Truckers and farmers launched a nationwide strike on Monday, erecting roadblocks across 20 Mexican states over soaring transport costs worsened by the US-Israeli war on Iran, and security concerns for drivers.
Organized by the National Front for the Rescue of Mexican Agriculture (FNRCM) and the National Association of Truckers in Mexico (ANTAC), the action included free passage at some toll booths alongside blockades, with each regional group determining specific tactics but signaling potential for coordinated escalation.
Protesters declared they are “going broke” from diesel price hikes and fertilizer cost surges that are worsening from the Strait of Hormuz closure caused by the war in the Middle East, and stagnant grain prices that impact farmers.
Eraclio Rodríguez, a leader of the FNRCM, expressed frustration after federal authorities offered no substantive response: “It’s a counterproposal that says nothing; the federal government has no interest in resolving our demands. Negotiations so far have led nowhere, so we’ve decided to go on national strike.” He highlighted the lack of a development bank for agricultural financing, no progress on removing basic grains from the USMCA (US, Mexico, Canada) trade deal or establishing guaranteed prices—issues raised since last year—plus “new problems from the war in Iran, like increases in diesel costs and fertilizer prices.”
These grievances are inseparable from the broader strike wave sweeping Mexico, the United States and Latin America against growing inflation, mass layoffs and war-driven commodity shocks. The blockades by truckers and farmers signal the potential for a continental general strike.
In Mexico, there are ongoing strikes by Tornel tire workers, Caterpillar workers, Tridonex auto parts workers and the “bank of the poor” Monte de Piedad, as well as labor conflicts at the General Motors assembly plant in Silao and among teachers belonging to the CNTE.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of the nominally “left” Morena party dismissed the truckers’ and farmers’ strike outright, declaring “there is no reason” for it, while prioritizing corporate supply lines by sending National Guard troops to harass demonstrators.
Freight companies distanced themselves from the strike action, with the National Chamber of Freight Transportation and Industrial Business Chamber rejecting disruptions to major routes and calling for “dialogue.” The freight employer’s opposition reveals a class divide between them and small operators and drivers as blockades cut into profits.
By Tuesday morning, the government claimed most protests had ended, with only five blockades remaining in Baja California, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Tlaxcala and Morelos.
Repression quickly followed. In Tlaxcala, riot police dispatched by Morena Governor Lorena Cuéllar Cisneros used tear gas, water cannon, physical attacks and arrests to break up the FNRCM blockade.
Emigdio Taboada, FNRCM spokesperson in Tlaxcala, reported being detained with his father and reported that several farmers were injured: “Suddenly they started shooting tear gas at us and aiming guns.”
Even though the action was initially announced as “indefinite,” ANTAC announced a temporary suspension of blockades nationwide after the violent crackdowns in Tlaxcala, Veracruz and Chihuahua, stating they could no longer “guarantee the integrity, freedom or lives of those protesting.”
In a full statement, ANTAC called the repression “outrageous” and added: “The same authorities who have been absent so many times when crime robs, attacks, disappears and takes lives showed up this time... but to repress, beat and detain those who only ask to live and work with dignity.”
Despite the pullback, protests persisted Wednesday at four points in Sinaloa, one in Oaxaca and another in Guerrero.
A secondary but critical demand is security against organized crime violence and extortion, echoing recent mass protests by truckers and public transport workers in Peru. In Mexico, last month’s military killing of Jalisco Cartel leader “El Mencho”—with the participation of the US government—unleashed cartel reprisals: 252 blockades, violent attacks and truck burnings.
These events take place as the Trump administration announces its “Greater North America” doctrine, which seeks to redefine the hemisphere—from Greenland to Ecuador—as a US “security perimeter” for the purpose of dominating supply chains, resources and cheap labor in preparation for war against China and Russia. Mexico holds the most critical position; its auto plants, maquiladoras and agro-exports form the backbone of North American production integrated into the Pentagon’s war economy.
The truckers’ and farmers’ roadblocks demonstrate their enormous objective power to paralyze the “resilient supply chains” envisioned by US imperialism but realizing it requires conscious coordination with workers surging into struggle across Mexico, the US, Canada and Latin America.
Under a populist guise, the Morena administrations under Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Sheinbaum have accelerated the complete subordination of Mexico to US and Canadian imperialism’s war machine.
Its repression—tear gas and pointing guns at farmers and truckers—signals that its response to a mass movement from below will be no different from the one carried out under their right-wing predecessors. Morena, however, has granted resources and legal protection to the military previously unheard of, including to the National Guard created by AMLO, and deployed the military against past blockades, picket lines and, above all, immigrant workers crossing Mexico.
The USMCA, now under renegotiation, enforces this subordination and Mexico’s historical oppression, while allowing US and Canadian corporations to bully and impose conditions on Mexican workers and farmers. The trade deal also promoted a so-called “independent” union bureaucracy backed by the US government to better suppress workers and interfere politically.
However, the leaderships of truckers and farmers maintain a corporatist and nationalist approach to the USMCA and other issues raised, limiting the fight to lobbying the capitalist state and factions of the political establishment to protect “Mexican products” against imports from the United States.
It is a basic fact of economic life, even more so in North America, that every finished commodity, even grain staples that require fertilizers and machinery, are the product of globalized processes where transnational corporations exploit workers across multiple countries.
Truckers, agricultural workers and small farmers need to oppose the long legacy of nationalism and corporatism that characterized the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) and now Morena—a legacy whose main effect has been to further subordinate Mexican life to the diktats of Wall Street, above all to maintain cheap labor and resources to feed massive profits and the war machine.
The alternative is rank-and-file committees uniting truckers, farmers, autoworkers and teachers across Mexico and north of the border. This means GM and other autoworkers across North America linking with truckers, tire workers, meatpacking workers, agricultural workers and others for the defense of jobs, living standards and safe conditions, along with environmental sustainability.
This power could shatter the power of not only the US corporations but Mexico’s comprador ruling class by laying the basis for workers’ control of transport, industry and agriculture—feeding people before profits or war.
Without this internationalist and socialist program for workers power and control over production, however, such protests and social anger will lead to demoralization and manipulation by imperialism and the far-right as the ruling class prepares for dictatorship and fascism.
Along with their class brothers internationally, Mexican workers hold the key to a progressive solution to the deepening capitalist crisis: the coordination of their struggles across borders both northward and southward to stop the wealth they produce from inflating the coffers of the ruling oligarchies and fueling imperialism’s slaughter in the Middle East, Latin America and globally.