Confederation of Mexican Workers - The "age of Dinosaurs"

The "age of Dinosaurs"

Those PRI leaders who stayed within the circle of power acquired the derogative nickname of "dinosaurs". Fidel Velázquez was the longest-lived of them all and one of the most conservative as well.

Velázquez and the CTM opposed every major movement that ran against the status quo prevalent in the country: in 1968 he verbally attacked the student demonstrators who supported Cuba and demanded democratic reforms in Mexico, calling them radicals inspired by foreign doctrines. The government went further, killing three hundred students in the Tlatelolco massacre that same year. Velázquez openly supported the suppression of this movement.

In 1972 the CTM expelled the Sindicato de Trabajadores Electricistas de la República Mexicana (STERM), a union of electrical workers that had demanded union democracy and taken a more militant stance toward employers. When the union did not collapse after pressure from the CTM, the government merged it with another union to form the new Sindicato ''Único'' de Trabajadores Electricistas de la República Mexicana (SUTERM). Velázquez intervened in SUTERM's internal affairs to drive out the former leaders of STERM, after which employers blacklisted them and their supporters.

Even then, those workers persisted by organizing rallies of more than 100,000 electrical workers and their supporters and calling a strike against the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE) on July 16, 1976. The strike was ended by army units and hired thugs who occupied the CFE plants; the army interned hundreds of strikers in San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, while thugs beat workers and forced them to sign letters supporting the charro leadership of the SUTERM.

Velázquez was the first to demand that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who organized the Democratic Current within the PRI in 1987, be expelled from the PRI for his campaign for democratization and challenging the entrenched leadership. Velázquez called Cárdenas a violent radical and suggested that he was a communist. Velázquez was also one of the first to condemn the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) when it started an armed rebellion in Chiapas in 1994.

Velázquez was also a faithful supporter of the technocrat current within the PRI, which sought to dismantle the nationalist economic policies of the Mexican Revolution in order to open México to foreign investment. Velázquez supported technocrat Presidents Miguel de la Madrid, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon as they privatized state-owned enterprises (formerly a bastion of power for the CTM) as part of the structural adjustment plans imposed by the International Monetary Fund. During those years the minimum wage in real terms fell by nearly 70 percent. Velázquez also supported passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 after initially denouncing it as a disaster for workers of all three countries.

Even so, Velázquez's power within the PRI slipped in the 1990s as his own health declined. While in the past every President of Mexico consulted Velázquez before picking his successor, Velázquez was not consulted in the selection of Luis Donaldo Colosio as the PRI's presidential candidate in 1994. Even after Colosio's assassination Velázquez was only told that Ernesto Zedillo was the new Presidential candidate a few minutes before the formal announcement.

Velázquez called off the traditional May Day rallies in 1995, threatening those who disobeyed with fines or expulsion, in order to avoid the possibility of embarrassing displays of opposition to the CTM and the PRI. Instead of a May Day march in 1996 a group set up a mock funeral for Velázquez in retaliation.

The real funeral, attended by the entire Mexican political elite, came a year later in 1997. President Zedillo said in his eulogy that "Don Fidel knew how to reconcile the special interests of workers with the greater interest of the nation."

Velázquez's interim successor, Blas Chumacero, died three weeks after Velázquez, aged 92. He was succeeded in turn by Leonardo Rodríguez Alcaine, aged 76.