Collapse of Dignity (31 page)

The man who told me about these secret meetings insisted that neither he nor any of his colleagues had attended them, much less participated in the conspiracy. His company was one of the few who saw the indecent nature of the actions against us and refused to be a part of it. He also told me that Vicente Fox and his wife were fully aware of the plot and supported its execution. The president's involvement in such a conspiracy is of course grounds for not only dismissal but for serious criminal charges. Sadly, Mexico is one of the countries where such abuses go unspoken of, concealed by an iron wall.

If this evidence doesn't amount to a proof of conspiracy, I don't know what does. A group of shameless individuals—businessmen, politicians, and union lackeys—had banded together in premeditated actions designed to destroy my colleagues, me, and the union we represent, merely because we were an obstacle to their perverted collective interests.

Although the tragedy at the mine took the company and the government of Vicente Fox completely by surprise, they did not hesitate to use it as an opportunity to accelerate a new phase of the conspiracy they had plotted in the presidential offices of Vicente Fox. They had been conspiring against us long before the mine collapse, but that event gave them all the more reason to work together for my downfall; if they didn't, they would be implicated in the deaths of the sixty-five men.

Once we made the public accusation of industrial homicide, their plans for persecution kicked into high gear, falling on us from the pinnacle of economic and political power in Mexico. Their attacks made use of the previously established relationships between Fox's labor department, the companies, and the media, and they were clearly coordinated and premeditated. These antisocial businessmen and ambitious politicians have
long wanted to take advantage of the fact that the government consists of prominent individuals from the extreme, antiunion right.

Though we have been a primary target of this plot, it should not be seen as an isolated assault against the unionized miners, metalworkers, and steelworkers of Mexico. These businessmen and their attendant politicians are waging a general offensive against democratic and independent trade unionism; Fox, and Calderón after him, carried out aggressive actions against the Mexican Electricians Union, the Aviation Workers' Union, and others. The Miners' Union was merely the first on their long hit list of democratic and independent trade unions that they had prepared during their clumsy scheming in 2005.

Certain businessmen in Mexico hope to continue collaborating with right-wing politicians to effectively nullify all unions in the Mexican landscape. Since the PAN took power in 2000, we have experienced something like a lost decade: inequality has grown exponentially and abuse of power is rampant. Our main weapon in response is solidarity. Neither Mexico nor Mexicans deserve this intolerable situation. These individuals have created a bad image of our country abroad and have caused deep losses in Mexican society. For the future of our children and grandchildren, the situation has to change.

Following close on the heels of Moreira's accusation against Vicente
Fox came an additional report that once again confirmed the presence of a direct conspiracy against the Miners' Union. Among the speakers at the opening ceremony of the Extraordinary General Convention of the Miners' Union in April 2007 was Francisco Hernández Juárez, head of the Telephone Workers' Union and president of the National Workers' Union (UNT). I knew Hernández only formally, through union business, but that day, as I watched his speech from Vancouver through a video conference, he dropped a compelling hint about the governments early intent to weaken Los Mineros.

During his speech he stated, to the surprise of more than nine hundred convention attendees, that at the beginning of 2005 Carlos María
Abascal, then serving as secretary of labor, had said to him personally “that they were coming for Napoleón Gómez Urrutia.” This would have been a full year before Pasta de Conchos and the attempted imposition of Morales. It was further proof that they had been planning to remove me as general secretary of the union long before the official start of the conflict in February 2006.

Hernández Juárez repeated that same statement during the Ordinary General Miners' Convention in May 2008, to which he also was invited. His statement fell on us like a bucket of ice water. Abascal had given me a warning, but it came so close to the outbreak of aggression that we didn't have sufficient time to prepare a defense strategy and counterattack.

Though I felt great anger upon hearing Hernández statement, I knew we had to keep our focus on defending the union and finding justice for our lost colleagues. We were now over a year into the conflict, and we were still fighting the bank fraud charges and seeking justice for Pasta de Conchos. Yet we had just won a significant victory: In March 2007, shortly before our annual convention, the Fourth Collegiate Tribunal for Labor Matters of the First Circuit declared that I was the legitimate leader of the Miners' Union, and that the labor department had abused its authority and failed to follow correct procedures in its refusal to recognize me as such. According to the ruling, the government was obliged to officially recognize me as general secretary with a
toma de nota
within forty-eight hours. Lozano grudgingly complied. Elías Morales was at last stripped of the title he had held in name only.

Yet, rather than admit defeat, the forces allied against us were to show no signs of letting up. In fact, following my official reinstatement as general secretary, the conspirators ratcheted up their attacks. This time, they would throw all their efforts into the national media.

The truth does not belong to the one who yells the most.

—
RABINDRANATH TAGORE

In 2007, the union's lawyers presented a formal complaint before the
PGR for the crimes committed at Pasta de Conchos. Our complaint, in accordance with the criminal code, was a charge of industrial homicide by intentional or malicious omission—also known as “corporate murder”—leveled against Germán Larrea, Grupo México's board of directors, Francisco Salazar, Labor Undersecretary Emilio Gómez Vives, and the rest of the officials and inspectors from the labor department. The case was presented before the Special Unit of Investigation for the Prosecution of Criminal Offenses Committed by Public Servants, under preliminary investigation number 4085/07/08.

