This Day in Labor History: October 14, 1948
By 
On October 14, 1948, a rogue anti-militant thug named Jesus Diaz de Leon took over the Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la República Mexicana, the independent Mexican railroad union with support from Mexican president Miguel Aleman. This violent coup over elected leadership was indicative of how the Mexican state would support institutional violence when it served their interests. This date matters because it is a moment that demonstrates how the ruling party PRI incorporated unions as part of the state apparatus and made them lackeys of their one-party state instead of representative of workers’ interests.
The Mexican Revolution was always a complex set of contradictions that combined rich men looking to seize power for themselves with genuine radicalism from both farmers and urban workers. Without a strong unifying ideology and with a leadership structure that gave presidents only one six-year term–the one thing in Mexican politics that is truly sacrosanct–it was difficult to know the future of this state.
After the Revolution ended, there were plenty of independent unions seeking to fight for workers rights. This continued for awhile. PRI leaders were ideologically inconsistent. Plutarco Elias Calles leaned a bit to the right as time went on and he initially managed to dominate some his successors after Alvaro Obregon was assassinated at the beginning of his term, leading to a bunch of short timers. But when that ended in 1934, Lazaro Cardenas took over and shifted things to the left. This is the classic period of Mexico and the international left, when the muralistas painted their visions of Mexican history and the Mexican future on public buildings and when Leon Trotsky found Mexico a suitable home. But after Cardenas’ term ended in 1940, the next leaders shifted back to the right and to gathering power under their own umbrella, a process in which Cardenas acquiesced. That included capturing these independent unions and making them part of the state political apparatus.
Mexico had become more economically prosperous in the years after the Revolution, but many workers felt they had not benefitted. Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la República Mexicana (STRFM) formed in 1933 to promote Mexican rail workers rights and pay. It had been critical in supporting Cardenas in 1938 and thus was foundational to creation of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRI), the ruling party that would come to dominate the nation. Both Cardenas and union leadership believed central government policy was critical to establishing economic growth and workers benefitting from it. Already, Cardenas sought to bring unions in as part of the state and so it turned the running of much of the railroads over to STRFM leaders, but then it also did what the U.S. would do in World War II–use union leadership as a way to discipline workers against striking. Still, the STRFM did have its own agenda and as the nation moved to the right after Cardenas, it’s leadership became increasingly frustrated, angry, and militant.
In 1946, when Miguel Aleman took the presidency, the nation really started moving to the right. He wanted a powerful economy too but saw unions as getting in the way. Aleman turned his back on the leftist intentions of previous governments, making it very friendly to its gigantic neighbor to the north, but also angering leftist workers. So it found workers who would do its bidding, led by the thug Jesus Diaz de Leon. At the core of all of this was American advisors telling Aleman that the only way to remake the Mexican railway was to discipline the Mexican worker. He eagerly agreed and started unilaterally restructuring union contracts. This only infuriated workers more.
The STRFM and other unions educated their workers on the decline of their purchasing power due to inflation. They needed more money and started calling for the nationalization of the entire rail industry in order to stop American advisors from dominating it and hurting the workers more. Meanwhile, the PRI was forcing the railroads to lose money in order to subsidize the growth of other industries with cheap freight rates, which only made the workers more precarious. STRFM leadership openly lambasted the PRI-appointed hacks to railroad boards who knew nothing about the subject but were mere patronage posts by corrupt people who sought to get rich off the state. Rail leaders had different ideas on how to improve the railroads–lay off workers and freeze wages. They had every intention of running the railroad like a private company. There would be no more of that lefty Cardenas stuff in modern Mexico (again, Cardenas was still around and said almost nothing about the state abandoning his policies). So Aleman acted to eliminate the union challenge to his policies once and for all.
The government cut overtime hours to force the workers into anger and then set about to use that militancy to undermine the union through what was basically a violent coup. First, it threw union leaders in prison on trumped up corruption charges that were outright untrue–the union leaders had overt authorization to spend the money from the union rank and file. But the government didn’t care. Then it set about to push their hand-picked new leadership. Diaz de Leon had no problem using violence. He had about 600 men with him when he descended upon STRFM headquarters in Mexico City. They ran in the building and forced the leadership and workers in there out. Aleman gave him public support for this brawl. They then worked together very effectively. Diaz de Leon became rich and powerful. In exchange, he kicked all the communists out of the union. He and Aleman agreed to freeze rail workers wages and to engage in modernization practices that would throw some rail workers out of a job.
The October 14 Group, as it became known, soon had an infamous reputation in Mexico for using violence against anyone who got in its way–whether inside or outside the union–and for completely ignoring any semblance of democracy in the STRFM. In the aftermath, Diaz de Leon and the rest of the new STRFM leadership spent the next decade doing whatever PRI leadership wanted, freezing wages in order to maximize profits for the state, keeping cargo rates low. In exchange, they got to elect their friends to leadership and the PRI would back their undemocratic and often violent methods. Workers no longer had an independent voice in the Mexican state. This became the key moment in which workers were fully coopted by the PRI.
When in 1959, rail workers rose up against their leadership and their state, their leader got a 16 year prison sentence and the new independent militancy was crushed, though this did force the state to sign better contracts to undermine worker discontent.
I borrowed from Robert F. Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory to write this post.
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