The moment was chosen strategically: shortly before midnight on 10 October 2009, a Saturday, federal police and the army occupied the facilities of the state electricity company Luz y Fuerza and the Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union (SME). At the same time, then President Felipe Calderón, of the country’s conservative party, decreed that the company be liquidated. His official reasoning was that there was “demonstrable operational and financial inefficiency”. Overnight, 44,000 workers lost their jobs.
Gerold Schmidt is head of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Mexico City Office.
Carla Vázquez Mendieta is as a project coordinator at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Mexico City Office.
Thus began the second half of Calderón’s six years in office (2006–2012), in which he sought to expand his neoliberal agenda and work towards the privatization of state-owned enterprises. It was a time in which neoliberal forces worldwide were attempting to weaken state power in core strategic areas. The coup against Luz y Fuerza was also an attempt to use the army to project a show of strength: three years after taking office, Calderón was still tainted by the suspicion that he had committed electoral fraud against the left-wing candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The SME was one of the many groups to have supported Obrador’s protests and demands.
The abrupt shuttering of Luz y Fuerza, which primarily supplied power to central Mexico and its capital, caught the general public unawares. The same could not be said for the major media outlets, however. They offered a unified voice, and to great effect they parroted the government line about the company’s supposed inefficiency, unreasonably high wages, and alleged privileges that union members had acquired via corrupt means. There was no mention of how the SME’s collective bargaining agreement was the result of the union’s decades of militant class-conscious struggle.
Protests against the Destruction of a State Electricity Provider
The SME, founded in 1914 by anarcho-syndicalist and socialist workers during the Mexican Revolution, is the country’s oldest industrial union. It is one of the few unions in Mexico that has always regarded itself as class-conscious and political, and has always maintained its distance to government, regardless of which party was in power. In contrast, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled for decades, saw the unions purely as political mouthpieces.
For the neoliberal conservative Calderón, it was more important to strike a blow against the SME than against Luz y Fuerza. The union was a thorn in his side. Putting an end to the independent and militant union would have removed a key obstacle to his privatization policy and to his goal of also liquidating the country’s other major state electricity company, CFE. It would have sent a chilling signal to other progressive forces. As part of a number of civil-society alliances, the SME had played a significant role in efforts to counter the neoliberal policies of various Mexican governments from the 1980s onwards.
The election victory of progressive presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 seemed to open up new possibilities.
Initially, everything went according to plan for Calderón. In 2009, the conservative-leaning Mexican constitutional court dismissed the SME’s applications for an injunction against the coup. Genaro García Luna, the minister for public security who was also Calderón’s right-hand man — and who is now incarcerated in the United States due to his ties to the drug trade and organized crime — successfully pressured other unions to refrain from expressing solidarity with the SME. One of the unions to face such pressure was the CFE-affiliated SUTERM.
Despite this, the SME was able to mobilize over 100,000 people to take to the streets of Mexico City in protest at the closure. At the same time, it was clear that 44,000 workers and their families would only be able to play a limited role in the protests, given that they were no longer earning an income, something the government took full advantage of. It sought to entice workers to resign with double the financial compensation if they agreed to accept redundancy within a four-week period, and additionally promised that they would be re-hired at CFE — a promise that it ultimately failed to uphold. After the first deadline came and went, the government presented further offers designed to incentivize resigning. In the end, many workers accepted the redundancy package out of economic necessity, because they were close to retirement, or because they lacked the political conviction necessary to undertake a long industrial dispute.
Fighting for Survival and a Reorientation
What remained was a hardened core of around 16,000 trade unionists under the leadership of Martín Esparza, who still holds the position of SME general secretary today. They demanded the complete restoration of their rights and the resumption of Luz y Fuerza’s operations. Instead of individual compensation, they fought for the return of union-specific facilities such as sports venues and event and management buildings. This hardened core has survived to this day. Fifteen years after Luz y Fuerza’s closure, the SME continues to boast over 14,000 members.
