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Article

19 May 2020

Author:
WSWS

Mexico: High levels of deaths reported amongst maquiladora workers as they return to factories without safeguards in place

"Hundreds of Mexican maquiladora workers dying after back-to-work orders take effect", 19 de mayo de 2020

The decision by Wall Street and the Trump administration to restart production has produced an unprecedented health crisis in northern Mexico, where workers at maquiladora sweatshops that produce parts for export to the US are contracting coronavirus by the tens of thousands and dying at alarming rates.

On Saturday, the health secretary of Northern Baja California announced that 432 of the 519 people who have officially died from the virus in the state were maquiladora workers. In Baja cities like Tijuana and Mexicali, as well as other border cities like Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, doctors report that their hospitals are overflowing with sick maquiladora workers, some of whom are dying in their work uniforms. Mexican maquiladora workers make between US$8 to $10 per day.

Hospital officials say the government’s official death toll and total number of positive cases nationwide—5,177 and 49,219 respectively, as of yesterday afternoon—vastly understate the real impact. They claim that hundreds or thousands more maquiladora workers are dying than is officially acknowledged, and that the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is obscuring the real toll in an effort to force workers back to work...