Mexican Protesters Bare All, Gain Help With Grievances

MEXICO CITY — They used hypodermic syringes to spatter their blood on Mexico City’s government buildings during protests.

Two of them launched a hunger strike in a tent outside the National Human Rights Commission building, a protest that began Oct. 14 and now threatens to claim their lives.

But when nearly a dozen of the 336 fired street cleaners from the southern state of Tabasco stripped naked, streaked and mooned the nation’s Congress this week, their 18-month protest finally caught the attention of power brokers in the nation’s capital.

With bare derrieres splashed across newspapers and television screens, it was clear the garbage workers had thrust their agenda into the national spotlight.

On Friday, federal Interior Ministry officials here were negotiating intensively with the fired street cleaners’ leaders and Tabasco officials to reach a compromise that would reinstate some of the workers, award some back pay and drop criminal charges pending against them from earlier protests.

As the federal government intervened to solve the conflict, though, some analysts and opposition leaders said the unorthodox and desperate persistence of the Tabasco sanitation workers already has set an important--and possibly dangerous--precedent for future protests at a time when Mexico’s unemployment and poverty continue to fuel dissent.

“We don’t want things to have to go to this extreme, but the reason these workers are taking it this far is because of the lack of government sensitivity,” said opposition Sen. Felix Salgado, who took up the workers’ cause after their nude appearance in Congress.

“The federal government intervened in this conflict not because they had a legal obligation to do so, but because the political pressure had become unendurable,” added syndicated columnist Sergio Sarmiento. “This represents an important victory for the garbage workers, but it raises serious doubts about what will be future [government] policy in confronting the many protest movements that are rising up in the country.”

Salgado, Sarmiento and other analysts concluded that it was not the workers’ widely publicized nude protest that pressed President Ernesto Zedillo’s government into arbitrating the conflict. Rather, they said, it was the imminent death of the hunger strikers that stepped up the political pressure this week. Doctors said both workers were on the verge of death after more than 80 days on a diet of water, honey and glucose.

Mireille Roccatti, in her first official act as president of the rights commission, visited the two near-unconscious workers in their tent Thursday and vowed to investigate the controversy.

Although their tactics have taken on national importance, the garbage workers’ issue is largely local.

Since their protest began in July 1995, the street cleaners have insisted that they were fired because they refused state and local officials’ demands that they perform unpaid, personal chores: cleaning swimming pools, walking dogs and doing yardwork at the officials’ homes.

City officials have denied the charge, asserting that layoffs were necessary to balance the city budget in the state capital, Villahermosa, at a time when Mexico’s economic crisis forced all local governments to curtail spending.

The workers began with street protests in Villahermosa. But, like many local protest movements, they soon reached the capital.

Their tactics--even the spilling of their own blood--are not uncommon in Mexico, nor are hunger strikes. What set Tabasco’s workers apart this week was their nude appearance in Congress and the apparent commitment of their hunger strikers to die for the cause.

“This is an important and negative precedent,” Sarmiento concluded. “In Mexico, we must have just and prudent legal procedures to define the judicial actions of the government and to resolve legal battles between individuals.

“The decision to stage a hunger strike or to strip naked in public cannot be the criterion of justice in our country.”