Antipathy Marked Relations Between Salinas, Oil Workers’ Boss : Politics Seen Behind Jailing of Mexico Unionist

Arresting Joaquin Hernandez Galicia on illegal weapons charges, as the government did this week, is like nabbing Al Capone for tax evasion: It is convenient, provable and not the real reason the oil union boss is behind bars.

Like other union and political leaders in Mexico, La Quina, as Hernandez Galicia is called, was known to surround himself with tough bodyguards and to keep a cache of weapons close at hand.

“For weapons, they could have gotten La Quina on any one of 365 days for the the last 10 years,” said political analyst Lorenzo Meyer.

Instead, political observers say, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made the decision to arrest Hernandez Galicia for a range of personal and political reasons, not the least of which was the union leader’s enormous power and his willingness to use it against a president.

From the modest house where he was arrested Tuesday in Ciudad Madero, Tamaulipas state, Hernandez Galicia, 66, operated as an old-style cacique , a political boss who commanded the loyalty of nearly 200,000 oil workers and their families, an empire of businesses from funeral parlors to cosmetics and control over politicians from several oil-rich states.

His union, part of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), offered its members pay and benefits unavailable even to the rest of organized labor. His associates lived well. And those who dared to challenge his authority met public charges of criminal activity, early retirement or, reportedly, death.

In a country where, until recently, few dared to question the power of the presidency, Hernandez Galicia was audacious with those who occupied the office. In one of the most brazen examples, the union boss sent his right-hand man to the National Palace three years ago to tell then-President Miguel de la Madrid, “If Pemex (the national oil company) falls, the state falls and you fall, too, Mr. President.”

Past Leader’s Praise

Shortly afterward, De la Madrid traveled to Ciudad Madero to publicly laud Hernandez Galicia as an honest union leader.

Samuel del Villar, once the head of De la Madrid’s “moral renovation” team, said in an interview that he had tried to persuade the president to arrest Hernandez Galicia, resigning when it became clear he would not.

“He was afraid that La Quina would stop oil production. I told him the power of the state was greater than the power of La Quina, but he thought not,” said Del Villar, who has since left the ruling party.

Oddly enough, Salinas was politically much weaker than De la Madrid when he moved against the union leader just five weeks after assuming the presidency. Salinas was elected with 50.7% of the official vote, the lowest ever for a candidate of the ruling party, and took office amid widespread charges that the PRI had stolen the election for him.

Now, the blow against such a symbol of power and corruption as La Quina seems to be earning Salinas the legitimacy he has lacked. Even his critics recognize the boldness of the arrest, and people in the street now say the president “wears pants”--the highest of compliments in Mexico.

Salinas and Hernandez Galicia developed a mutual antipathy several years ago, beginning with an order that Salinas issued in 1984 when he was secretary of planning and budget. The order was to end the practice of assigning half of Pemex’s outside contracts to the union.

When Salinas’ emerged as a possible successor to De la Madrid, Hernandez Galicia is said to have sent a group of housewives to bang pots in protest at one of his speeches. The union boss reputedly financed a book published around that time entitled “Assassin in the Presidency?” The book tells of an accident in which Salinas, at the age of 3, fired a gun, killing a maid in the household.

In the election, Hernandez Galicia reportedly allowed his disciplined workers to vote for opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, whose father, President Lazaro Cardenas, had nationalized the oil industry here in 1938. And just before the inauguration last month, Hernandez Galicia made a power play against Salinas.

Union leaders who are members of the federal Chamber of Deputies accused a former Pemex director of having embezzled $49 million in 1985 when the oil company bought two Yugoslav-built tankers. The charge was meant to show the union’s capacity to embarrass the president and its creativity in getting what it wants.

Ideological Division

While personal animosity was reportedly a strong force behind the union leader’s arrest, there also are deep ideological differences between Salinas and Hernandez Galicia.

Salinas proposes to reduce the role of the government in the economy and to speed up De la Madrid’s policy of selling off government companies. Salinas would like to break the giant Pemex monopoly into several companies and sell off some of its petrochemical operations. He wants Pemex and the rest of Mexican industry to become more efficient, productive and internationally competitive. To achieve that, he wants the union weakened.

“This type of union is contrary to the economic model that Salinas wants,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a professor at the post-graduate Colegio de Mexico. “These unions arose in Mexico when industry was protected and directed at an internal market. They were inefficient, but that was not important because there was no competition. The unions supported the government and passed on the cost to society without regard for productivity.

“With the economic crisis, those unions have become expensive and their relationship with the state has become difficult,” Meyer said.

Unions such as that grouping the oil workers have been key pillars of the ruling party, but Salinas also wants to restructure the party, to diminish the power of old-time political bosses such as Hernandez Galicia. His removal is a signal to other so-called “dinosaurs.”

So far, the Hernandez Galicia case is progressing well for Salinas--workers have not reacted violently, oil production continues normal after brief interruptions Wednesday, and Hernandez Galicia was arraigned Thursday on the weapons charges and on a homicide charge in the death of a federal agent in the gun battle between his bodyguards and troops seeking to arrest him.

The government says that paraffin tests found gunpowder traces showing that Hernandez Galicia had fired a gun.

Many unanswered questions remain. It is not clear, for example, whether the president can weaken his party’s unions without cutting the base out from under himself at a moment when the opposition is stronger than ever before.

Those who applaud Hernandez Galicia’s arrest wonder if it will be an isolated action--such as the De la Madrid administration’s arrest of former Mexico City Police Chief Arturo Durazo in a brief drive against corruption--or if it will be part of a broader, anti-corruption policy aimed at all sectors, including business.

It appears that Fidel Velasquez, leader of the ruling party’s Mexican Workers Congress, labor’s umbrella organization, is backing the president, but observers ask: What will that do to the party’s credibility with labor, and will Cardenas’ National Democratic Front be able to lure the oil workers away from the ruling party?

The government still must fight Hernandez Galicia over the leadership of the oil workers union. On Tuesday night, union leaders named Ricardo Camero Cardiel, an ally of Hernandez Galicia, as interim general secretary, but Labor Minister Arsenio Farrell Cubillas said Wednesday that the government will not recognize him.