Dan La Botz continues to bring us fascinating commentary on labor in Mexico with the February edition of Mexican Labor News & Analysis. Check out the contents below & read on:

Contents for this issue:

• The Pope in Mexico
• Twenty Years since the San Andres Accords
• Mexican Economic Situation Leads to Deep Budget Cuts
• U.S., Mexican Unions Accuse Asarco and Subsidiary of Workers Rights’ Violations
• Teachers March Against Education Reform
• Miners Win Back Jobs—then Beaten by Company Union Thugs
• CTM Unions Demand Contracts Building New Airport
• Mexicana Flight Attendants Protest at U.S. Embassy
• New Head of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM)
• Pasta Deconchos: Ten Years of Impunity
• Book Review – Drugs, War, and Capitalism

Photo by Aleteia Image Department via flickr (CC-BY)

This article was first published in Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

By Dan La Botz

2015 was another in a series of very bad years for Mexico. Mexican working people continued to experience in 2015 the difficulties of a stagnant economy, the violence of the drug war, repression of the labor and social movements, and the rule of corrupt political parties. Few workers had legitimate labor unions with which to resist employer and government policies, and fewer had the desire to engage in strikes. Yet some workers—teachers in southern Mexico, farm workers in Baja California, and maquiladora workers in Juarez—did courageously attempt to fight for their rights and for greater power. We begin this report with the drug wars that have so dominated Mexican life for the last decade.

The Drug War, Crime, Justice

Mexico remains a killing field. The Mexican New Year, January 1, 2016, opened with the assassination of Gisela Raquel Mota Ocampo, the 33-year old woman who had just taken office as mayor of Temixco, Morelos. She was killed by four armed men who arrived in a black van and shot her gangland style. Senators and congressional representatives of her party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), asserted that she had been murdered by organized crime. Her assassination was one of the 100 city council members and 1,000 municipal officials who have been killed in the last decade, principally by organized crime.  In addition to government officials murdered, three reporters were killed in Mexico in 2015 and 35 have been killed since 1992, most by drug dealers. Continue reading Mexico Labor Year in Review →