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Susana Prieto, a respected Mexican labor lawyer, has been held for three weeks on fabricated charges.
The new NAFTA took effect today. Judging by events on the ground in Mexico, it’s a lot like the old NAFTA.
The so-called U.S.-Canada-Mexico agreement (USMCA) was the Trump administration’s effort to replace NAFTA with something that provided better protection for U.S. manufacturing and labor interests. But when Democrats saw the text of the deal last year, it looked mostly like the same old same old, especially when it came to worker rights.
After several months of bargaining, some teeth were put into the deal, especially for Mexican workers’ right to organize, and Democrats and most U.S. trade union leaders agreed to support the revised agreement. Hopes were raised last July with the election of a progressive union ally, Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of Mexico. But of course a deal is only as good as its enforcement.
As if to mock the new NAFTA, a respected Mexican labor lawyer and independent labor organizer, Susana Prieto, has been held for three weeks on fabricated charges. [UPDATE July 2, 2020: At yesterday’s bail hearing, the prosecutor proposed to suspend the trumped-up charges, but only if Prieto agreed to be banned from Labor Court in Matamoros for two and a half years, and agree to stay out of the state of Tamaulipas except to see a parole officer, preventing her from meeting with workers in Matamoros. Prieto did not agree to these conditions. It remains to be seen how the Mexican federal government will weigh in, or whether U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will formally object.] Prieto has been leading strikes and protests demanding better working conditions for workers in Matamoros on the Texas border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
On June 8, she was arrested and charged by a local prosecutor with inciting a riot, a familiar tactic to break strikes and protests. After several punitive denials of bail, a hearing on her release was scheduled for today.
President López Obrador and his labor minister, Luisa Alcalde, objected to the arrest and called for Prieto’s release. But Alcalde acknowledged in an interview with Reuters that the arrest complicates the challenge of Mexican compliance with the USMCA.
“This implies a major challenge, since there could be matters where the reform still isn’t implemented, and yet, there are complaints over rights violations, above all about union freedoms and collective bargaining,” she said.
The fact is that López Obrador may be president, but he doesn’t totally control Mexican union-busting state governments in league with corporations and Mexico’s old-line phony unions. And if López Obrador can’t control what actually happens on the ground when Mexican workers try to exercise their rights as guaranteed by the USMCA, then the whole premise of the deal is called into question.
In addition to marking the official start of the new NAFTA, July 1 also opens the term of the Mexican Supreme Court, which will begin hearing the first 100 of some 600 cases involving challenges allowed under USMCA to the certification of fake company unions that signed contracts not ratified by workers. But if organizers can be arrested on the ground on trumped up charges, those guarantees are hollow as well.
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Last week, several U.S. human rights and labor organizations signed a letter demanding Prieto’s release. And yesterday, 60 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting him to use Washington’s leverage to work for Prieto’s release
Meanwhile, with his usual tin ear and unerring sense of timing, President Trump yesterday invited President López Obrador for a White House visit next week to celebrate the new NAFTA.
There isn’t much to celebrate. Even Trump’s own top trade official, Robert Lighthizer, has expressed alarm in a recent Congressional hearing that the jailing of Prieto doesn’t bode well for enforcement of USMCA’s guarantees, calling it a “bad indicator.”
If Trump is serious about his prized USMCA, he will inform López Obrador that he has to find a way to enforce Mexican worker rights, or the deal is off. Don’t hold your breath.
As Democrats were trying to find a way to support the new NAFTA, which did contain one very good provision getting rid of “investor-state” provisions, allowing corporations to end run national and state regulations that allegedly interfered with trade, skeptics warned that the new labor protections were mostly a sham. We’ll soon learn whether the skeptics were right.
