Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America. By Maria Victoria Murillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 250p. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Extract

In February of 1995, following the disastrous December 1994 devaluation of the Mexican peso, which sent incomes down temporarily by as much as 60% and threw more than a million laborers out of work, the nonagenarian labor leader Fidel Velasquez issued a curious statement. He declared that each Mexican worker (earning on average at that time about six dollars a day) should pledge one day's pay toward Mexico's external debt to show solidarity with Mexico's 24 ailing billionaires, some of whom were now merely several-hundred-millionaires. In a country where jokes are often the most telling form of popular political commentary, nobody knew whether to laugh or cry at doddering Velasquez's exhortation. After all, his long record as an advocate of painful wage caps and government downsizing suggested that he actually might be serious.