In Taking On a Union, Salinas Is on the Spot : Action Wins Praise but Stirs Fears That Mexico Is Heading for Political Suicide

The arrest of Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, the legendary head of the powerful and corrupt oil workers’ union, was a gutsy, bold and laudable move by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

It has given his supporters and admirers their first thing to cheer about since Salinas was designated the presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, back in October, 1987. For Salinas himself, it was one more indication that the Mexican presidency still packs a considerable amount of power, despite his own weakness because of persistent questions about vote tampering in his election on July 6. But it has also raised serious questions about the future of the Mexican political system, and about how Salinas intends to govern and carry out his program.

Union corruption and bossism, known as charrismo sindical (from charro , the elegantly dressed Mexican equivalent of a cowboy), is neither a recent nor a limited phenomenon in the Mexican labor movement. It emerged in the 1940s under President Miguel Aleman when the government, trying to encourage private investment for a major industrialization drive, decided that Mexico’s combative and democratic labor unions had to be domesticated. They were--largely by force, partly by corruption.

Through the mid-1980s this system worked. Strikes by major unions were brutally repressed. Real wages of the workers stagnated or declined. Among the union leadership, authoritarian practices flourished. The unions delivered votes to the PRI and got jobs, payoffs, congressional seats and other privileges in exchange. As long as the economy was growing, and employment along with it, the system worked. The greatest beneficiaries, of course, were the government--able to impose wage and economic policies that it could never have gotten away with if confronted by real unions--and the private sector--which paid off corrupt union leaders instead of paying decent wages to union workers.

Salinas wants to change all this, largely because the traditional charro union leaders are no longer functional to the system. They didn’t deliver the vote to him on July 6, although they did deliver enough after the elections to allow him to “win.” And the rigidities in hiring and firing, or employment guarantees built into Mexican labor legislation, have become a serious obstacle to economic modernization as Salinas and his team define it. Finally, the union bosses do not like Salinas and never have, because they know that he will try to eliminate them for one reason or another. The problem is that the entire system rests on them, and it is far from clear that it can survive without them.

This is perhaps the key issue. Many people have commented that by going after Hernandez Galicia, known as La Quina, Salinas is driving the political system close to suicide, for two reasons:

--The union bureaucracy has been the system’s main dike against labor unrest and combativeness for 40 years now. As recently as last month, the PRI-affiliated Mexican Workers Congress accepted an incredibly low 8% increase in wages after a year of 50% inflation. No democratically elected, responsive and honest union leadership would ever have countenanced an agreement of this nature. If the alternative to the present union Establishment was no unions at all, this might appear to be attractive to the Mexican private sector and to some of Salinas’ technocrats. But, in addition to being morally unacceptable, it is impossible. The point then becomes whether the system--and in particular Salinas’ bitter, unpopular economic policies--can actually be implemented without the help of the union bureaucracy that has proved to be so decisive in imposing those policies on the rank and file in the past.

--Salinas is also perhaps unleashing forces that he may not be able to fully control. The Mexican people have generally supported the move against the oil workers’ union leadership because it is known as a corrupt and brutal group of people. But many have reacted to the arrest the way that Mexicans, with their inborn sense of fair play and dignity, often do: by demanding that everybody who is perceived as being corrupt and brutal also be jailed and tried. That means half of Salinas’ Cabinet, for starters, with the fabulously wealthy owners of nearly every one of Mexico’s stock-brokerage firms next in line.

Even if Salinas were to move only against significant representatives of every sector of Mexican society that is seen as corrupt by the Mexican people, it would be hard to know where he would stop. But if he doesn’t, he will quickly feel the backlash of those who conclude that, by jailing only La Quina, Salinas was simply settling accounts among rival, power-hungry factions.

In this case the violent methods of dubious legality that were used against Hernandez Galicia, unavoidable as they may have been, would become an issue. They would emerge as a dangerous precedent, particularly when placed in the context of other heavy-handed signals that the Salinas administration has been sending, including the designation to key police posts of officials who are known for their brutal methods, the slaughtering of up to 13 inmates during a prison riot last month, and the disappearance or death of several opposition-linked individuals.

Salinas’ authoritarian modernization is moving forward, but it is far from evident where it will lead and who and what it will destroy in its path.