Anti-Government Strikes Sweep Through Mexican Mines

CANANEA, Mexico--This month Mexico celebrated the 100th anniversary of the battle that started its revolution a century ago -- the uprising in Cananea. In this tiny town, just 50 miles south of the Arizona border, Mexican miners organized an insurrection, meant to topple not just Colonel Greene, the U.S. owner of what was even then one of the world's largest copper mines, but the Mexican government itself.

Today, miners in Cananea are again on strike, having stopped the mine on the anniversary date, June 1. But they still refuse to go back to work. Miners here joined their coworkers in Nacozari, another Sonoran mining town not far away, who have been on strike for over two months. Other miners and steel workers throughout Mexico are also refusing to work.

The strikes sweeping through the mines have provoked huge demonstrations in Mexico City, the occupation of the Mexico's main steel mill and the killing of two workers there. The crisis challenges the imposition of the economic reforms that privatized the mines and many other government enterprises. Meanwhile, the miners' union has sought support across the border in the United States and Canada.

This is not an ordinary strike over wages, although the economic condition of miners has plummeted in the wake of the privatization of the mines over a decade ago. Mexican labor is in crisis because the government of President Vicente Fox will not permit Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, the president miners elected twice to head their union, to hold office. Fox has accused Gomez of corruption. Two federal judges in Mexico City refused to press charges against him, however, forcing Fox to find a state judge in Sonora to do so.

Fox would like to replace Gomez with a more amenable leader. Gomez incurred Fox' wrath when he declared that mine owners and the government were guilty of "industrial homicide" after dozens of coal miners were killed in a coalmine disaster near the U.S. border in February.

Large Mexican corporations, which benefited from the privatizations and are strong supporters of the current government, also want Gomez out. In wage negotiations, Gomez demands that workers get a bigger share of currently record-level copper prices. The government sold the Cananea mine to Grupo Mexico, the world's seventh-largest copper company, in 1992 in one of the country's largest handovers of state property. The corporation belongs to the wealthy Larrea family, who now also own American Smelting and Refining Co., and mines on the U.S. side of the border.

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