Calderón and the Trans-Pacific Agreement

 

President Felipe Calderón, together with his wife, Margarita Zavala, and his children, during the ‘A Democratic, Accountable Government’ event yesterday in the National Auditorium. Photograph: Cristina Rodríguez

Next Monday 2 April, president Barack Obama of the United States, president Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, will participate in a North American summit in Washington, DC. It is expected that at this meeting they will analyse issues such as the role the three nations will play at the summit in Cartagena, Colombia, which takes place at the end of April, Mexico’s conduct as host and member of the G20, which will meet in June in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, and the Mexican government’s application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which is not yet finalised.

Negotiations concerning this Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement are underway at a critical time for the global economy, which in many areas has faced catastrophe due to the lack of control, recklessness and irresponsibility of financial markets. Global unemployment is currently calculated at between 250 and 300 million people and in Mexico almost 6 million people are unemployed, a figure that does not include the 14 million in unstable informal employment. Most governments and international financial institutions are pressuring for debts to be shouldered by workers, and of course anti-union currents are going so far as attempting to wipe out the unions, especially the most democratic ones, so that no organisations are left to protect and defend workers’ and human rights, and thus passing the responsibility for and consequences of the crisis and their abuses onto the working class. This is a myopic, clumsy and incredibly short-term vision.

International federations such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF), and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), among others, have signalled in writing and across a range of forums that the Mexican government should not be allowed to join the TPP until it changes its economic and social policies to ones that truly promote economic growth, employment, the correct application of justice and respect for the unions’ autonomy and freedom.

The members and leaders of these strategic and powerful federations are conscious of the importance of global commerce. They also know that free trade agreements have not improved the wellbeing of the world’s workers, nor have they contributed to decreasing inequality between and inside different countries. Commerce should be fair and based on the principle of equity in order to increase living standards, quality employment, social protection and security, at the same time as defending workers’ rights, avoiding contamination, and respecting human rights, dignity and democracy.

Felipe Calderón’s administration has been seriously questioned by these and other organisations, but this questioning has become more forceful in the face of the administration’s recent application to join the TPP, the lack of coherence in the objectives it announces and the specific negative results that can be observed in terms of the application of justice, inequality, corruption, and repression of workers and democratic unions.

In the eyes of the global federations, it is clear that the Mexican government, as a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has not respected the parallel labour cooperation agreement, has failed in the protection of workers’ basic rights and has been highly inefficient and insensitive in relation to their concerns about excessively low salaries, employment insecurity and the growth of employer protection contracts and ghost unions, some of which are linked to organised crime and others of which have ties with or are part of ‘official or charro’ corporatist unions. These are generally fraudsters working with government consent and at the service of employers to ensure that wages and working conditions are minimal, in a truly scandalous and shamefully barefaced system of corruption and complicity. For all these reasons the global organisations oppose the Mexican government joining the TPP.

What is more, Calderón’s labour policy has led to greater repression and violence through the use of physical intimidation and terrorism against the activists and leaders of democratic and independent union organisations. His government has abused its power by employing methods such as official recognition or ‘taking note’ against democratic union leadership, with a discriminatory strategy of controlling unions that do not serve their interests. In the desperation of his anti-union policy at the end of his six-year Presidential term of office, with clear Fascist overtones, Felipe Calderón has gone as far as pressuring and forcing representatives and senators to approve his labour reform project, which deepens exploitation, inequality and insecurity in Mexico.

The esteemed columnist and labour lawyer Arturo Alcalde Justiniani is entirely right in asking: when will the government will stop siding with the corrupt leaders it protects as if they were a necessary evil? When will it end the war against the mining union and stop putting all the power of the State behind Grupo Minero México? This is the reality of governmental policy towards Mexican workers. In short, Calderón would rather look after investors than his own citizens. 

Unethical Companies

It is regrettable, shameful and contemptible that the Mexican companies which act without any kind of social responsibility, and are among the least ethical in the world, now claim to be exemplary companies which most strictly comply with legal and moral standards. In flagrant attacks on the information gathered in Mexico and across the world about their social irresponsibility, which only the current conservative government fails to notice, and even rewards, these companies have been publicly patting themselves on the back and thus confirming their evident lack of ethics by boasting about morals they do not possess.

