Workers in factories on or near the U.S.-Mexican border, "maquiladores," a million of them earning an average of $5 a day, have begun to flex their political muscles. There are signs that those muscles could bring dramatic changes in nationwide elections set for next year. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues.

TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA -- As Mexico's year 2000 elections approach, the balance of power is increasingly moving towards cities along the country's two-thousand-mile long border with the United States.

And the muscles behind the change may be those of factory workers with a long list of complaints.

Already the industrial powerhouse of North America, cities like Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros have nonetheless remained backwaters in Mexican national politics. But a recent election here indicates the picture is changing rapidly.

Tijuana's factories employ 200,000 people. Most of them have come north from more southerly states looking for work.

Their migrant status disenfranchises them because Mexican residency requirements dictate that people can only vote in state and local elections in the locality in which they officially reside.

But national elections are a different story, and it seems clear that mobilizing these workers could threaten the government's policy of using low industrial wages to attract foreign investment.

A recent municipal election in Tijuana marked the first serious campaign by a political party to get the votes of maquiladora workers.

This effort has its roots in a strike called last June by workers at the Han Young factory, the first legal strike by an independent union ever at a border plant.

Two weeks into the strike, Tijuana police tore down the strike flags strung across the factory doors, allowed the company to bring in strikebreakers and told strikers they could no longer picket or congregate outside.

So the strikers took to the streets, staging a series of daily marches through the huge working-class barrios which surround the maquiladoras. With the election set for June 28, they not only appealed for support for their strike, but called on voters to reject the National Action Party (PAN), accusing it of siding with factory owners.

The PAN has ruled Tijuana and Baja California for over a decade, and is strong in other northern states as well. It shares a policy of using economic austerity to promote foreign investment with the Institutional Revolutionary Party  (PRI) which has governed Mexico since the late 1920s.

The left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has not been a serious threat to the PAN/PRI in the north, despite electoral inroads in southern Mexico and the fact that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, its presidential candidate in the last two national elections, is now mayor of Mexico City.

Last June, however, PRD candidates campaigned seriously for the votes of maquiladora workers. They distributed thousands of flyers calling for raising factory wages, for child care for the mostly-female workforce, and free transportation to and from work -- along with demands for basic city services in the barrios. For the first time, the PRD began organizing neighborhood committees in working-class precincts. Tijuana's fast-growing streetsellers' association, which represents thousands of migrant workers from Oaxaca, set up a PRD committee

The PRD mayoral candidate, Jesus Ruiz Barraza, rector of the University of Tijuana, spent $300,000 on his campaign, supplementing a first-ever infusion of money from Mexico City. Cardenas came and campaigned for local candidates.

As a result, PRD support increased dramatically. The party which won only 10,000 votes in Tijuana in 1992 and 1995, polled 25,800, or 9.5% of the votes cast. "In the past, I would have been entitled to a seat on the city council, along with two of our other candidates," says Aurora Pelayo, PRD president for Baja California. "But the PRI and the PAN engineered an electoral reform last year which they used to deny us any seats at all."

The party did, however, win council positions in the smaller cities of Mexicali, Tecate, Ensenada and Rosarito.

A new, independent labor federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), which organized a local chapter in Baja California last summer, already has 25,000 members.

The new federation has challenged government economic policies. When Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo offered workers a 14% increase in salaries to compensate for inflation, the UNT demanded 22%. Along the border, the federation calls for a daily wage of 100 pesos ($10), double the present average.

These developments threaten increased labor costs for U.S.- and other foreign-owned factories along the border.

Of Mexico's 10 million permanently-employed workers, one million work in the border factories. "If the movement among maquiladora workers grows," says Enrique Hernandez, general secretary of the Han Young workers' union, "by 2000 we could win tens, or even hundreds of thousands of new votes."

Perhaps it is that prospect that explains why Hernandez and Jose Penaflor Barron, the Han Young union lawyer, have been repeatedly detained and interrogated by the Tijuana police.

Border political authorities and factory owners clearly view the possibility of unbalancing the country's power structure with alarm.