AND
Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo wrote in 1986 that, despite the setbacks, setbacks, bitterness, personal disagreements, repression and political marginalization, nothing had stood in the way of Demetrio Vallejo dedicating his life to the well-being of the working class. Born at the dawn of the Mexican Revolution, in November 1910 and died in December 1985, his name is emblematic of the deep drive of the Mexican proletariat to conquer democracy and freedom.
Vallejo joined the PCM as a railroad worker. Some documents from 1939 are kept in the Cemos when, as president of the regional committee of Coatzacoalcos, he communicated the activity of the counterrevolutionary organizations, which at that time swarmed as a direct reaction to the feverish reformist gaze of Cardenism.
We will find Vallejo later, when the PCM was trapped in Encinista sectarianism, in the forging and development of the Peasant Workers’ Party. Although he stood out less as a writer, he did so as an organizer, especially in his native Oaxaca. Despite this, some texts are found in Novembera title carried by the press of his party.
The decade of life of the POCM positioned Vallejo as the bold organizer who arrived at the political certainty that the only way to democracy was the conquest of the independence of the subaltern classes. That conclusion had its zenith in the proletarian mobilizations of 1958-1959, the first workers’ insurgency that marked the course of unionism with blood and fire, as it showed with the crudeness of authoritarianism the inability of the regime to process any timidly democratic demand. Adherents of railroad unionism requested better salaries and the ability to elect who would lead their union organizations. Despite the limited scope of their demands, the mere possibility of evading corporate political mediation became the nightmare of the modernizing elite.
Extinguishing the burning flame of the proletarian will to democratize their daily life required the use of the army and led Vallejo, Campa and many others to prison for 11 long years. In those two decades, Vallejo wrote profusely in Policythe magazine of Marcué Pardiñas and continued to be a fierce combatant, as shown by his prolonged hunger strike in 1968, which affected his health. It was in 1967, while he was in prison, that the Spartacus Communist League proposed to Heberto Castillo, then at the head of a diminished MLN, that the political prisoner be launched as a candidate for deputy. This was the first “meeting”, at a distance, between Vallejo and Castillo. A year later, the engineer from Veracruz would be a victim of confinement after his participation in the Coalition of teachers that supported the protest summer of 1968.
Upon release from imprisonment, Vallejo, Castillo and others began to forge a new political organization. Although several of the initiators did not follow the route set by these two leaders, in 1975 the PMT was founded, a space from which it would wage its battles in those years. In addition to organizing the Railway Union Movement, the labor leader wrote against the Echeverrist “opening”, which he did not consider a true commitment to democracy, in favor of abortion and argued about the interpretation of the events of 1959, especially the responsibility of the left-wing parties in his defeat. In 1982, Vallejo’s influence found one of its emblematic moments in the Pascual soft drink strike.
However, like all political organizations, the PMT suffered a process of internal dispute. The leftists in those years expanded their “mass” work, which meant decentering the union world. This displacement led to a confrontation that escalated to his exclusion from the organization he helped form. From that moment on he joined the young PSUM and in the 1985 midterm election he obtained a seat, which Alejandro Encinas occupied after his death.
Vallejo’s course is an example of an important, although minority, fraction of the labor movement. Without being a Marxist or socialist ideologue, he expressed like few others the daily meaning of the struggles of the Mexican working class, imprisoned in its actions by the tricolor Leviathan. Like all actors of this era, Vallejo was in the middle of political disputes that often took on a personal tone and he lived with the passion of someone who dedicated himself to a cause. Despite them, however, his name is a reference for imagining futures where democracy goes beyond the ballot box and is also established in the worlds of work.
A political culture that claims to be democratic cannot avoid the name of someone who, in an era when public positions were not coveted, left his freedom and his health in pursuit of the improvement of the working class. Honoring the name of the democratic combatants of the 20th century includes taking care of the symbolic and material heritage of this union and the current custodians of its memory, largely located today in the Railway Museum.
* Political scientist, UAM researcher. Co-author of The plebeian root of Mexican democracy.
