Introducing the Armani-Clad Woman Who Could Break Mexico's Gridlock

Gordillo, Top Union Boss and, She Says, 'No Angel,' Ascends in the Congress

JOSE DE CORDOBA / Wall Street Journal 30jul03

MEXICO CITY—In a land of macho politicians, Mexico's top power broker these days is a petite union boss who loves Armani dresses and rules with an iron fist sheathed in an Escada glove.

Elba Esther Gordillo, 58 years old, has long been an important figure in Mexican politics. Widely referred to as "moral leader" of the country's 1.4 million teachers, she controls the largest labor union in Latin America and is a pillar of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. But with her election earlier this month as head of the PRI's congressional delegation, she now will be negotiating for the largest bloc in Mexico's Congress. That arguably makes her as powerful as President Vicente Fox, who was badly weakened by midterm losses by his National Action Party, or PAN.

Ms. Gordillo, people in both parties say, may be the best hope of pushing any significant legislation through Mexico's deeply divided congress in the three years that remain of President Fox's term. Wall Street analysts are carefully parsing her words and her past, hoping to find clues about her thoughts on proposed economic reforms that business leaders view as crucial. While she hasn't publicly spelled out her plans, government officials say she has recently met with the country's top business people and said she would back economic reforms.

On top of the list is a fiscal plan that will enable Mexico to raise enough money to build schools, hospitals and badly needed infrastructure. Another key initiative is a constitutional change that will open wider the door allowing private and foreign investment in Mexico's sputtering electric sector. High energy costs are driving away investment, costing Mexico thousands of jobs. Last year, the PRI-dominated senate spiked Mr. Fox's energy proposal.

To her critics, Ms. Gordillo is a political dinosaur whose heavy-handed methods show how the PRI kept hold of power for 71 years. Her enemies accuse her of amassing a fortune of dubious provenance and even of being involved in the murder of a union foe. She denies both charges. Earlier this year, murder accusations against her, filed by union opponents, were dismissed by prosecutors.

"I live very well and I'm no angel," says Ms. Gordillo, drinking a diet Coke at a coffeehouse in a Mexico City hotel where she holds court, meeting with political cronies and cabinet ministers. "But I've neither stolen or killed."

Ms. Gordillo assiduously courts Mexico's rich and powerful. She has the power of making instant bestsellers, conferring fortune and flattery on journalists and intellectuals. In a country where editions of most books run no more than 3,000 copies, Ms. Gordillo's teachers' union every year orders up to 500,000 copies of a single book, to be given to teachers. She has also thrown the weight of the union behind an effort by Mr. Fox's wife, Marta, to publish and distribute as many as 10 million parenting guides to Mexican families. That effort, which depends on private funding, has drawn fire from both the left and the right.

Her grip on the nation's teachers is the source of her power. For the last decade she has run the National Education Worker's Syndicate, or SNTE, as her own fief, political analysts say. With a kitty flush with an estimated $9 million in monthly dues, the SNTE continues to be Mexico's most powerful political machine.

"She's Mexico's Jimmy Hoffa in a dress," says Delal Baer, a Mexico expert in the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Teachers make up about half of Mexico's government workers and have an organized presence across the country. In dozens of cities and towns, the elected mayor is a teacher. In the incoming Congress, teachers hold 29 of the chamber's 500 seats; they hold scores of seats in state assemblies. Because of their capacity to mobilize thousands of their colleagues and shut down a state's school system in pursuit of wage demands, the teachers' union can strike terror into a governor's heart and make a president's knees tremble.

Ms. Gordillo says the time is ripe for Mexico's political parties to come together to pass basic reforms. "Nobody in his right mind wants the president to fail," she says. "We are entering a period of political compromise."

Mr. Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive, and his right-of-center PAN party ended the long reign of the PRI in 2000. But his ambitious, pro-business agenda has been stalled in the divided Congress ever since.

A skilled political infighter, Ms. Gordillo is everything Mr. Fox is not. While these days Mr. Fox barely ventures forth from the presidential palace, Ms. Gordillo ranges easily across Mexico's political and social spectrum. She is equally at home cutting deals with union bosses and breaking bread with plutocrats such as Telmex's chief shareholder Carlos Slim. Mexico's controversial former president Carlos Salinas is among her friends.

In other times, many in Mr. Fox's reformist PAN party would be aghast at his dealing with the likes of Ms. Gordillo. But earlier this month, Mr. Fox suffered a stinging defeat, when his party lost almost a quarter of its 202 seats in the 500-seat chamber. Meanwhile, the PRI, whose history has been marked with corruption scandals, consolidated its position as the leading force in congress with 224 seats. Now, even those who criticized Ms. Gordillo in the past are singing a conciliatory tune.

"She's the best of a bad lot," says Guillermo Lujan Pena, the head of the PAN's congressional delegation in the state of Chihuahua. "But one can negotiate with her."

It's a telling statement coming from Mr. Lujan Pena. Seventeen years ago, when Ms. Gordillo was the PRI's delegate to Chihuahua, she helped steal the gubernatorial elections from the PAN, Mr. Lujan Pena and other party members claim. Ms. Gordillo says her role in the Chihuahua elections was to "mobilize consciences" and was completely above board. "I've never done any dirty political work," she says.

