Collapse of Dignity (45 page)

The simple fact is that under the federal labor law,
force majeure
does not apply when a company has let its own greed and neglect deteriorate an operation. It was a fraudulent, unprecedented move, concocted merely to end the strike. Now that the courts had upheld the strike three times, it was their only recourse.

The General Mines Director, a person I had never met or had contact with, complied with Grupo México's request and ordered the inspection of the Cananea facilities. Then, on March 20, 2009, he hurriedly issued a resolution stating that, based on reports from the inspectors and statements and documents from Grupo México, he concluded that the damage to the facility had indeed prevented Grupo México from carrying out the mining concession granted to them at Cananea. It was a fabrication, though; the inspections never happened. The resolution claimed that the damage to the facility and its equipment was “of such a serious nature that it makes it impossible to undertake the work in the terms set forth in the Mining Act.” He concluded that the damage was caused by “third parties,” which supposedly constituted
force majeure
according to Article 70, section IV, of the Regulation to the Mining Act. Not only does Article 70 not apply to the situation at Cananea, but the General Mines Director's findings were a total fabrication. All the paperwork relating to the supposed inspection had been prepared in Grupo México's offices.

That same day, Grupo México initiated a special proceeding before the JFCA in order to request termination of the employment relationship with Los Mineros and all its members at Cananea based on
force majeure
. After a hearing in which the company repeated its false claim that the workers had vandalized and destroyed the mine's equipment and facilities, the court stated that the result of this evidence would be the immediate termination of the union's labor contracts. In one fell swoop, the workers were fired, and Grupo México began gathering workers who were not “contaminated” by unionism. Right away,
the company began hiring hundreds of contract workers from different regions of the country, even from several Central American countries, all of whom lacked sufficient training, and started up production with them. So much for Grupo México's claim that the mine was inoperable. As usual, the company didn't show any shame about exposing its own deceit. (The company had performed a similar maneuver as it fought the strike in Taxco: Larrea presented the Mexican Stock Exchange with reports saying that the silver mine had proven mineral reserves for forty years, but in the labor courts, he was simultaneously claiming that the reserves had been exhausted and that he would therefore have to terminate the miners' employment agreements.)

The nine hundred Cananea miners had been displaced, but they were determined to continue the strike. Following the JFCA's approval of the termination, we filed an amparo to have the workers reinstated. Unfortunately, the case would be held up in the courts for nearly a year. When the Second Collegiate Tribunal finally made its ruling on February 11, 2010, it announced its decision: The judge had taken Grupo México's side, and we were denied amparo. In the eyes of the court, the workers' agreement with the company had ended, meaning the strike had ended too.

But we weren't ready to give up. We appealed the decision to the Supreme Court and got another blow: On March 17, 2010, a year after Grupo México's dishonest
force majeure
maneuver, our appeal was denied. It was now looking like Grupo México would bring in federal forces to evict us from Cananea.

Mexico's Political Coordination Board—a governing body of the Chamber of Deputies—saw that this was a possibility and made an effort to prevent the powder keg of Cananea from exploding. In April, the board formally urged the government to avoid using force to remove the strikers, and it even asked the government to consider ending Grupo México's concession. The company, the board argued, clearly was incapable of exercising competent stewardship over this resource. The board called for a thirty-day break followed by renewed negotiations between the workers and Grupo México.

Shortly afterward, the International Tribunal on Trade Union Rights completed a yearlong study of the situation at Cananea and announced its opinion. It called into question the court ruling that had approved the termination of the miners' contracts and noted the government's pervasive bias toward Grupo México.

We knew, however, that Calderón, Lozano, and Gómez Mont would never listen to such reasoning. The company was loudly complaining about the strike, claiming that the conflict had so far cost the company over $4 billion. Interior Secretary Gómez Mont, in particular, was eager to help his former legal client recoup these costs, and he helped the company organize a forceful attack. On June 6, 2010, nearly four thousand heavily armed forces from the federal government and the state government of Sonora invaded the Cananea mine. They forced workers out of the mine, chased them to the union hall, and then tear-gassed the people who had taken shelter inside, including women and children.

It's remarkable that no one was killed in the violence. I made a call to our Cananea brothers that day and urged them not to confront their attackers or give in to their provocation, since the miners were outnumbered four to one. But the miners of Cananea did not give up without a fight. They did their best to resist nonviolently, and many were wounded. At the end of the vicious assault, the workers and their families had been terrorized and ejected from the mine facilities. Five miners were badly beaten, and twenty-two miners suspected of being leaders within the union local were arrested. The armed forces were receiving orders from top government officials, including President Calderón himself. They had never obeyed the rule of law, and they clearly lack human principles and morals.

The captured miners were subsequently released in the absence of a legal basis for the charges, although one of them, Martín Fernando Salazar, who at the time was dealing with a family medical situation in Hermosillo, is still detained in a prison in Agua Prieta, Sonora. The company pressed criminal charges against several more.

Following the full Grupo México takeover, the company brought in thousands more scabs and signed them up to a useless company union.
The town of Cananea now resembled a military outpost, as hundreds of armed forces stationed themselves around the mine to keep the strikers out.

With Los Mineros out of the mine, Grupo México announced that it would invest $120 million to improve and enlarge the Cananea copper mine, while the state of Sonora would invest $440 million of its own funds in the town of Cananea.

It seemed like a final defeat in our struggle for Cananea, but in no way were we prepared to give up fighting against the abuses of Germán Larrea. The vast majority of union members held firm, refusing any severance pay or offers to come back to their jobs under the company union. On August 11, 2010, two months after the invasion, the Ninth District Judge in Sonora—Víctor Aucencio Romero Hernández—ruled that the strike could continue. Though we had been forced out, our strike was still legally recognized, even if the government wasn't prepared to enforce the court's ruling.

