Fidel Velázquez Sánchez
After his father's death in 1920 Velázquez moved to the Azcapotzalco area of Mexico City, where he worked, among other things, delivering milk.
While neither CROM nor its leader, Luis Morones, had any connection to the crime, Calles (who was about to finish his term of office and to begin his run as éminence grise behind the presidency in the period known as El Maximato) considered Morones the intellectual author of the assassination because he had denounced Obregón's plans to amend the constitution to allow himself to serve another term as President of Mexico.
Velázquez played an active role in trade union affairs in the early 1930s: he was a member of the commission that edited the new Federal Labor Law in 1931, took part in proceedings before the Federal Labor Board, which had the power to register unions or declare a strike legal or illegal, and established ties with both the governmental representatives on the Board and with the employers.
As a wave of labor militancy came to México in the wake of the worldwide depression of the 1930s, Velázquez, leaders of the CGT, and Lombardo Toledano, who had also left CROM, founded the Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (CGOCM) or General Confederation of Workers and Peasants of Mexico, on June 28, 1933.
Earl Browder, then head of the Communist Party USA, urged them to accept "unity at all costs", and they returned.
The CTM (along with the CGT, CROM and the electrical workers union) formally aligned with the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano, the precursor of the PRI.
The Federal Labor Boards, which had the power to determine which unions could represent workers and which strikes were legal, consistently favored the CTM against its rivals.
As organizational secretary, Velázquez involved himself in the day-to-day decisions of the organization, building up a power base of patronage.
When Lombardo Toledano stepped down as general secretary of the CTM at the end of his term, Velázquez took his place on February 28, 1941.
The CTM not only refused to endorse the new party, but expelled Lombardo Toledano, his supporters on the CTM's executive board, and other leftwing unionists and withdrew from both the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina, a regional confederation founded by Lombardo Toledano, and the pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions.
The government used similar tactics in 1959, nationalizing the rail industry, firing thousands of strikers and sentencing union leaders to more than ten years in prison for leading a strike.
Velázquez intervened in SUTERM's internal affairs to drive out the former leaders of STERM, after which employers blacklisted them and their supporters.
Velázquez was also one of the first to attack the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) when it led an armed rebellion in Chiapas.
Velázquez continued to support them even as they privatized state-owned industries, a bastion of power for the CTM, as part of the structural adjustment plans imposed by the International Monetary Fund, while signing national pacts that shifted most of the burden to workers while their minimum wage in real terms fell by nearly 70 percent in these years.
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 of workers in 1995, threatening those who disobeyed with fines or expulsion, to avoid the possibility of embarrassing displays of opposition to the CTM or the PRI.
A rival federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), was formed in November 1997 to challenge Velázquez's legacy.
