Collapse of Dignity (25 page)

In response to the political persecution unleashed, the struggle of the mineworkers in the past five years constitutes a historic struggle that is, as I stated earlier, without precedent in the defense of union autonomy, liberty, and the basic human rights of workers. To a degree this has been a conflict and a movement that has inspired all unions, not just in Mexico, but all over the world. The great resistance and dignity with which we have defended these rights, principles, and fundamental values have been of sufficient interest to the unions, international federations, and organizations, who are well aware of the significance and transcendence of our effort, work, courage, and dedication to achieving great victory for workers and democracy in this universal struggle.

Since the invasion of neoliberal technocrats in the 1980s, most Mexican politicians have tried to ignore the reality of Mexico. They create an imaginary Mexico that reflects their desires and their demagoguery but that doesn't reflect what the people see around them every day. Whether out of convenience, conviction, or inability, they disregard the poverty that affects so many citizens. Were they to address this reality, their economic policies would have to change radically. They ignore the fact that Mexico is a country of workers—whether city dwellers, farmers, middle class,
campesino
, indigenous, or immigrant. To the PAN, Mexico is Fox's country that is, in the former president's words, “of businessmen, by businessmen, and for businessmen.” This sentiment is a catastrophic mockery of the concept of a republic. They forget that labor laws were not created to cater to voracious private interests but to protect the interests of workers. People in the streets used to say that Fox's version of the country was “Foxiland” or “DisneyFox.”

Right-wing politicians have lost their moral compass. The government has the ability to relieve many of the injuries it has caused; the legal, economic, and political structure of Mexico is fundamentally
very solid. It has been dismantled and broken, but it is not destroyed. It will take a long time to repair the damage, but we must pick up the task urgently. The path of decay we are on can only lead to a profound national crisis.

Since Fox and the PAN took the helm of the country, our difficulties have increased exponentially. And Calderón, Fox's successor, has waged an ill-conceived war against organized crime that has seen the deaths or missing of more then 150,000 since 2006. Unemployment is rampant, and many young people without prospects for work or school are attracted to organized crime. Official figures show that seven million young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four lack education and jobs. Mexicans call them “NINI”—no education, no jobs—and they make up a huge potential market for organized crime. Unemployment among the total labor force of Mexico was estimated at 14 million in 2012. Capital has fled the country. Foreign and domestic debt is growing at an alarming rate. Prices, especially for consumer products, have spiked. There is corruption on all sides, in the legal system as well as in Los Pinos. The governing class has impunity with respect to nearly all its crimes. All these evils have reached insufferable levels, and the Mexican people are losing patience.

Yet our struggle has implications beyond the turmoil currently seen in Mexico. The principles we fight for are applicable to the struggles of our fellow unions in countries throughout the world. Multinational and global companies tend to exploit manual labor and natural resources—especially the nonrenewable, like minerals, oil, and gas—even more in less advanced countries, because these nations' governments allow them to. In the National Miners' Union we have insisted vigorously on fair treatment for laborers, and this has been the basis of one of my main conflicts with the government. The Mexican government should be more demanding with both Mexican and foreign investors regarding respect for working, health, and safety conditions as well as environmental contamination. Investors have a social and legal responsibility. They should not exploit natural resources indiscriminately, with no regulations, taking them out of the country and removing the profits from
Mexico. They should temper their focus on amassing profits even at the cost of leaving the soil and subsoil depleted.

The basic principles on which these companies operate must change. Working conditions in globalized companies tend to get worse all the time in terms of workers' interests, and at the same time we perceive a global policy focus on the defense of these companies' common interests. Therefore, we have proposed to other labor leaders around the world that, just as transnational companies globalize, unions and the union struggle needs to globalize. We can no longer afford to fight the battle for workers' rights one strike or even one nation at a time; we must expand the front to cover the whole world.

The global mining and metals sector now consists of huge multinational corporations implementing common strategies to defend their interests—companies like Grupo México; the British-Australian Rio Tinto and its Canadian subsidiary Rio Tinto Alcan; Brazil's Vale; and the British-Australian BHP Billiton. Equipped with advanced technologies and huge financial reserves, they cross borders and oceans in order to exploit natural resources and manual labor. In this environment, workers need a global strategy for the defense of their common interests more than ever. Working together will give workers and unions strength, and the ability to withstand the collaboration of corporations and public officials against them.

Fortunately, we have seen the response to these ideas. In June 2012, in a world congress of the three most important international labor federations celebrated in Copenhagen, Denmark, IndustriALL Global Union was created, a new federation representing more than fifty million members from 140 countries. I was honored to be unanimously elected by 1,400 delegates as a member of the new executive committee.

We must bring together members of the working class from far and wide, and from every industry. Without organizations to serve as a counterweight to the ambitions, greed, and massive exploitation of companies and governments that worship the free market, worldwide inequality will continue and worsen, sooner or later generating huge social and political crises across the globe. A country that protects the
individual interests of a few and exploits the manual labor of the majority is doomed to failure, when the ongoing frustration of the repressed leads to widespread unrest and violence. Because unions supply the counterweight to this inequality and exploitation, they are far from becoming outdated or irrelevant. The opposite is true: They are needed more than ever.

Governments, like fish, begin to rot from the head.