In the more than five years since we made that complaint, the PGR has neglected to conduct even a preliminary investigation and has never looked into the facts we reported. Instead, it has frozen and attempted to drop our lawsuit completely. It has continued to try to lay blame for the disaster on the union itself, once again exposing its ongoing bias toward Grupo México. And it has continued to support Grupo México's efforts to prosecute me and my four colleagues for crimes we didn't commit, in an effort to distract attention from the real perpetrators of industrial homicide. Officials at the attorney general's office seem to have forgotten the sixty-five lives lost in February 2006 and the families who have been affected by these deaths. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, they have shown no interest in exposing the wrongdoing of their powerful allies.

Yet, Los Mineros still held out hope of justice. Despite the fact that I'd been fully acting in the capacity of general secretary over the previous year, even from my station in Vancouver, the Supreme Court's official reinstatement of me as leader of the union gave us hope that the entire legal system hadn't been corrupted. We had received a just—if long delayed—ruling, and the labor department had been rightly criticized for its actions. At last, the workers' desire to rid themselves of the traitor Elías Morales had been respected.

The victory lifted the spirits of the entire organization, but for Grupo México and the labor department, it was a humiliation. Faced with this chastening from the Supreme Court and slow progress in their legal campaign against us—and still infuriated by our accusations of industrial homicide—the union's enemies began working on a new plan. Since the beginning of the conflict, Grupo México had held meetings every Wednesday specifically to discuss their efforts against Los Mineros. In attendance at these meetings were high-level Grupo México officials, the company's internal lawyers and its criminal lawyers, and former government officials who were on its payroll. They also invited publicists, psychologists, and consultants to advise them on the best way to carry out their attacks. In these meetings, they gave each party an assignment for the week—deciding who could best bribe whom, who could best pressure whom. Following the rebuke from the Supreme Court, this perverted mastermind group decided to shift its full focus to the national media. Their plan was to turn the general public against me in any way they could.

Though the media had been biased against us from the start, Grupo México now initiated an expensive paid publicity campaign against the leaders of the Miners' Union. It was a hatchet job unlike any other attack on a union leader in Mexican history. Beginning on April 20, they launched a campaign consisting of a series of slanderous TV advertisements that denounced me for supposed misuse of the $55 million Mining Trust. Over foreboding, dramatic music, a voiceover depicted
me as a heartless criminal and portrayed the supposed “victims” of my crimes—the miners—as hoping to see me end up in jail. At the conclusion of the spot, the parties allegedly responsible for the spot are identified in small print: “Section XI of the Union of Miners of Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua, and Section VI Charcas, San Luis Potosí.” In these sections, Grupo México had lied to, bribed, and threatened members of Los Mineros until they renounced the union. This unlawful coercion worked on a small minority of locals, and we lost a few union sections that had belonged to the organization for more than fifty years—though, of course, these union locals could never have afforded this kind of publicity. The truth is that this multimillion-dollar campaign was financed exclusively by Grupo México.

The ad was broadcast nationally on Televisa's Channel 2 (not coincidentally, both Germán Larrea and Alberto Bailleres sit on the board of Televisa and are supposedly shareholders). Another spot, broadcast nationally on Televisa's Channel 2 and on Televisión Azteca's Channel 13, made the same claim and again stated that the same union sections—both belonging to workers of Grupo México—had paid for it. For eight months, from April to December, the ads ran during peak times—during highly anticipated soccer games, for example—taking up the most desirable and high-dollar ad space. We estimated that in the end, these defamatory ads were run a total of about eight hundred times, all in prime “triple A” airtime.

Germán Larrea had plenty of money to put toward the cause, and, true to his cynical nature, he didn't care about the fact that everyone knew where the real backing for the ads came from. All in all, we have estimated, based on the cost of this premium media space, that Grupo México invested close to $200 million on the eight-month campaign. (The absurdity of this being nearly four times the entire amount of the Mining Trust was not lost on us.) In fact, Jaime Lomelín, CEO of Grupo Peñoles, the second-largest mining company in Mexico, told me that Larrea had been saying that he did not mind losing his fortune in his fight against the Miners' Union. I heard a similar story from one of our tax lawyers who has a connection with a member of Larrea's defense
team. The company shamelessly threw money at their efforts to drag me through the mud and insert themselves into the union's operations. They hired more than thirty law firms to help them fight us, even as they made a big show of giving pitifully small amounts to the families of the men who died at Pasta de Conchos. The allocation of money to these two causes clearly reveals Germán Larrea's priorities.

What just country would allow TV ads to be bought and broadcast against an individual who should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise? What country would allow—and in fact support—such propaganda, which has the sole purpose of turning the public against a man who they all know is innocent? It seems that being on the board of Televisa, as is the case of Germán Larrea and Alberto Bailleres, has its advantages. No one intervened to stop the airing of these malicious ads, although we presented the request before several authorities. We presented a series of appeals to the media outlets airing slander against us and requested the legal right to a response. None of us were suing for a cent of damages, though the spots clearly justified that claim; we only wanted the right to reply when our accusers published articles or presented information that was false or slanderous. Each one of our appeals was ignored.

Because we didn't have the financial resources to mount a counterattack in the media (our accounts were still frozen by the government), the union members instead took their retaliation to the streets. In a national campaign, the miners spent their own time making huge posters and displaying them in public areas, particularly in the swanky neighborhoods where Larrea would be most ashamed. In large red lettering, the posters read “Larrea—Assassin of Miners” and “Grupo México Corrupt.” Volunteers also printed many handouts and leaflets to give out, each of them showing the truth of the situation that was so egregiously distorted in the media and displaying a large photo of the reclusive Larrea. It wasn't as high-caliber as Larrea's multimillion-dollar national media blitz, but it was the best we could do to defend our honor and reveal Larrea and his cronies for what they are.