Profile : Mexico’s ‘Don Fidel’: The Indispensable Power Broker : The labor leader’s downfall has long been predicted, yet nine successive presidents have turned to him for advice. He now has a key role in talks on a North American free-trade pact.

Fidel Velazquez is both the essence of Mexican politics and the exception to every rule of Mexican public life.

In a country where officials from the President on down are limited to one term in office, he is in his ninth stint as secretary general of the nation’s largest labor federation, known as the CTM.

In a government run by Cabinet secretaries in their 40s with degrees from Harvard and Yale, he is a white-haired former milkman who barely finished grade school. In an administration whose byword is modernization, he remains “Don Fidel,” preserving a traditional title of respect for the old and powerful.

For years, Mexican and foreign pundits have predicted his downfall, seen signs that his power was eroding. Yet, like each of his eight predecessors, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari consults Don Fidel before announcing any important decision.

Mexico without Don Fidel is so unthinkable that no one here uses the phrase “when Fidel dies.” They whisper, almost conspiratorially, “If Fidel dies . . . .”

That does not seem likely to happen any time soon. Tomorrow Fidel celebrates his 91st birthday deeply embroiled in the continent’s top economic issue: the pending North American free-trade agreement.

Unlike U.S. and Canadian organized labor, Don Fidel supports the idea, making him the focus of attention at this week’s meeting in Ottawa of the Inter-american Regional Organization of Workers, an association of Western Hemisphere labor federations.

“The Canadian comrades are interested in talking with us about the (free trade) agreement,” he said, relighting his trademark cigar. “I accepted their invitation, to see what they are proposing.”

If they propose anything less than full acceptance of the pending agreement, the Canadians can expect the same answer an AFL-CIO delegation received when it visited Mexico early this month.

“We told them they had come too late,” said Don Fidel. “We already had made a commitment to the Mexican government.”

Don Fidel takes his commitments to the Mexican government seriously. The CTM is part of the ruling party, a relationship similar to the ties between the trade unions and governments in old Eastern European socialist countries.

Being part of the governing party has brought responsibilities as well as privileges, especially since Mexico’s economic crisis began in 1981. Unions have accepted wage increases far below inflation, clearly placing what they believed to be the interests of the nation above the interests of their members.

“The workers are those who have most contributed to fighting the crisis, to keeping the peace, to giving up what was needed to prevent this crisis from degenerating into a tragedy,” Don Fidel said with pride. “That is why Mexico is not in the same conditions as other countries on our continent.”

Supporting the free-trade agreement gives him one more chance to demonstrate the labor movement’s loyalty to the government, but this time in a way that could bring tangible benefits to the CTM.

In return for his advance support of the pending agreement, Don Fidel got what no American or Canadian labor leader could hope to receive: three seats on his country’s free-trade negotiating team.

He has instructed his negotiators to push for access to U.S. and Canadian markets for Mexican manufactured goods and for foreign investment that will bring jobs to Mexico--exactly what his U.S. counterparts most fear.

Mexico and the CTM desperately need those jobs. Nine years of economic stagnation have led to massive layoffs in many union bastions, including government-owned industries. That makes a free-trade agreement with the potential to revive Mexico’s own flagging industry and to encourage construction of new factories essential to Mexico’s unions. Fidel Velazquez has not stayed at the head of Mexico’s labor movement for 50 years by overlooking such matters.

Don Fidel runs the 11,000 CTM-affiliated locals from an imposing building on a square dominated by Mexico City’s domed Monument to the Revolution, about 20 blocks from the National Palace.

In the tradition of Mexican populist leaders, he holds open house most mornings. On Mondays, seats in his waiting room are filled by reporters from Mexico City’s dozens of daily newspapers, awaiting his weekly press conference. Tuesday’s front pages faithfully disseminate his views of current events.

Other days, prospective visitors range from lawyers in pin-striped suits to workers clasping worn palm hats.

When conflicts between factory owners and longtime local labor boss Agapito Gonzalez exploded into a citywide strike in the border town of Matamoros two years ago, everyone involved--including the state governor--came here to settle their differences.

“Don Fidel promised to keep Agapito under control,” recalled one factory owner.

Keeping his 5 million members under control, as much as leading them, has been Don Fidel’s political role.

His control has kept Mexican workers on the job as their spending power has dropped by two-thirds over the last nine years. Austerity measures that provoked national strikes in Argentina and riots in Brazil and Venezuela have been met in Mexico with orderly demonstrations down the main boulevard.

“The history of Mexico cannot be understood without Fidel Velazquez,” former President Jose Lopez Portillo said during his last embattled days in office in 1982. “He is an extraordinary and exceptional leader as well as an exemplary patriot and magnificent Mexican.”

