through their criminal negligence and superexploitation, now they also want to destroy their union.

The union fired back with a small taste of its social power—rolling strikes on a national scale that lasted 40 hours, that mobilized 270,000 workers protesting the government attack and demanding better working conditions and wages, and that caused losses estimated at over $17 million to the bloodsucking bosses. Already over 30,000 workers from the SME, CROC, CROM and UNT unions mobilized on Tuesday, March 7, in Mexico City with the miners in solidarity. The target of this attack is the labor movement as a whole. An injury to one is an injury to all! We call on all working people and opponents of capitalist exploitation to oppose this attack.

Class-struggle defense of the unions requires a fight for their complete and unconditional independence from the bourgeoisie and its state—the prerequisite to achieving trade-union democracy and to transforming the unions into organs of struggle for the interests of the great exploited masses. This means breaking with all illusions in the bosses’ parties—PRI, PRD, PAN. This means a fight to build a revolutionary workers party to smash the profit-driven, murderous system of capitalism and replace it with the rule of the working class through international socialist revolution. That is the purpose of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Bourgeois state, hands off the SNTMMSRM! Drop the charges against Napoleón Gómez Urrutia! Down with the reprisals against striking workers!

11 March 2006