Arrest Enhances President’s Aura : La Quina Ran Mexico Oil Union as a Feudal Lord : Joaquin Hernandez Galicia (La Quina), union chief who broke too many rules and sought too much power.

He was impudent, daring to leave the room while governors spoke and to address presidents in vulgar language.

He was savvy, quick to identify the weaknesses of his adversaries and quicker yet to exploit them.

He was powerful, so powerful that his arrest in a military raid last week was enough to endow President Carlos Salinas de Gortari with an air of authority that he had lacked: To bring down Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, leader of the largest and wealthiest union in Latin America for more than a quarter century, is to become powerful yourself.

The son of an oil worker and a welder by training, Hernandez Galicia fought his way to the top of the oil workers union, then turned it into an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars in businesses, urban real estate, farmlands, aircraft and ships. He managed them as an autocrat, accountable only to himself.

La Quina, as he is called in a nickname derived from his first name, was at once a man of the system and a man against the system. His union belongs to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party--the PRI--and the last three presidents of Mexico allowed him to operate as a feudal lord in exchange for stability in the strategic petroleum industry. Directors of Petroleos Mexicanos, the national oil company universally called Pemex, worked with the union boss rather than against him.

“There was a symbiotic relationship between the union and Pemex,” said George Grayson, an expert on the Mexican oil industry. “Pemex wanted labor stability and wanted the PRI to succeed. The PRI succeeds by having the cooperation of union leaders.”

At a meeting to exchange New Year’s greetings, the president of the ruling party told the 66-year-old Hernandez Galicia that he and his union were “a pillar” of the PRI. But days later, President Salinas decided the union boss had become more of a threat to the system than a support.

Hernandez Galicia was arrested together with nearly 50 of his associates on charges of arms trafficking and on a homicide charge stemming from the death of a federal agent during the arrest. Hernandez Galicia’s reputed front man in business also was hauled in on tax evasion charges, and the union’s assets were frozen.

The union chief broke too many rules. He openly criticized the president. He pushed for too much power. He made it known he craved a Cabinet-level post. Some believed he wanted to be president himself.

“No one who loves his country wants to fight with the government,” Hernandez Galicia told Proceso Magazine in a rare interview two years ago. “But general opinion is that we are all worse off every day. . . . A privileged caste is forming of those who live too well in the high-level government, while painful measures are applied every day to the people who, despite it all, remain hopeful that this will end.”

Competing Government

Salinas determined that the union boss had set up a competing government, a nation within the nation. From his home in Ciudad Madero, the slightly built and soft-spoken man managed mayors, congressmen and at least one senator from oil-producing states such as Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco and Campeche. In those states, even towns that are not oil towns answered to the union boss.

“From the secretaries to the municipal presidents, there wasn’t a person who didn’t owe a favor to La Quina,” said a PRI congressman.

Favors were the union chief’s specialty. Favors and fear. His official title in the union was director of social, revolutionary and humanist works, and each day, men and women lined up outside his middle-class house for a chance to make a request of the leader.

Humble women would ask him to reprimand their husbands for drinking or straying from home; working men came with their heads bowed seeking jobs or loans or an education for their children; men and women together asked for permission to name their sons Joaquin, after him.

Politicians Stood in Line

Politicians and power-brokers also stood in line. A PRI official who visited Hernandez Galicia in Ciudad Madero not long ago, described the ritual:

“A young man approached and La Quina said to me, ‘I paid for his schooling.’ La Quina asked how he was doing, and the man said he had been unable to start his medical practice because he still lacked a piece of equipment that cost 5 million pesos (about $2,200). La Quina turned to one of the men who are always around him and said, ‘Attend to this boy.’ ”

Eventually, the official said, Hernandez Galicia would have called on the doctor’s services.

The PRI official said that Hernandez Galicia was about to extend his influence into the organized agricultural sector, having financed the campaign of a candidate to head the National Confederation of Small Landowners. The farm leader would have been beholden to Hernandez Galicia.

Also Resorted to Force

When favors failed, however, Hernandez Galicia did not hesitate to use force. He quashed dissident movements. He outwitted his adversaries and, when necessary, he reportedly had his enemies killed.

