Freedom: January 2007 Archives

"When a capo goes down, another pops up to claim the turf. Every Mexican president wears a narco lord around his neck"

"Over a million farm families (6,000,000 Mexicans) have been forced off the land, primarily by the dumping of cheap NAFTA corn on this side of the border"

After a tumultuous year in which the red and black flags of civil insurrection unfurled on the barricades and the rancor of "los de abajo" ("those from below") took fire, newly sworn-in president Felipe Calderon and his transnational backers are banking on fading the color scheme to a ubiquitous gray in 2007. Their success will be measured by the fight back of a popular resistance that has surged from the bottom in many parts of the country during 2006.

"While the land allocated for management is littered with villas, fancy mansions and green areas, workers are housed in Soviet-style apartment blocks with soot covering the outside walls. The balconies are worn out, sewage is leaking and trash has piled up in little smelly hills."

MAHALA EL-KOBRA, Egypt (IPS)- More than 20,000 Egyptian textile workers have scored a rare win over plans to privatise their publicly-owned company, with a massive strike that forced the company's management and the pro-free market government to back down.

Union leaders say the triumph has breathed life into the country's ailing labour movement, weakened by repeated hits from the government of President Hosni Mubarak. The last strike in this city was in 1988.

Workers at the al-Mahala Textile Company (Ghazl al-Mahala) in the country's northwest demonstrated for five days starting last weekend and occupied several factories to protest a decision by the company's chairman Mahmoud el-Gebaly to withhold bonus payments, as promised earlier by the government. Nearly a quarter of the strikers were women.

Management had said the decision was a way to lower expenses, even though the original promise was to give workers a meagre bonus of 200 Egyptian pounds per year -- about 35 dollars.

In response, the workers launched a massive impromptu protest in this city, some 130 kms northwest of the capital Cairo, citing corruption and plans to make the company more attractive for potential buyers under Egypt's World Bank-sponsored privatisation programme. They also stopped work for two and half days.