Despite Ms. Gordillo's many years as a PRI leader, top Fox government officials see her as an ally. She met Mr. Fox in 1994, after Mr. Fox's former foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, invited her to join a loose-knit assembly of intellectuals, politicians and businessmen interested in bringing about a transition to democracy. Mr. Fox and Ms. Gordillo hit it off, he recalls. "The president loves her," says Mr. Castaneda, a close friend of Ms. Gordillo who rents an apartment she owns right below her own luxury penthouse.

It's Ms. Gordillo's closeness to Mr. Fox, and her willingness to negotiate with his government, that make many in her own party distrust her. This month, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, her opponent in the election for congressional whip, lashed out at Ms. Gordillo, warning legislators about her "collaboration" with the Fox government. Making the Fox government's "failed agenda" the PRI's own would be a colossal mistake, he said.

Ms. Gordillo elicits a combination of fear and respect from government and union officials. Facing a hotel ballroom full of such officials last year, she took command of a panel discussing proposed education reforms. Even though she left the union's top post in 1994, and now just presides over a committee overseeing the union's political relations, there was no doubt about who was running the show. "You are here for four more years," she told Mexico's education minister in front of the crowd. "But we will still be around when you are gone. So don't mess up."

Her rise is a rags-to-riches story. Born in Chiapas, one of the poorest of Mexico's states, Ms. Gordillo says she led a hardscrabble existence. Her grandfather, a prosperous businessman in the provincial city of Comitan, made most of his money running a distillery, she says. He fathered 46 children, 41 of them out of wedlock. "He was a ladies' man," she says. "He was an old man who dedicated himself to being a stud." A macho disciplinarian, he disowned Ms. Gordillo's mother after she married Ms. Gordillo's father, a traffic cop of whom he didn't approve. After the death of her husband, Ms. Gordillo's mother, Estela, eked out a meager existence as a rural teacher.

By age 15, Ms. Gordillo, the oldest of two daughters, was helping the family survive by working as a rural educator, teaching peasants how to read and write. She married one of her high-school teachers, but her husband soon fell ill. Ms. Gordillo donated a kidney to him, but he died.

At 18, a widow with a young daughter and few prospects, Ms. Gordillo was teaching school in one of the capital's poorest neighborhoods. Soon, she was swept up in radical union politics. A fiery speaker and efficient organizer, she blasted Carlos Jongitud, then boss of the teachers' union, at every turn. But Ms. Gordillo's target recognized the talents of the passionate young teacher. She soon became his protege—and, some say, the two began a romantic relationship. Mr. Jongitud didn't respond to various messages seeking comment left at his office.

"That I was or was not his lover ... I neither deny or confirm," says Ms. Gordillo. "It's a question that insults my person, because even if it were to be true, nobody can say that that made me Elba Esther."

With Mr. Jongitud's help, Ms. Gordillo enjoyed a stratospheric rise through union ranks during the 1970s and 1980s. First, she quashed a dissident slate to win a disputed election to head the teachers' union in the state of Mexico, says Teodoro Palomino, one of her foes from those days. During those years, dissident teachers who form a rival movement within the SNTE say, she ruthlessly suppressed opposition.

The dissidents have accused her of having a hand in the assassination of one of their leaders in 1981. Dissidents filed a complaint with prosecutors, charging that she helped arrange the murder of a rebellious union leader. The complaint was dismissed.

Ms. Gordillo says the elections were democratic, and the dissidents threatened to derail them through the use of violence. As to the murder charge, she says she is innocent.

Dissident teachers also say that in her rise to the top of the union Ms. Gordillo has amassed a sizable fortune at teachers' expense. In 2001, her critics published a list of 10 properties she allegedly owns, including a $1.7 million home in San Diego. "The house in San Diego is for real, it belongs to my mother," says Ms. Gordillo. "The other properties belong to my daughters who are adults, married and working, but I don't have the riches people say I have."

Ms. Gordillo says the foundation of her fortune is an inheritance from her grandfather. In Chiapas, her uncle, Mario Morales, says he delivered some 300 gold Centenario coins, valued now at about $120,000, as well as some stocks in mining companies to Ms. Gordillo's mother, after the death of Ms. Gordillo's grandfather in 1973.

Ms. Gordillo enjoyed a parallel rise in fortune within the PRI and the Mexican government, serving as a federal deputy and then as the appointed mayor of one of Mexico City's most important districts. George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, recalls seeing Ms. Gordillo handle a hostile crowd in the aftermath of Mexico City's disastrous 1985 earthquake. "She was getting boos and catcalls but she talked to them for half an hour and got a round of applause," says Mr. Grayson. "She connects."

Her big break came in 1989. Newly installed President Salinas faced social and economic chaos. As half a million protesting teachers filled Mexico City's central square, Mr. Salinas orchestrated the ouster of Mr. Jongitud as head of the teachers union, says Sen. Manuel Bartlett, who was then the education minister and helped to orchestrate the change. A few months later, Ms. Gordillo was named to replace her former mentor. She was later elected secretary-general—in an election that dissidents say was fraudulent. "We were locked out," says Mr. Palomino, the dissident teacher. Ms. Gordillo says she won the election fair and square.

Now Ms. Gordillo may have gotten her biggest break yet. "This is the most important moment in my career," she told cheering PRI legislators recently, in the bowels of the cavernous party headquarters. "We will show the way to the nation."

--Joel Millman contributed to this article.