“He is a master organizer. Personally, when talking to you, he absorbs every nuance of what you are saying and your sentiments. He is an entrepreneurial genius. He is also a man utterly without scruples,” Grayson said.

Hernandez Galicia was publicly accused of murdering Heriberto Kehoe Vincent, a rival leader who became secretary general of the oil workers in 1976 and was killed the following year. The charge against Hernandez Galicia was never proven.

Two of Hernandez Galicia’s jailed bodyguards allegedly have admitted that they murdered another rival of their boss in 1983. According to the government, the bodyguards said they were following orders from Hernandez Galicia when they killed Oscar Torres Pancardo, the mayor of Poza Rica, Veracruz, and a union leader.

Little Investigation in Past

In the past, there has been scant official investigation of crimes attributed to the union boss.

Hernandez Galicia has not served as secretary general of the union since 1964, allowing other men to do the job for him instead. For the last eight years, his secretary general and sidekick has been Salvador Barragan Camacho, a chubby union boss who is as flashy as Hernandez Galicia is austere.

While Hernandez Galicia wore a cross on a chain around his neck and followed a natural, vegetarian diet, Barragan Camacho sported gold jewelry and reveled in playing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas. The two were what Grayson called “a saint and sinner tandem,” keeping the union in line. Barragan Camacho is in police custody at a Mexico City hospital where he is being treated for a heart condition.

Cushy Arrangement

The union’s immense wealth comes from decades of having received nearly half of all contracts of any kind let by Pemex, which the union could then sublet at a profit. That arrangement was ended by Salinas in 1984, when he was secretary of planning and budget in the Cabinet of President Miguel de la Madrid. The union continues to receive 2% of the value of all contracts to support the union’s “fund for social works,” which Hernandez Galicia oversaw, and the company withholds 2.5% of all workers’ pay for the union. The union and union leaders own companies that contract with Pemex.

While people like Barragan Camacho grew rich at the top, some of the wealth also filtered down. Leaders of union locals “sold” jobs at Pemex to the highest bidders. Oil workers earned so much more than other wage earners that they could sub-let their jobs for a portion of the salary. The union provides low-cost housing, health care and inexpensive stores for its workers.

Union Worth Unknown

Since there has never been a public accounting, no one knows exactly how much the union is worth. According to Alan Riding, author of a book about Mexico called “Distant Neighbors,” Hernandez Galicia estimated his union’s assets at $670 million in 1983.

A year earlier, after this country’s first major peso devaluation, Hernandez Galicia ordered the union to give the government the peso equivalent of $650,000 to help repay the country’s foreign debt.

The union also financed the fancy Mexico City headquarters of the Mexican Workers Congress, the PRI’s umbrella labor confederation to which the oil workers belong. Hernandez Galicia cooperated with Fidel Velasquez, the 88-year-old chief of the Workers Congress, but labor sources say that Velasquez always felt the oil boss was too independent and resented him for it. Today, Velasquez is supporting the president and the PRI system over his fellow labor leader.

Could Be Key

Velasquez also may be a key figure in the fight for succession of the oil union. Hernandez Galicia loyalists have named Ricardo Camero Cardiel as interim secretary general in an effort to prolong the chief’s influence. The government refuses to recognize Camero Cardiel and is seeking help from Velasquez, who most likely wants someone who is more manageable. The union plans to call a special national congress in an attempt to confirm Camero Cardiel.

Because oil is Mexico’s No. 1 earner of foreign exchange, the oil workers are likely to remain a strong union--but not as strong as they used to be. Grayson compares them to the Teamsters in the United States.

“When Jimmy Hoffa was eliminated, the Teamsters didn’t disappear. They are still a strong union, but they have changed. They have been backing (President) Reagan and the system to advance their goals,” he said.

The power of Hernandez Galicia, however, appears to have been extinguished.

“His power was in his access to presidents and in his ability to hand out union posts, benefits, jobs and schooling--the favors,” said a PRI congressman. “What favors can he hand out from jail?”