Collapse of Dignity (35 page)

As repressions like these escalated, international support for Los
Mineros continued. On August 14—days after the murder of Reynaldo Hernández—at the Regional Conference of the IMF of Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, the assembly expressed its complete and absolute support for the Mexican miners in their struggle for dignity, autonomy, and liberty. The organization agreed to three global solidarity resolutions: (1) Recover the sixty-three bodies abandoned in Pasta de Conchos, treat the families fairly, and punish those responsible, both in the company and the government; (2) Find an immediate solution to the three strikes in Cananea, Sombrerete, and Taxco; (3) Immediately stop persecuting Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and the National Miners' Union.

Despite calls for an end to the persecution—from the IMF, Los Mineros ourselves, and many others—the attack on union democracy continued. Germán Larrea dearly wanted the strike in Cananea to end—along with those in Taxco and Sombrerete—and he knew that the only long-term solution to controlling the unrest of the workers was to have a union that served not to empower them, but to pacify and further subjugate them. To that end—and because their smear campaign hadn't convinced the union's members that I was a fraud—he and his band of fellow businessmen began directly intimidating workers, using outright threats and violence. The level of these assaults shot up in 2007, with me, my family, and a full ten members of the union's executive committee receiving death threats.

Mario Garcia Ortiz, the executive committee's delegate in the state of Michoacán (who was later elected as my alternate general secretary in the General Convention of May 2008), suffered extreme aggression at the hands of the government. Mario had always been a loyal advocate for Los
Mineros, and it was for that reason that they went after him. In February 2007, a group of men arrived at his house while his wife and son were there alone. His wife, María, heard the car pull up. Leaving the laundry she was doing, she walked to the front door to investigate. On the other side of the door, she found a group of strange men. “Are you the wife of Mario Garcia?” one asked. When she replied yes, she was grabbed by the hair and told she would be paying for her husband's actions. They dragged her by the hair to a waiting car, threw her on the back floorboard, and ordered her not to look at their faces. Before they left, they shot at the house and demanded that Mario's young son, Miguel, say where his father was. Miguel wouldn't say, even when they threatened him with the death of his father. Unable to get an answer, they drove off with María, leaving Miguel traumatized.

Witnesses to the abduction quickly identified the kidnappers as state policemen dressed as civilians; in a small town like Mario's, everyone knew everyone, and masquerading police were easy to spot. When Mario called me to tell me what was going on, he was in a rage, worried sick over his wife. He said that he and a few of his colleagues had decided to collect some collateral that would help them negotiate with her captors. They had followed a group of workers—traitors who were in the service of Grupo Villacero—to a water-bottling company, and then trapped the men inside. His plan was to kill the men one by one and then burn the building to the ground if María wasn't returned unharmed. It was the only way the distraught Mario could think of to pressure his wife's captors into letting her go.

I did my best to calm Mario over the phone, and I assured him that violence would not do anything to help the situation. Despite my great anger against the aggressors, I told him that we shouldn't make irrational decisions, that we should keep a cool head. If we lost our heads and acted rashly, I said, we would be acting like our enemies, and even more blood would be spilled as a result.

As soon as I was off the phone with Mario, I called Michoacán's governor, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, and demanded that they release Mario Garcia's wife unharmed. I told him what Mario was threatening to do and insisted that María be returned right away. (We already knew
Cárdenas Batel to be a weak man who would not stand up to the union's abusers; he'd proven that excellently in his reaction to the attack against the Sicartsa mill the previous year.) The governor claimed not to know anything about the kidnapping, even though it was very clear that the perpetrators were disguised state police.

In the end, they held María for seven hours. She had been blind-folded, bound at the wrists and knees, and verbally abused for that entire time. Eventually, they set her outside and took off the blindfold and leg bindings. In an instant María was off and running.

None of us knew what prompted the policemen to release her then, or whether Cárdenas Batel or anyone else had spoken with them, but we were immensely relieved when she reappeared. Yet, it still gives me deep pain to consider the psychic harm inflicted on her and her adolescent son.

“I'm always thinking about that moment,” María said later, “but I have to find the courage to continue. I love my husband and know he's working for a good cause. I know he must defend the rights of the union workers, and I will stand by him. When I sleep, I sleep dressed, just in case. And I send my boy to sleep across the street. I know he's been hurt by this, too, because now, whenever he hears something out in the street, he always stands up to see what's happening outside. I want to take him to a doctor but he won't go. He says he'll get over it.” Miguel was so disturbed by the threats and seeing his mother assaulted in such a way that he lost his ability to speak for quite a while.

“I'd given up my wife for dead,” Mario told me. “And if she was dead, those fifteen cowards and traitors that we had in custody were going to go with her. We were getting ready to act if they didn't release her soon, because that was the decision of all the workers in Section 271 of the National Union.” To this day, I am grateful that such terrible events did not come to pass.

On top of brutal intimidation tactics like these, Grupo México also
launched broader and more systematic efforts to undermine the union organization. In late 2006, a new labor union purporting to
represent Mexico's metalworkers had appeared and applied for
registro
—governmental recognition—from the labor department. Called the “National Union of Workers in the Exploration, Exploitation, and Benefit of Mines” (SUTEEBM), it had been established with the direct involvement of Grupo México. It was a Germán Larrea project, a union set up by a company to put on a front of worker representation while in reality further suppressing the workers. SUTEEBM was headed by Francisco Hernández Gámez, a former Cananea miner who had been expelled from the union in 2006 after attempting to set up his own subcontracting business in the mine. SUTEEBM had received its
registro
from the Calderón government so easily and quickly that it was hard to take the organization seriously. Clearly, Larrea's influence—along with that of Alberto Bailleres and Alonso Ancira—put the
registro
on a fast track through the bureaucracy, just as it had done with Elías Morales's
toma de nota
in February 2006. Labor Secretary Lozano, of course, lent his aid.

