Newspaper Office Standoff Persists

Thirty-one newspaper workers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca prepared Thursday to enter their fifth week barricaded inside their own building in a bitter labor dispute that has drawn condemnation from human rights and media advocacy groups.

Employees of the newspaper Noticias, Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca say they have been forced to remain inside their workplace since June 17 in order to keep publishing because of a picket line set up by a union with ties to state government leaders.

The union, which is legally authorized to represent the paper’s 102 employees, says it called a strike to demand a 25% wage increase. But employees of the newspaper, which has been critical of the state government, say they already had agreed to a 6% pay raise, and that they reject the leadership of the union, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, or CROC. The employees say the strike is being orchestrated by politicians to silence the newspaper, which continues to be printed and distributed from a plant elsewhere in Oaxaca state.

“Oaxaca is a state where there is a nearly absolute control of the media of communication, speaking of the press, radio, TV,” said one of the barricaded workers, Luis Ignacio Velasquez, 42, by phone Wednesday from inside the building. “If we give in to this struggle, Oaxaca would remain practically under the domination of the communications media controlled by the state.”

The newspaper’s owner, Ericel Gomez Nucamendi, has said he believes that the strike is part of a campaign against Noticias by Oaxacan Gov. Ulises Ruiz, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated post-revolutionary Mexican politics for seven decades before losing the presidency to Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, in 2000. The PRI continues to hold power in many state governments and municipalities, but Noticias has editorialized in favor of its opponents.

CROC leader David Aguilar Robles, who also is a congressman from the PRI, said that Noticias employees initially had requested that the union help them negotiate a contract. Those employees inside the building in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital, “are not kidnapped,” he said, “they are there of their own free will.”

“This is a farce. It is a banner that they are utilizing in order to be in the news and to call attention to themselves,” he said of the barricaded employees.

Hector Ramirez, a Oaxacan government spokesman, said the state had “no official position” on the dispute, calling it strictly a labor matter. “The government cannot put itself into labor conflicts,” Ramirez said.

With the help of employees working outside the building and phoning in their reports, those barricaded inside have been able to continue producing a daily paper for the past three weeks and maintain its website. Ismael San Martin Hernandez, editorial director for Noticias, said the paper was printing around 10,000 copies, about half its normal daily press run. The paper also has shrunk to half its normal 68 pages.

San Martin said the strike began when about 300 people, including hired farm workers and disguised municipal policemen, surrounded the newspaper’s offices and blocked its entrances. The newspaper building is about eight blocks northeast of the city’s colonial-era historic center, a popular tourist attraction.

Velasquez said that he and the other reporters, photographers, press operators, technicians and security personnel have been living off filtered water, instant coffee and canned tuna and sleeping on floors and desks. With relatives and supporters unable to cross the picket line to bring in supplies, sympathetic neighbors occasionally have managed to pass food through windows to the employees, he said.

Several employees have come down with the flu and intestinal ailments, Velasquez said, and a diabetic employee has decided to recycle his medical syringes to give himself injections.

Last month, the human rights group Amnesty International expressed concern that the Oaxacan government was behind the strike, and called on it to guarantee the safety of the newspaper’s staff and investigate reports of threats and intimidation against the newspaper.

Media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has condemned a June 19 incident in which CROC supporters allegedly intercepted a Noticias distribution truck and seized several thousand copies of the paper.

Eric L. Olson, Amnesty’s advocacy director for the Americas, said that for decades under PRI rule, Mexican businesses were obliged to sign collective bargaining agreements with state-controlled unions not directly chosen by the workers themselves.

“To decertify a union in Mexico is extremely difficult, because it goes to the Junta Laboral, the labor board, that itself is dominated by the PRI,” Olson said in a phone interview from his Washington office.

Cecilia Sanchez in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.