Nov
17
His death was reported by news agencies in Mexico.
Mr. Hernández Galicia led a union of 200,000 workers employed by Mexico’s huge state-owned oil company, Pemex, and they revered him for the generous benefits he won for them.
Operating out of the grim Gulf Coast city of Ciudad Madero, the union was all things to its people, owning supermarkets, funeral homes and service stations, and functioning as a surrogate city government: paving streets, installing sewers, building parks and improving schools and hospitals. Sons were allowed to inherit their fathers’ jobs.
But Mr. Hernández Galicia and his union were widely viewed as corrupt. Many workers did not work, instead giving supervisors a portion of their wages. The union controlled huge Pemex contracts, and Mr. Hernández Galicia’s vast wealth was widely assumed to have come from skimming profits. He was also accused of far darker acts, including murdering other union leaders, though those allegations were never proved.
His many supporters said he was the victim of slander by political rivals. The most bitter of those rivals was the man who had him arrested, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
As a top government aide in the 1980s, Mr. Salinas worked to limit the power of the oil workers’ union by reducing the amount of contracts it controlled. When he ran for president in 1988, he promised further reforms, including eventually making parts of Pemex private. Mr. Hernández Galicia, whose nickname was La Quina, a diminutive of Joaquín, responded by encouraging union members to support other candidates — a break from the union’s traditional allegiance to Mr. Salinas’s Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Six months after Mr. Salinas was elected president by a historically low margin — he won slightly more than 50 percent of the vote, and many believed the results were fraudulent — Mr. Hernández Galicia was arrested in a military-style assault on his split-level ranch house in Ciudad Madero.
Government forces blew down the front door of his home with a bazooka and dragged Mr. Hernández Galicia away in his underwear. The government said one of its officers was killed in a shootout.
Mr. Hernández Galicia, one of seven people charged in the killing, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for murder. He served less than nine.
In December 1997 he was freed on parole, ostensibly for good conduct. But his release followed an unlikely development: He had become an international human rights cause.
In the time since his arrest, rights groups concluded that the police and soldiers who arrested him had planted the body that was supposed to be his murder victim, as well as hundreds of submachine guns and piles of ammunition he was accused of owning illegally. Amnesty International called him a “prisoner of conscience.”
“We don’t issue certificates of sanctity to anyone,” Morris Tidball, Amnesty International’s representative for Latin America, said at the time. “But the charges brought against La Quina have absolutely no basis in any evidence. It is clear that he is innocent and was put in jail because he was critical of government plans to sell off the petroleum industry.”
Mr. Hernández Galicia did not claim the moral high ground himself. In the weeks before his release, he lamented the declining power of the union he once led.
“My oil workers were corrupt, drunken and courageous,” he said in an interview with The New York Times shortly before he was freed. “Today the oil workers are corrupt, drunken and absolutely servile.”
Mr. Hernández Galicia was born on Aug. 12, 1922. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade and became an apprentice welder. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.
He became president of the union in the late 1950s and served for three decades, negotiating contracts that made oil workers the best-paid workers in Mexico. But although his grip on the union had been firm, he insisted he would not try to regain his power after his release from prison.
“I would be stupid to sacrifice my family again to go back and struggle for a union that has lost all its rights,” he said in 1997. “I’m in here because I’m a nationalist, not because I’m a fool.”
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