—
RUSSIAN PROVERB

In mid-November 2006, the International Metalworkers' Federation
(IMF) held a press conference in the 11 de Julio theater next to Los Mineros' Mexico City headquarters. In the theater—named after the day the union was founded in 1934—and before a large delegation of union leaders who had traveled to Mexico from around the world, the IMF's general secretary, Marcello Malentacchi, announced a Day of Global Solidarity with the Miners' Union, to be held on December 11. Malentacchi had personally urged many congressman and senators to pressure the government to end its aggression against the union, and at the press conference that day, he encouraged workers to do the same on a global scale.

He announced that labor organizations around the world would be petitioning the Mexican embassies in their countries on December 11, protesting the Mexican government's collusion with the private sector and its efforts to strip the Miners' Union of its autonomy.

When December 11 arrived, I was ecstatic and honored by the international outpouring of solidarity for our cause. Union organizations in more than thirty countries on six continents—from Kenya to France to Japan—sent letters to their Mexican ambassadors, urging them to support respect for basic labor rights. Many of these organizations held marches and protests in front of the embassies and spoke to the press about the situation in Mexico and how the government's actions revealed
a fundamental disrespect for workers. Up in Vancouver, I worked with the USW and several smaller unions to organize an event in front of the Mexican consulate there. I spoke to the crowd about the nearly one-year-old conflict, stressing the need to fight for the dignity and freedom of workers wherever it was threatened.

I felt optimistic that day, with so many showing their support for Los Mineros. In our battle against industrial titans, we would certainly need it. I was also pleased that the demonstrations would send a strong message to Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, who had taken over for Vicente Fox on December 1. It had been a hotly debated election that brought up many questions about the legality and transparency of the electoral process, but at least Fox was out of office. Through a request hand-delivered by Jack Layton, president of Canada's New Democratic Party (NDP), Los Mineros had requested an audience with Calderón. The prospect of a new president had awoken some hope in the members of the Miners' Union; we didn't think it could get much worse than President Fox and his wife, and Calderón seemed to be open to negotiating an end to the conflict. We were to be sorely disappointed.

At the end of 2006, two months before Vicente Fox's government left office, Interior Secretary Abascal sent me a message in which he told me it would be best to arrive at an arrangement with the outgoing administration rather than continue the call for recognition of the union's true leadership into the Calderón administration. Abascal insisted that it was better to seek an arrangement with President Fox before president-elect Calderón took up residence at Los Pinos. The incoming government was going to be, in Abascal's words, “much worse and more aggressive.” The Calderón administration would never want to seek an arrangement with the union or me; on the contrary, they would push the confrontation to the point of destroying the Miners' Union, my family, and me. Abascal said that if I would resign, the Fox administration would cease its accusations against my union colleagues and me and end their campaign of slander before Calderón took office.

I didn't consider caving to this indecent proposal—this last pathetic attempt at extortion—for one second. There was no way I would
validate their claims—or tacitly erase their hand in the Pasta de Conchos disaster—by acceding to their demand. Had I stepped down, I would have been implicitly admitting that the leaders of the Miners' Union had committed some kind of failure or abuse against the workers' interests, and there was no way I would help propagate that lie. My message in reply to Abascal was simple: “I am leader of the National Miners' Union based on the free and democratic decision of the workers, in which they voted unanimously. They are the only ones who can decide whether I should continue as head of the union. It is not a decision that the government can or should make, much less the companies who employ our members.”

When Fox stepped down from the presidency, all the union's demands were still in place: that our autonomy be respected; that those responsible for Pasta de Conchos be held accountable; that the bodies of our colleagues be recovered; and that fair compensation be paid to the families immediately.

In the days after he became president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa had his new and then-unknown secretary of labor, Javier Lozano Alarcón, set meetings with some of my colleagues from the executive committee and our labor counselors, Carlos and Nestor de Buen. In his initial communications with them, Labor Secretary Lozano expressed the administration's apparent intention of seeking a negotiated settlement to the strikes that were ongoing in some union sections and of determining the source of the aggression against the Miners' Union. He seemed to want a return to normalcy, and there were some indications that a favorable solution might be brewing.

Lozano said that Calderón had not created the conflict but had simply inherited it from the Fox administration, and that they wanted a resolution. Despite Abascal's warning, the new administration's intentions seemed good that December. One week before Christmas, Lozano told members of the union's executive committee and our labor attorneys that he had specific instructions from the president to terminate this conflict and to negotiate a solution consistent with the law and union autonomy. Lozano even said he was not going to leave for vacation yet, in the expectation that
a solution would be reached soon. Of course it was a lie—with only fifteen days in office, we knew he had no such vacation planned.

Lozano's supposed intention to negotiate fairly with us did not translate into reality, and his promises quickly fell by the wayside. The year 2007 began with two meetings in the labor secretary's office, with several executive committee members and our labor counselors in attendance. Lozano made a point of never addressing me as general secretary. These loose, unstructured talks failed: Lozano said the incoming government was willing to end the conflict and halt the charges against us, but their first requirement was my resignation as general secretary, along with the resignation of the entire executive committee of the union. After two meetings, my colleagues got the feeling that the conflict wasn't going to be solved. They demanded that Lozano make the third meeting more formal, saying that he needed to send me a letter announcing the meeting and that it should address me as their general secretary. At that moment, Lozano said he would do it, but I never received anything from him. The third meeting never took place. It seemed nothing had changed since just a couple of months before, when we had been dealing with Fox and Salazar.