These companies are Grupo México, owned by Germán Feliciano Larrea Mota Velasco, and Grupo Villacero, which belongs to the brothers Julio, Sergio y Pablo Villarreal Guajardo who hail from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Both companies have been advertising, in the press and other media, the fact that they have received awards, one from Concamin (the Confederation of Industrial Chambers), on the 28 of February, and the other from an association in London, on the 29 of February. The Concamin award is named ‘Ethics and values in industry’.

Worst of all is that in the case of Grupo México, the president himself Felipe Calderón rushed to Guadalajara to present the company with the Concamin award, making it clear, once more, that there is an unlawful complicity between them.

On this matter, the Geneva-based Covalence, an independent consulting firm which analyses the ethical indices of companies, published a report on 26 January which placed Grupo México among the least ethical in the world. It was ranked 573^rd out of a total of 586 corporations that were assessed, and in the natural resources sector, it was ranked 31^st out of 32.

Larrea Mota Velasco’s Grupo México stands out because of its insulting profit margins in recent years which are due, among other things, to the company’s cruel repression of employees and their fair labour demands as well as its criminal insensitivity towards the lives and security of its workers: this was demonstrated by the industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos, Coahuila, on the 19 February 2006.  The bodies of 63 of the 65 miners who died there have still not been recovered. This is national disgrace and its perpetrators, the company’s owner, partners and directors, have still not received the punishment they deserve. The widows and families of the miners who were killed have received nothing but contempt and persecution from Larrea, in an eloquent expression of the ethics that he uses in his company. But thanks to all this, Larrea is the second richest man in the world according to Forbes.

This corporation also stands out due to its lack of ethics and its inhuman refusal to resolve, through legal channels, the three legitimate strikes in Cananea, Sonora; Sombrerete, Zacatecas, and Taxco, Guerrero, which have now been running for around five years. To this we must add the complicity of Felipe Calderón’s government which sent over four thousand members of federal and state police forces into Cananea on 6 June 2010. This came after the illegal attempt to terminate labour relations at that mine, but where they have resumed rehabilitation work, violating the legal norm which states that in a legitimate strike, as is the case there, the contracting of new workers or resuming of any kind of productive activity is not permitted.

In this case, Grupo México has contracted several thousand third parties or strikebreakers since that police offensive, without having offered them any training. Those people are kept in conditions of inhumane slavery, working in virtual concentration camps, threatened and humiliated every day by armed men who guard their every movement. 20 people have been killed and over 100 injured at this mine due to the company’s negligence, which is always concealed. The third party workers live like slaves under the control of a charro leader, Javier Villarreal, and the local CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) is complicit in this.

Another serious case of murder by Grupo México’s paramilitaries took place in Nacozari, Sonora, on 11 August 2007. A worker named Reynaldo Hernández González was shot to death by these guards, and 20 of his co-workers were tortured; they were on their way back to work after an award was rendered in their favour. Those who orchestrated and carried out the attack remain unpunished, protected by all the ethics that Larrea and his partners can muster, which is rewarded by Calderón and Concamin.

As for the Villarreal Guajardo brothers’ Grupo Villacero, on 20 April 2006 this company sparked the repression by federal and state forces of the legal strike led by workers at the industrial port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. On that day Mario Alberto Castillo and Héctor Álvarez Gómez were murdered, and more than 100 workers where seriously injured. It is also public knowledge that the Villarreal Guajardo brothers previously admitted that they were the main cause of the bankruptcy of Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey, declared on 10 May 1986.

These are the two cases of businessmen, Larrea Mota Velasco and the Villarreal Guajardo brothers, who are desperately buying, at any cost, the pedigree that they altogether lack, in order to boast that they are the most ethical and socially responsible. And Calderón gives them all the recognition that they do not deserve, ignoring international condemnation, instead of making them pay for their disgraceful crimes.