In September 2007, the JFCA called for a decision from the miners on which union they preferred—SUTEEBM or Los Mineros. It announced a series of elections to be held at eight Grupo México work sites in the states of San Luis Potosí, Chihuahua, and Coahuila (the sections in Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea were not included, since they were already on strike). Leaders of the Miners' Union were given less than two days' notice that the elections would take place. Once they were over, Los Mineros—a seventy-year-old organization—had lost several of its sections to an upstart puppet union controlled by Germán Larrea.

In execution, the elections were little more than campaigns to coerce members of Los Mineros into signing up for the new SUTEEBM. The IMF, the Center for Labor Action and Reflection, and many human rights activists have voiced their opinion that the election was rigged in favor of Grupo México's union. The irregularities were numerous. Our labor lawyers and executive committee members present at the worksites recorded the efforts used to intimidate the workers.

First of all, many work sites held the elections in company offices, in the presence of supervisors and the company union. Moreover, the polling stations were surrounded by armed federal, state, and
municipal forces sent by Lozano to oversee the election. There were even members of the Mexican army at some stations, brandishing their weapons in front of the workers. Supposedly their mission was to ensure “peaceful elections,” but the polling stations looked like they were in a state of siege.

Furthering the intimidation, there were two ballot boxes at each station, each clearly marked—one with SUTEEBM's logo and the other with the logo of Los Mineros. Everyone in the room—including the hovering company men, labor department officials, and the armed troops—could see which box each miner put his ballot into. At the time this was permitted by Mexican labor law—not until the following year would the Supreme Court require secret ballot votes in union elections. The result was a climate of intimidation that made it impossible for workers to freely choose their union, as ILO Convention 87—ratified by Mexico—requires.

The governor of San Luis Potosí, PAN member Marcelo de los Santos, was especially active in the threats against the miners, and his influence was a big factor in their outcome. De los Santos put his law enforcement resources at the disposal of Grupo México—which has a predominant interest in his metal-rich state. The company used these forces to kidnap several miners before the election so they couldn't vote. Fifteen other workers in San Luis Potosí were fired just before the vote, both to prevent those fifteen from participating and to intimidate their colleagues.

During polling at the La Caridad mine in Nacozari, where Reynaldo Hernández had been murdered, the nine hundred recently fired workers were prevented from voting. The new workers brought in to replace them were directly threatened into voting for the puppet union; company officials told them that they would be fired and deported back to southern Mexico if the puppet union didn't take the election. And just before the election in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila—a few miles away from Pasta de Conchos—several workers were locked in a mine so they couldn't get to the polls in time. In other cases, the company tried bribes rather than threats; several workers received payments of between $150 and $350 in exchange for supporting SUTEEBM.

Once this forced voting was done and these sections had “decided” to leave Los Mineros for SUTEEMB, the Department of Labor issued an official news bulletin celebrating the supposedly free decision of the workers to join the new union.

Grupo México and the JFCA broke the law by holding these sham elections, and they also violated the workers' universal right to freedom of association. Now, as members of SUTEEBM, many of our former colleagues were entirely at the mercy of the company's whims. Following the instatement of Larrea's puppet union, Grupo México increased the Nacozari miners' workday from eight hours to twelve. This change—supported by SUTEEBM—meant more exploitation and more potential for tragic events like Pasta de Conchos. Today, nearly three-fourths of Nacozari workers are employed by contractors. They don't even have the benefit of belonging to a company union, much less a free, democratic one.

Despite this bullying, our former colleagues in the sections that lost to SUTEEBM have expressed their desire to rejoin the union. We are confident that they will do so when conditions are right.

After the election, the union's dialogue with the government broke
down completely. Labor Secretary Lozano was openly displaying his complete servility to Grupo México through his opposition to the Cananea strike and his help in setting up SUTEEBM. He seemed proud to be Larrea's “cat,” acting more like a lawyer for the man's company than a servant of the Mexican people. Our only hope was that we would win a judgment against him soon; we had demanded before the Chamber of Deputies that he be removed from office and barred from ever returning. We also demanded that he be investigated for unlawful gains, obstruction of justice, and abuses of power. Though the Mexican Constitution states that the mines are a state concession, not private property, Lozano—like his predecessor—never compelled Grupo México to honor and respect the law while operating these sites.

Through all the abuse, we maintained a fierce defense of our right to strike, fighting hard to keep the Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea strikes
going. We refused to allow the company, through underhanded legal maneuvering, to have them declared illegal—though they tried hard, and in some cases succeeded.

On January 11, 2008, the JFCA issued a second resolution against the workers at Cananea, once again declaring the now nearly six-month-long strike illegal. According to the ruling, the workers would have twenty-four hours to return to their jobs before any punitive action would be taken. Yet just a little more than
one hour
after the union was notified of the ruling, armed state and federal forces numbering around seven hundred descended on the Cananea mine in a caravan of eighty vehicles. They fired rubber bullets and released tear gas, injuring twenty to forty miners. Larrea was again making use of the public forces that were always at his disposal (even though those forces are paid for by the Mexican people—and even though Grupo México doesn't pay taxes). The supportive PAN government gladly sent the troops to help this businessman protect his greed-fueled exploitation of Mexico's largest source of copper.