Reuters/Mexico City

Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, the once-powerful head of Mexico’s oil workers’ union whose arrest on charges of murder and illegal arms possession in 1989 created a political sensation, has died at the age of 91, his family said.

Hernandez died in hospital after suffering from a series of complications, his son said.

Known as “La Quina,” Hernandez was thrown in jail weeks after president Carlos Salinas took office in December 1988. Although he was widely seen as corrupt, Hernandez was also brought down by Salinas’s desire to put pressure on the oil workers’ union as part of plans to liberalise state oil and gas monopoly Pemex.

“Given my father’s age, 91, he had health complications,” his son Joaquin Hernandez Correa said. “It was his colon, his kidneys weren’t working properly. Then there was a respiratory infection and another complication from an edema.”

His diminutive father did not receive a jury trial but was convicted and sentenced by a judge to more than 30 years in prison, but the term was later cut.

The government then paroled him and he was released at the end of 1997.

The elder Hernandez was for years a pillar of labour support for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. At his peak, he controlled 200,000 oil workers in Pemex and oversaw a huge patronage budget. But his downfall came after he failed to back Salinas as the PRI’s presidential candidate during the 1988 election.

He was rumoured to be giving support to Salinas’s main rival, left-wing challenger Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Hernandez and his supporters said the charges he murdered a federal agent and possessed weapons were trumped up, and Amnesty International dubbed him a political prisoner for daring to oppose government privatisation plans and publicly criticising the president.