Modern Mexico was built on the back of labor struggle. In 1906, a miners’ strike at a US-owned copper mine in Cananea, Sonora, was brutally repressed by the rural police of dictator Porfirio Díaz, together with US Rangers dispatched from Arizona. The following year, a strike at a French-owned textile mill in Río Blanco, Veracruz was put down with similar ruthlessness. These actions helped spark the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which, in turn, caused important labor protections to be enshrined in the Constitution of 1917.

A generation later, in 1938, the refusal of multinational oil companies to settle with striking workers, despite a ruling by the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board (JFCA) and a failed appeal to the Supreme Court, led to the expropriation of the oil industry by President Lázaro Cárdenas. The willingness of the petroleum workers’ union to allow the president to call the negotiating shots, however, was a sign of things to come. Inspired by the in-vogue corporatism of the 1930s, the emerging hegemon of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was busy grouping workers into the worker, campesino, and popular sectors, each with its own confederation and all of them fully subservient to the ruling party. The era of union simulation had begun.