Not everyone in Mexico agrees.

With his slicked-back white hair, baggy suits, dark glasses and a voice deepened by a lifetime of smoking cigars, Don Fidel is a favorite target of cartoonists and comedians. Writers say he looks and talks like a mobster or a 1930s labor baron.

He was a 10-year-old farm boy at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution--the civil war that gave birth to the modern state. At 17 he was a soldier on the war’s winning side.

Three years later, he was delivering milk for the Rosario Dairy Co. in a rural area outside Mexico City and trying to start a union. He was labeled an agitator and fired in 1922.

It was only a temporary setback. In two years, he had his milkmen’s union, then a citywide workers federation. In 1933, he was among the young unionists who seceded from what was then the only national labor federation, known as CROM, dealing the organization a blow from which it never recovered.

The rebels set up their own federation, the CTM, and soon Don Fidel and his allies--known as the five little wolves--were running it. By 1941, he was the undisputed leader.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s political leaders were devising a system that could govern the country without the constant assassinations and uprisings that continued into the 1920s. They institutionalized the revolution into a political party that ruled the nation virtually unopposed.

Don Fidel and the CTM became part of the system, a pillar of the Institutional Revolution Party--PRI by its Spanish initials.

“We were a modern organization that from its founding broke with the old models of unionism and its prejudices,” said Don Fidel. “We decided not only to defend the rights of workers but also to take part in the life of Mexico.”

During the decades of steady economic growth, the CTM did both things well.

Wages rose at about the same level as inflation, but the real gains were in fringe benefits. Medical care and profit-sharing were mandated for all workers, largely because of pressure from the unions.

Organized labor became a blue-collar aristocracy, with first dibs on public housing, special discount stores and its own bank, providing union members low-interest loans in a country where credit had been unavailable to the working class.

Labor leaders got PRI nominations to seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, a virtual guarantee of election. Don Fidel served three Senate terms.

In return, the CTM delivered the votes of its 5 million members and their families to the PRI, election after election, and provided the crowds at political rallies.

Lately though, during Mexico’s decade-long economic crisis, the CTM’s dual roles have come into conflict.

Shortly after taking office in December, 1988, President Salinas arrested Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, head of the mighty petroleum workers’ union, a CTM affiliate.

Don Fidel raised no objections. Nor was his silence a great surprise.

He had, after all, sided with the government’s bloody suppression of a nationwide railroad workers’ strike in 1958. A decade later, he kept workers from joining the student protest movement and said nothing when protesters were massacred. Shortly afterward, then-President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz introduced a new labor code that reduced the workweek to 48 hours.

The surprise following the arrest incident was that this time, his support for the government brought no reward.

“Humiliation after humiliation,” was the way the feisty political magazine Proceso described Don Fidel’s recent history.

As workers have borne the brunt of Mexico’s economic restructuring, their enthusiasm for PRI politics has waned.

In 1988, labor candidates were the big losers when opposition parties for the first time won nearly half the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Labor was clearly unable to deliver the votes, even in traditional strongholds such as oil towns.

Political defeats set off internal labor splits. Long-suffering dissident movements inside important locals--including Ford de Mexico and the brewery that makes Corona beer--last year tried to leave the CTM and join smaller federations. Police and goons said to have been hired by local CTM-affiliated union officials smashed those efforts, killing one man in the process.

Meanwhile, the old CROM federation is gaining strength again in the export factories of northwestern Mexico.

The coming weeks will provide opportunities to test Don Fidel’s remaining strength both at protecting workers and taking part in Mexico’s political life.

He has filed suit against the Labor Ministry to force an increase in the $4-a-day minimum wage.

On the political front, party nominations for candidates in next August’s congressional elections are due next month. Don Fidel is widely expected to seek an increase in the number of seats for labor--or at least a chance to make up for the losses of three years ago.

Fewer seats and no minimum wage increase would constitute a resounding defeat for the CTM and Don Fidel. And before that, he faces a third test. The annual Labor Day parade May 1 gives organized labor a chance to show its force. The response to this year’s parade could be an important gauge of how much clout Don Fidel really has left.

Biography Name: Fidel Velazquez Title: Secretary general, Mexican Workers Federation (CTM) Age: 90 Personal: Born on farm outside Mexico City. Was fired from dairy in 1922 for trying to form a union. Succeeded two years later and in 1929 helped found both the Mexico City Workers Federation in 1936, becoming secretary general in 1941, a post he has held.

Quote: “Despite the age difference between those who now have Mexico’s destiny in their hands and me, we have understood each other perfectly well: First, because we are Mexicans, we all have the same interest, and because the government has known to give us our due (allowing us) to participate in forums such as this free-trade agreement that are important to the people.”