All Labor Must Defend Miners Union!

Mexico: Brutal Cop Attack Breaks Cananea Strike

The following is a translation of a leaflet issued on June 14 by our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México.

On June 7, some 2,000 cops from federal, state and municipal police forces brutally broke the nearly three-year-long strike of miners at Cananea, Sonora [near the border with Arizona] organized in Local 65 of the SNTMMSRM [miners and metal workers] union. The pretext was a resolution of the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board, issued on June 4, which declared the “end of the labor relationship” (thus laying off the entire workforce) and put an “end to the strike the workers maintained at the mine” (La Jornada, 8 June). Illustrating that the ultimate goal is to get rid of the miners union, Javier Lozano (Secretary of Labor) and [mining company] Grupo México plan to impose a company union linked to the Federación Nacional de Sindicatos Independientes (FNSI, National Federation of Independent Unions), which was created and sponsored by the bourgeoisie of the city of Monterrey, and give it the collective contract that would come with reopening the mine.

The workers refuted the government’s transparent lies that the action had been “peaceful” and that there had been “no casualties.” In seizing the mine, police used tear gas and, according to Marco Antonio del Toro, a lawyer for the miners union, two workers were shot. Five miners were arrested and later declared that they had been tied up and forced to kneel on a hill for several hours. With incredible cruelty, police forces seized the facilities of the Pasta de Conchos mine in a simultaneous action, dispersing people who have been mourning the death of 65 miners in the tragedy of February 2006 [a mine explosion] and arresting the mothers of two of the fallen miners. Several unions, including prominently the United Steel Workers (USW) of the U.S., have declared their solidarity with the miners union. We Spartacists protest this new attack and call on the workers movement as a whole to mobilize in defense of the miners union. Defend the miners union!

The state and the capitalists are determined to bring the miners union to its knees and get rid of its leadership, which has been facing charges for several years now. From the beginning, we have called for dropping all charges against the leadership of the miners union, including [Napoleón] Gómez Urrutia—without giving them any political support—on the basis of the elementary principle summed up in the slogan: bourgeois state, hands off the unions!

In the crusade against the miners union, the Lázaro Cárdenas [steel] workers came first; they managed to achieve victory in their 2006 strike after heroically repelling a brutal police attack (including state police under the command of the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution]) in April of that year, at the cost of two dead workers. Then it was Cananea’s turn. (This is not the first time the state has launched an attack to break this strike.) In January 2008, hundreds of police attacked the strikers. Despite the fact that police temporarily took control of the mine, they failed in the end and the strike went on.

The union’s answer at the time was a national eight-hour strike involving some 25,000 workers from 85 steel plants and mines. By June 2010, the strike at Cananea, a place famous for the heroic 1906 strike [whose repression by Mexican troops and Arizona Rangers was an important factor in the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20], had caused losses to the bosses of at least $1.5 billion—the Cananea workers hit the bosses hard. The vengeful government, which is the bosses’ executive committee, wants revenge. In this new attempt, the government felt emboldened by the relatively easy victory it achieved in destroying the SME electrical workers union last October, when it did not face a major response from labor.

Should this new attack on the miners union—the union that has been the most combative in the country over the last several years—succeed, it would pave the road for similar attacks on the continuing [miners] strikes in Taxco and Sombrerete. It would mean a crucial victory for the bosses and their state in their longtime offensive against this union, and it would be yet another terrible blow against the entire labor movement. After the SME, the miners union is simply next on the list. This new attack must not pass unchallenged!

Despite the militancy of the ranks, the bureaucracy leading the miners union itself shares central responsibility for the enormous defeat inflicted on the SME—a defeat for the entire working class. As we wrote in Espartaco (January 2010 supplement), “The responsibility for this ominous defeat lies with the pro-capitalist leadership of the falsely ‘independent’ unions, such as the UNT [National Union of Workers], that line up behind the bourgeois PRD, as well as that of the miners union, who only mobilized the ranks in order to relieve pressure and did not organize any strike action that would hit the bosses where it hurts—in their pockets.” Through their actions, the pro-capitalist union bureaucracies hung the SME out to dry while sowing illusions in the courts, the bourgeois PRD and the PRD’s actions in Congress. Today, in the face of the new government attack, the miners long for a forceful response from their leadership: “And when will the national strike take place? Since the beginning you have been saying that, and nothing happens!” exclaimed a worker, directing himself to the national leadership in Cananea on June 7 (La Jornada, 8 June).

Nonetheless, up until now the strategy of the national leadership of the miners union has been limited to legal actions such as amparos [constitutional provision of protection against the actions of state authorities]. While the union should use every legal measure to defend itself against the government and the bosses of the powerful Grupo México, workers must understand that there is no justice in the capitalist courts. The central purpose of the courts is to defend private property and maintain capitalist exploitation. The bourgeois state (in essence, the army, police, courts and prisons) is an organ of systematic repression to maintain the rule of the capitalists. The power of the working class lies in its relationship to the means of production and its role in setting the gears of the economy in motion.

Over the last decade, workers in the miners union have given ample displays of their will to fight and have achieved important partial victories. However, these struggles have been ideologically framed within the nationalist populism of the bourgeois PRD. But the PRD is a party of capital—the class enemy—that represents the more nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie. The differences between the PRD, the PAN [ruling right-wing clericalist National Action Party] and the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico for decades] are reduced to the manner in which capitalist exploitation is administered: whereas the PAN considers it more appropriate to march hand in hand with the imperialists and rules ever more with the iron fist of repression in order to push forward its starvation measures, AMLO [PRD politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador] and the PRD seek to win the support of the working class in order to renegotiate the terms of subordination to American imperialism while trying to stabilize this system of exploitation and oppression.

Regardless of the ideology of this or that section of the bourgeoisie, the interests of workers and bosses are fundamentally counterposed. There are only two real choices: the side of the workers or that of the capitalists who exploit them. The union bureaucracy, while obtaining its salaries and benefits from the unions, in the end supports the capitalist system and the politicians who front for it. As we wrote in March 2006 in the aftermath of the Pasta de Conchos tragedy and in defense of the miners union against the attacks of the bosses and their state [see “Protest Cop Killing of Steel Workers,” WV No. 869, 28 April 2006]:

“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).”