‘Long Live International Solidarity!’
This speech was delivered by Julio César Flores López and Adriana Barbosa Carranza of La Liga Sindical Obrera Mexicanas while accepting IPS’s 2026 International Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award on behalf of their organization.
You can read the speech from Unidos MN, our 2026 domestic awardees, here.
My name is Julio César Flores López, I have been a worker at the Goodyear company for 7 years. I serve as general secretary of the Mexican Workers’ Union League and its section in my company, the Independent Union of Goodyear Mexico Workers.
It is a great honor for me to receive on behalf of all my colleagues in the League the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, which has been presented to great personalities, organizations and movements defending human rights.
This award is a recognition of thousands of workers in Mexico, for their courage, commitment and dignity, to organize an independent and authentic union, which is truly a tool to defend the rights and change the lives of people and their families.
With the League, workers are learning to be part of a real union, which holds assemblies, freely elects its representatives, participates in collective bargaining, always putting the defense of workers’ rights at the center.
The League has also been able to make use of legal tools at the national and international level, to ensure respect for the rights of workers. Indeed, we have resorted to the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, with great success, in most cases. In Goodyear, one of the most important remediation plans was achieved, due to the weight of the economic remuneration that we receive as a sanction to the company, for not applying the Sectoral Contract that should govern us.
But above all we have resorted to international solidarity, to unity with the unions of the United States, especially with the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, to whom we are very grateful for their support and with whom we share this award, because without their support our progress would not have been possible.
We hope that this award will serve to strengthen the conviction to continue building the League, that it will be an inspiration for many more workers in Mexico to organize and defend their rights and learn to use the national and international mechanisms that are within their reach.
We hope that this award will serve to make visible the struggle of workers in Mexico, because injustice continues to be a constant in companies in our country, and unions like ours are needed to end it.
Long live the struggle of the working class!
Long live international solidarity!
My name is Adriana Barbosa Carranza, I have been a worker at the 3M company for 12 years. I have the responsibility of being the secretary of organization of the League and general secretary in the section at 3M, San Luis Potosí plant.
As a mother, I am very proud to be here to receive the Letelier-Moffitt Award, because the fight that we have started in Mexico, to build a real union, is a fight for our families, for our daughters and sons. It is a fight for our own safety, for justice.
The 3M factory in San Luis Potosí has been operating for more than 20 years, during most of that time, we had corrupt union representation, which did not defend the interests of workers. Therefore, as soon as we had the opportunity to vote against that representation, we did so and we ended it.
There had to be a labor reform that forced the corrupt CTM union to submit its collective agreement to consultation. But there should also have been a labor chapter in the trade agreement, which allowed us to go to the representatives of the United States government, on a visit they made to San Luis Potosí, to ask them to pay close attention to the process that we were going to develop, to have a new independent union and a new, fairer collective agreement.
At 3M, the first Collective Bargaining Agreement of the League was signed. It is very gratifying to know that colleagues from other companies decided to follow our same path.
We are the proof, as are the sections of the League in other companies, that it is better to have a real union, a union of workers, our wages have grown like never before, our benefits have also been improved. The company no longer does what it wants, against the workers, now there is a union that defends them.
Of course, there is much to be done, but recognitions such as this award inspire us and encourage us to move forward.
To learn about the struggle of the comrades of Unidos de Minnesota, it is also a very great encouragement, because what it is about is defending all rights, it is about defending the community. That is what we do in our factories, because a real union is also a community.
Long live the struggle of the working people!
