A New United Movement Stops Mexico for a Day

A New United Movement Stops Mexico for a Day
By Tamara Pearson | Upside Down World

In the many metro stations of giant Mexico city, amidst the ugly smell of Pizza Hut and the newspapers vendors yelling out, “Gráfico! 3 pesos!”, youth crowd around the hand written posters recruiting for the national police daily. At 12,000 pesos (US$1000) per month, and with increasing unemployment and harder prospects for the country’s youth, the offer is very tempting.

Since the US-Mexico trade agreement, NAFTA, the number of Mexicans illegally crossing the border into the US seeking employment has risen to 500,000 a year. Add to this the financial crisis (Mexicans repeat to me “When the U.S sneezes Mexico gets pneumonia”) and Mexican president Calderon’s measures to handle the crisis, which consist in a “fiscal package” of an increased consumption tax including food and medicine, new communication taxes and decreased government spending. Then add the fact that the minium wage in Mexico today buys a third of what it bought twenty years ago, and you can see how the government’s firing of 44,000 electricity workers, members of the county’s most combative and independent union, SME (Mexican Electrical Union), became catalyst for a movement of people deeply angry at both an unfair economic system, and towards a president who, most studies admit, used fraud to win the elections in 2006.

The electricity workers were fired on October 10th. On October 16th, around 500,000 people marched in the capital in protest. One month after the firing the people’s anger still had not cooled, and on November 11th there were again massive marches, road blocks, full strikes and partial strikes all across the country. Read more.