However, the CTM began to lose influence within the PRI structure in the late 1980s, as technocrats increasingly held power within the party.

Eventually, the union found itself forced to deal with a new party in power after the PRI lost the 2000 general election, an event that drastically reduced the CTM's influence in Mexican politics.

Cárdenas's predecessors had relied heavily on the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, or CROM, in order to garner support from the working class.

[4] One of the most important leaders who left CROM was Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Marxist intellectual who later developed close ties with the Soviet Union.

While Lombardo Toledano was a convinced Stalinist and the most important representative of the Soviet Union in México and Latin America, after his visit there in 1935, he was never a member of the Mexican Communist Party or PCM.

The CTM (along with the CROM and the electrical workers union) formally aligned with the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM), the predecessor of the PRI, as its "labor sector" in 1938.

The Federal Labor Board, which determined which unions could represent workers and whether strikes were legal, consistently favored the CTM against its rivals.

Consistent with the Mexican tradition against re-election of leaders, Lombardo Toledano stepped down as general secretary of the CTM at the end of his term.

When a strike broke out at the Nueva Rosita coal mine in 1950, the employer forced local businesses to refuse to sell food to the strikers.

The government used similar tactics in 1959 after the nationalization of the rail industry, firing thousands of strikers and sentencing union leaders to more than ten years in prison.

The CTM adopted a practice of entering into "protection contracts"—also known as sweetheart deals—where the workers not only had no role in negotiating, but in some cases did not even know such deals existed.

Velázquez and the CTM opposed every major movement that ran against the status quo prevalent in the country: in 1968 he verbally attacked the student demonstrators who supported Cuba and demanded democratic reforms in Mexico, calling them radicals inspired by foreign doctrines.

The strike was ended by army units and hired thugs who occupied the CFE plants; the army interned hundreds of strikers in San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, while thugs beat workers and forced them to sign letters supporting the charro leadership of the SUTERM.

Velázquez was also one of the first to condemn the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) when it started an armed rebellion in Chiapas in 1994.

Velázquez was also a faithful supporter of the technocrat current within the PRI, which sought to dismantle the nationalist economic policies of the Mexican Revolution in order to open México to foreign investment.

Velázquez also supported passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 after initially denouncing it as a disaster for workers of all three countries.

Velázquez called off the traditional May Day rallies in 1995, threatening those who disobeyed with fines or expulsion, in order to avoid the possibility of embarrassing displays of opposition to the CTM and the PRI.