By Peter Gellert
MEXICO CITY — The eight-year struggle of sanitation workers from the south-east state of Tabasco ended on the evening of January 22, when an agreement was reached satisfying employee demands.
The workers, initially fired for refusing to clean the private homes of municipal officials, had evolved into a nationwide rallying point for opposition, human rights and independent union activists and therefore, a test of strength between authorities and social protest movements.
Following years of scattered protests, in mid-1996 workers took their case directly to the capital, launching a well-publicised hunger strike in October and even stripping naked — a Mexican protest form — during a session of the Chamber of Deputies several weeks ago to dramatise their plight.
But it was a 97-day hunger strike, which brought two workers to the verge of death, that pushed the sanitation workers' fight to national attention.
Public sympathy was running high, not only because of the modest nature of the workers' demands — reinstatement and payment of back wages — and the perception that as the most downtrodden they were worthy of support, but also because their target, Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo, is widely viewed as a hardline, old-style ruling party politician, tainted, moreover, by credible electoral fraud charges.
The struggle came to a head early on Sunday morning, January 19, when 300 riot police violently evicted the workers from their encampment, forcibly hospitalising the two hunger strikers closest to death.
The city government justified the measure as its legal obligation to protect individuals' health and in response to alleged demands from civil society. But the decision to forcibly evict the workers was widely denounced as open repression and sparked a wave of protests that aided the strikers.
As often happens in Mexico with such cases, the public response to the police repression took on its own dimension, in this case, putting the spotlight on the semi-official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH).
The semi-autonomous but government-financed CNDH refused to comment on the obvious violations of human rights, arguing that it does not get involved in labour disputes. But it was also reported in the press that the riot police were stationed in the CNDH offices before moving against the strikers. The CNDH clearly has a lot of explaining to do.
The on again-off again negotiations were finally concluded on January 22 at the Interior Ministry's offices in the capital, with 190 workers promised their jobs back, under the same conditions and salaries established in the union's collective bargaining agreement.
Others are offered severance pay in accordance with labour legislation (employers and the government itself failing to abide by their own labour laws is a commonplace occurrence), payment of back wages and an agreement to lift 46 arrest warrants related to the protests.
Senator Felix Salgado, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, a key adviser to the striking workers, told Green Left Weekly that the agreement signed with the government was an across-the-board victory for the workers, who, in return, have pledged to suspend further protests.
The agreement was enthusiastically received by the striking sanitation workers, who had re-established their encampment and resumed the hunger strike. They attributed the successful conclusion to their conflict to pressure from public opinion and the broad-based support their struggle generated.