Toward a Pan-American Vision of Human Rights: The Mexican Railway Commission and United States Labor Unions during World War II

With the collapse of trade networks between the U.S. and large parts of the Pacific basin following the U.S.’s entry into WWII, State Department officials began looking towards Mexico to satisfy the military’s need for crucial tropical products.  Large quantities of agricultural products such as henequen, rubber, and foodstuffs could be bought in Mexico, which was cut off from its traditional European markets by war, but the Mexican transportation system—especially rail—was found to be woefully inadequate to move the quantities needed by the military.  As a result, in 1942 the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), headed by Nelson Rockefeller, established the Mexican Railway Commission to renovate and expand the Mexican government controlled National Railways.  This assistance was made available on the condition that the Mexican government restructure the National Railways, in part by reducing the influence of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the national union that represented rail workers and effectively functioned as an arm of the ruling party.  The proposed changes set off a wave of protest among labor leaders not just in Mexico but in the U.S., where activists argued that the OIAA was violating both Mexican sovereignty and the basic rights of workers to organize and maintain a minimum standard of living.  This paper argues that U.S. labor leader’s arguments on behalf of Mexican rail workers drew on a language of worker rights and of national rights that transcended national boundaries and universalized the rights of workers, placing them into a framework of human rights.  Drawing authority from Pan American agreements, labor leaders used a body of hemispheric law to justify their defense of both human rights for workers on an individual level and the rights of workers collectively as part of a sovereign nation.