MEXICO CITY — Thirty-one newspaper workers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca prepared Thursday to enter their fifth week barricaded inside their own building in a bitter labor dispute that has drawn condemnation from human rights and media advocacy groups.
Employees of the newspaper Noticias, Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca say they have been forced to remain inside their workplace since June 17 in order to keep publishing because of a picket line set up by a union with ties to state government leaders.
The union, which is legally authorized to represent the paper's 102 employees, says it called a strike to demand a 25% wage increase. But employees of the newspaper, which has been critical of the state government, say they already had agreed to a 6% pay raise, and that they reject the leadership of the union, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, or CROC. The employees say the strike is being orchestrated by politicians to silence the newspaper, which continues to be printed and distributed from a plant elsewhere in Oaxaca state.
"Oaxaca is a state where there is a nearly absolute control of the media of communication, speaking of the press, radio, TV," said one of the barricaded workers, Luis Ignacio Velasquez, 42, by phone Wednesday from inside the building. "If we give in to this struggle, Oaxaca would remain practically under the domination of the communications media controlled by the state."
The newspaper's owner, Ericel Gomez Nucamendi, has said he believes that the strike is part of a campaign against Noticias by Oaxacan Gov. Ulises Ruiz, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated post-revolutionary Mexican politics for seven decades before losing the presidency to Vicente Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, in 2000. The PRI continues to hold power in many state governments and municipalities, but Noticias has editorialized in favor of its opponents.
CROC leader David Aguilar Robles, who also is a congressman from the PRI, said that Noticias employees initially had requested that the union help them negotiate a contract. Those employees inside the building in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital, "are not kidnapped," he said, "they are there of their own free will."
"This is a farce. It is a banner that they are utilizing in order to be in the news and to call attention to themselves," he said of the barricaded employees.