In August of 2010, while we were still dealing with the aftermath of
the Cananea assault, I got a call from a fellow labor leader in Chile. He told me that an explosion in the San José de Atacama mine, near Copiapó, had trapped thirty-three miners more than 2,300 feet below the surface. No one knew whether they were alive or dead. I immediately expressed the solidarity of Los Mineros, and soon read the reports in the national media. We watched the situation with great concern, finding it nearly impossible not to draw parallels to Pasta de Conchos.

Though Chile also has a conservative government like Mexico's, there was an intense effort to determine the fate of the trapped miners, and all thirty-three were found alive seventeen days after the rescue began. For more than two months the whole country devoted their faith and resources to saving the miners—including the mineworkers' unions; the communities and families; the directors of Minera San Esteban Primera, the company that owned the mine; the provincial authorities in Atacama; and even President Sebastian Pinera.

The rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners put into stark relief the enormous guilt that Mexican businessmen and governing politicians bear on their conscience for the industrial homicide that occurred on February 19, 2006, in the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila. Sixty-three miners are today still abandoned at the bottom of the mine, at less than four hundred feet of depth, on land that is smoother than the mountainous, rocky landscape of Chile. In Chile, a concerted effort was sustained for more than two months after the accident, while in Pasta de Conchos Grupo México, directed by Germán Larrea and his accomplice Xavier García de Quevedo, as well as the concealing and enabling government of Vicente Fox, closed the mine and suspended rescue operations just five days after the explosion, condemning to death the miners who might have still been alive.

And the differences continue: In Chile the rescued workers were offered payments on the order of one million dollars each, while in Mexico the relatives from Pasta de Conchos were offered miserly payments equal to only seven thousand dollars for each family of the deceased miners. This was in 2006, a year in which the income of Grupo México was on the unprecedented order of $6 billion.

When twenty-nine workers died in a tragic accident at a coal mine in West Virginia in April 2010, President Barack Obama himself went to the site of the accident on two different occasions. He ordered an investigation into who was at fault for the accident, but he also immediately pushed through reforms aimed at preventing other industrial homicides in the mines throughout the country. In the end, payments of three million dollars were ordered for each family of the miners killed.

The outcomes of these mining tragedies in other countries puts Mexican government leaders and the owners of the mining companies in a very poor light. Neither President Vicente Fox nor Germán Larrea ever visited the relatives, either to express their condolences or to offer technical, financial, or material help that would have enabled the rescue to continue. President Felipe Calderón also has not visited in the more than seven years since the Pasta de Conchos disaster and continues to ignore his responsibility in this matter.

The insensitive and egotistical attitude has continued in Mexico, since Calderón has not taken a single step to rescue the sixty-three bodies that remain abandoned in Pasta de Conchos. He also has done nothing to help the families or to make fair and respectable payments, much less to criminally prosecute those responsible for the catastrophe. Of course, neither Grupo México nor the governments of Fox and Calderón have ever wanted to know the true causes of the explosion, because that would display for all to see the irresponsibility, abuses, and criminal negligence of Larrea, his board of directors, and his management staff, exposing them to criminal prosecution.

Thus, we celebrated the rescue of our mining comrades in Chile with the rest of the world, but not without a heaviness of heart. It was impossible not to speculate what the outcome would have been had the labor department forced Grupo México to carry on its rescue efforts for even as little as seventeen days, rather than the mere five allowed. Because it is a question we will never know the answer to, all we can do is fight tirelessly, day to day, as hard as we can, to bring to justice the criminals responsible for the deaths and to ensure that corporate greed and governmental deceit do not take the lives of any more of our colleagues and friends.

It is strange how casually the wicked believe everything will turn out well.

—
VICTOR HUGO

On September 24, 2009, Felipe Calderón appointed a new attorney
general to head up the PGR. His pick was a close friend of his, Arturo Chávez Chávez, a former director of government in Abascal's interior department. Chávez lacked the ability or experience for the job of attorney general, and he had taken part in authorizing the deployment of armed forces against the striking workers at the Sicartsa mill at Lazaro Cárdenas in 2006. He was also widely criticized in the press for mishandling the investigation of mass murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. A cable leaked by Wikileaks in 2011 would later reveal the United States' opinion that Chávez's appointment was “totally unexpected and inexplicable.” To us, the appointment was absurd, but not inexplicable: Chávez was supported by Grupo México. Even though Calderón knew his friend wasn't qualified for the position of attorney general, the company had forced him to appoint Chávez. As usual, it was as if Grupo México held the president hostage, and it succeeded in getting a new PGR head who would protect its interests.

Despite the ongoing appointment of antiunion officials to top government positions, the injustices at Cananea, and the imprisonment of Juan Linares, the justice system—with all its flaws—had helped us resist the attacks of reactionary corporations and politicians. I am proud to say
that there
are
judges in Mexico who act independently of individuals like Germán Larrea and Javier Lozano, and who work to maintain the unbiased administration of justice. Finding this justice in a country like Mexico is a slow, grueling process, but in the end, truth prevails. In 2009 and 2010, we began to see some of the long-awaited rewards of our legal struggle.

On March 13, 2009, the Eighteenth Court in Criminal Matters of the Federal District, which had inherited the banking fraud charges from state officials in San Luis Potosí, refused to issue an arrest warrant against me, citing the fact that there was no evidence of any illegal activity. The PGR appealed the cancellation of the arrest warrant, but three judges from the Second Criminal Court of the Supreme Court of Justice confirmed the decision in my favor that September. The file was then referred to the PGR, who at last approved the proposal to cancel the prosecution of the alleged crime. That was one of the three state charges down, thanks to the excellent work of Marco del Toro and the rest of his team.