This success is based on a number of factors. One segment of the membership pursued alternative employment out of necessity, while remaining loyal to the union. In 2015, the SME founded a cooperative, Luz y Fuerza del Centro, whose activities include operating charging stations for electric vehicles, and solar panels that supply the major market of Mexico City. The SME also continues to support members of retirement age and the families of union members, and combines street protests with a willingness to engage in dialogue. In tough negotiations with various governments, they were able to claw back a portion of their real estate assets. In 2015, they likewise were able to utilize the opening up of the electricity market to private companies to their benefit. Together with the Portuguese conglomerate Mota-Engil, they founded Fénix, their own electricity company. The experience of union members helped Fénix get off to a successful start in the market. However, the SME never wavered from their stance that electricity supply should be the purview of the state rather than private enterprise.
The union has also been able to overcome internal conflicts without losing key members. Young unionists in particular have used the past few years to focus on further training. Just as many other social movements have shown solidarity with the SME over the years, so too has the SME shown support to other union-related and social struggles. They have developed international networks and have played host to international union congresses on multiple occasions. The SME’s large auditorium in the centre of Mexico City is also available for use by other groups.
The election victory of progressive presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 seemed to open up new possibilities. Obrador declared an end to the neoliberal agenda and emphasized the importance of state-owned enterprises. Among other things, he promised to restore the profitability of CFE, which had been run into the ground by previous governments. Despite several rounds of discussions between the SME and the Mexican government, this failed to result in unionists being incorporated into the company. Perhaps Obrador was uneasy about the SME’s political independence, or perhaps the outcome was due to resistance on the part of CFE director Manuel Bartlett Díaz, a former PRI politician and a rather controversial figure.[1]
The Union as Key Player for a Democratic Energy Transition
Discussions between the SME and Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s new president since January 2025, have borne more fruit than previous attempts. Sheinbaum, Obrador’s party comrade and former mayor of Mexico City, granted the SME the concession for supplying electricity to power Mexico City’s streetlights. The union was able to take this on because of their previous work, carried out via their company Fénix, of restoring to operationality the run-down Necaxa hydropower plant in the neighbouring state of Puebla .
Perhaps a more significant comeback awaits the SME under the presidency of an environmental scientist such as Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum is staying true to her predecessor’s policy of strengthening publicly owned companies. In a departure from the oil-focused Obrador, however, she wants to link the country’s energy sovereignty to a socio-ecological transformation. In the medium-term, this could lead to the state oil company Pemex being converted into a renewable energy provider.
The SME continues to campaign for all active members to be given the opportunity for employment at CFE or in other state-owned companies and administrative authorities. At the same time, they demand comprehensive labour rights, the human right to electricity supply, and public services for the entire population. For the SME, a just socio-ecological transition means more than just swapping out fossil fuels for renewable energy sources — energy should also not be a commodity that services the interests of private corporations.
The ball is now in the government’s court.
As part of this agenda, at the beginning of February the SME hosted the interregional congress of the Trade Union for Energy Democracy (TUED). Originally planned to take place in Argentina, the meeting of union members from the Global South had to be shifted at short notice due to the political situation in Argentina under the Milei government. The SME stepped in. At the congress, General Secretary Esparza spoke of “new strategic formulas for a public path towards the energy transition”.
In recent years, the SME has worked closely with academics from the Mexican science council CONAHCYT in working groups to develop just such data-based strategies. Since then, President Sheinbaum has elevated the council to the level of secretariat. With CONAHCYT’s support, the SME carried out a survey of its members to assess their current job qualifications and skill sets.
According to José Humberto Montes de Oca, the union’s foreign affairs secretary, these skills are to be utilized specifically in support of a socio-ecological transition — not only in the energy sector, but in the public sector as a whole. “In this political moment, we have a responsibility as an organized working class”, he stressed in an interview with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “In light of the climate crisis and increasingly precarious working conditions, we must transform ourselves and bring about a just, democratic energy transition if we wish to get through the next 100 years.” The SME is aiming to present their concept to the Sheinbaum government in the coming months.
The ball is now in the government’s court. In November, Energy Minister Luz Elena González announced around 24 billion euros worth of investments for the energy sector — which Montes de Oca believes also presents an opportunity to create new jobs. SME members are fighting for their place in the government’s energy strategy. The relative positions of the SME and the energy minister are similar in terms of content, but whether the government will open the door to the militant SME remains to be seen. Should this end up happening, it would represent an impressive comeback for a union that has never given up on its 15-year-long labour struggle.
Translated by Ryan Eyers and Rowan Coupland for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
[1] In 1988, the opposition held him responsible for having manipulated election results in favour of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (PRI), the official winner.