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July 16, 2020 Volume XXVII, Number 48 As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@ boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper. 690 South Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO, 80305 p 303.494.5511 f 303.494.2585 editorial@boulderweekly.com www.boulderweekly.com Boulder Weekly is published every Thursday. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. © 2020 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.
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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
The untold story of Mexico’s COVID-19 strikes by Dave Anderson
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et me introduce you to Susana Prieto, a hero of the pandemic you haven’t heard about. She is a longtime Mexican labor lawyer and organizer. One day in April, she aimed her cellphone camera at hundreds of workers who were on strike outside the Mexican factory of a U.S. company that hadn’t shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was broadcasting the video live on Facebook. She said, “You can see how many people there would be working together, elbow to elbow, without any health regulations. This is why so many workers have died in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.” The border city of Juárez has 327 “maquiladoras” employing more than 300,000 workers. Maquiladoras are foreign-owned assembly plants in Mexico that import machinery and materials duty-free and export finished products around the world. A large number of the plants are U.S.-owned. I
In March, the Mexican government ordered all “non-essential” businesses to close due to the pandemic. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s order defined “essential” businesses as those that “are directly necessary to address the sanitary emergency (of COVID-19) like work related to the medical, paramedic, administrative fields that support the national health system.” Most of the factories in Juárez are tied to the U.S. automotive and consumer electronics industries. Only about 20 companies with plants in Juárez are linked to health care generally, according to INDEX Juárez. Border Industrial Association Executive Director Jerry Pacheco told the El Paso Times, “The [Mexican] federal government is telling production plants to shut down, but it doesn’t have the muscle to shut them down.” Vicente Hernandez, a labor lawyer who works with Prieto, said a work stoppage is “one of the few ways to get the company to follow the emergency decree.” For four days, hundreds of workers at several plants belonging to St. Louis-based Electrical Components see THE ANDERSON FILES Page 6
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