10 July, 2009
MEXICO CITY, JULY 10 – Day one of the five day delegation saw Parliamentary and trade union leaders from 13 countries, including Manfred Warda and Jyrki Raina, General Secretaries of the ICEM and IMF, join Mexican union leaders and legislators yesterday to call for an end to the persecution of the Mexican mineworkers’ union and its leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia.
The international delegation with members of the special commission of the Mexican Senate established to investigate the strike at the Cananea mine, which has been ongoing for nearly two years. The meeting also included federal deputies and leaders of the National Union of Workers (UNT) and Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union (SME).
Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, raised the delegation’s concerns in a meeting with Mexico’s Labor Secretary. “We made it clear that the government’s interference in union governance, its jailing of union leaders and freezing union bank accounts, declaring strikes illegal and failing to prosecute the killers of union leaders, are serious and unacceptable violations of basic human rights,” he stated.
Layton, Australian Labor MP Graham Perrett, and a group of union leaders also met with Marcelo Ebrard, chief executive of the Federal District (Mexico City).
Members of the delegation held meetings with the Embassies of Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, Poland, and the United States to inform them about the Mexican government’s actions. The delegation’s message, according to United Steelworkers District 7 Director Jim Robinson, was that “when NAFTA was passed, we were told that it would raise wages for Mexican workers. Now the Mexican government and Grupo Mexico are trying to destroy the Mineworkers because they are doing just that.”
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda emphasized the importance of the delegation, “The ICEM and the International Metalworkers Federation here represents over 45 million workers worldwide. Ours is a unified voice of staunch solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Mexico, in their fight for the right to freely form trade unions and bargain collectively”.
See the previous press release on the Mexican delegation here.