Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  The company alone should have been responsible for the rescue—it should have sent in its own teams, along with inspectors from the labor department, but neither of those parties was present. Because we didn’t trust Grupo México’s ability to do the work or its willingness to give us honest reports, we knew that if we had any real chance of rescuing the trapped men, it would be up to us. Workers from other mines in Coahuila had come to Pasta de Conchos in solidarity with their endangered colleagues and their families, and the workers themselves, driven by the solidarity, began their rescue efforts with the complete support of the Miners’ Union and its local branches in Coahuila. They created rescue squads made up of Pasta de Conchos miners who knew the mine’s layout, and more experienced laborers from other mines in the area, the majority of them union members. With our own men involved, at least we knew we’d get a truthful report of how the mission was proceeding.

  The rescuers told me that, progressing very slowly—frequently on all fours—and driven by the thought of their trapped colleagues, a team of about eight men had managed to break through the first coal slide. With no ventilation or electricity, and only their headlamps for light, they’d dug with their hands and rudimentary miners’ tools until their bodies could fit through the hole. About fifty yards later, though, they ran into a second cave-in, and this one they were unable to break through. It seemed that the explosion had traveled along the floor of the mine over a distance of over one and a quarter miles, causing a series of these slides in a chain, and no one knew exactly where the group of miners had been at the moment of ignition.

  After obtaining a report on the situation, we went to the mouth of the mine, where other technicians were coordinating the rescue efforts. I decided to go down into it myself, along with members of the union’s executive committee and some rescue workers, to see the condition of the facilities for ourselves.

  The mine’s railway had been destroyed, so we descended into the sloped tunnel on foot, each of us wearing a miner’s outfit and a helmet with a headlamp. One of us held the device that measured gas concentrations. The whole mine was filled with dust and a suffocating smoky smell, with no ventilation or electricity. We walked along in total silence, the narrow tunnel forcing us to walk two abreast. At a depth of about 400 feet, we reached the pitch-black chamber where the main tunnel began. It was cold and hushed inside; it was like walking into a tomb. Dust and coal residue were piled all around us, and it was difficult to breathe. By the light of our lamps, we saw that the coal conveyer belts, which began in this chamber, and the cars that transported the miners were all destroyed. About 100 feet ahead, we encountered the first collapse. There was no getting through it without equipment. The reality was that we had to turn back.

  The impasse conjured up deep sadness, frustration, and anger. They had been able to break through only one rockslide so far, and we felt powerless at not having been able to prevent the tragedy. We’d held strikes and loudly decried the safety conditions, but despite all the pressure we could bring to bear, the government had refused to compel Grupo México to meet even the most basic of safety requirements. The thought of it brought me close to physical illness.

  When we got back to the surface, Salazar and García de Quevedo were finally ready to give the families their first report on the condition of the mine and the progress made by the rescue teams. Salazar looked shaky and nervous, and Quevedo went a pallid white as they fielded questions from the miners’ relatives.

  The two of them had apparently failed to hit upon any bright ideas for how to present the explosion. They said without much certainty that they had hopes of rescuing the trapped men, even as they were improvising rescue operations and sending men provided by other companies and equipped with hardly any equipment into the mine.

  Rather than seeking the hard truth from García de Quevedo, as any upright labor secretary would have done, Salazar had cooperated with him and other company representatives to develop an explanation for the tragedy that downplayed their own involvement. In the report to the family, there was absolutely no mention of the underlying cause of the collapse or all the inspections Salazar’s department had failed to carry out. As the private owner of two companies that are suppliers to Grupo México, and as the man responsible for ensuring proper inspection of Mexico’s mining stations, Salazar had a doubly strong interest in seeing that the PR aspects of the situation were controlled as quickly as possible. As both a businessman and a public official, he was utterly committed to Grupo México.

  After this pathetic briefing that brought no comfort to the families, I finally had a chance to talk to Governor Humberto Moreira, who had been at the site for most of the day. He was, of course, upset by the situation, but in our conversation he also seemed shocked by how Grupo México and Salazar were handling the catastrophe. He told me that the night before, on Sunday, at a private dinner in the guesthouse of Grupo México in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, the main topic of conversation between Salazar and García de Quevedo was what my reaction would be when I arrived and how they could spin their story to the press and to the miners’ families. Undoubtedly they knew that I wasn’t afraid to place blame precisely where it belonged, and further, they knew Los Mineros were already inflamed from the attack on our union’s headquarters and their plot to destroy its leadership. Despite the elaborate machinations that had led to Victor Flores’s reelection, the attack on our headquarters, and the fast-tracking of Elías Morales’s toma de nota, Grupo México and the Labor Secretary Salazar had no plan at all for handling the situation at Pasta de Conchos. Moreira confirmed for me that, privately, they were intent on not letting me publicize the full truth about why the mine had collapsed.

  Around 11:00 p.m. on Monday, Oralia and I went over to thank the night-shift volunteers before we drove to a nearby motel to eat some food, discuss the rescue further, and get a few hours of rest before returning to the site early the next morning. On our way to the car, we were approached by Javier de la Fuente, CEO and a major shareholder of General de Hulla. He took me aside and anxiously asked that I not take legal action against him, arguing that he had a family and more than thirty years working in the mining sector. I was furious at his request. As head of General de Hulla, he was in charge of operating the mine and was therefore instrumental in making as much money as possible for García de Quevedo and Grupo México, even at the risk of the workers’ lives. In fact, De la Fuente was one of the men the miners complained about most. He was a man who had repeatedly shown his carelessness and utter disrespect for the safety of his workers. Whenever any one of them would bring a work site hazard to his attention, his response was always the same: “If you don’t like it, you can quit. When you work here, you do what I say.”

  Now de la Fuente was coming to me to ask for leniency, but I had no sympathy. How could he claim his family and his history in the mining industry for credit, when he had so callously put his fellow miners in danger every day? Didn’t they have families too? Didn’t they sacrifice far more than he ever had for their profession?

  For me, de la Fuente’s plea was an early acknowledgment of guilt. He knew full well that they had not heeded the repeated warnings of the Safety and Hygiene Commission. I could offer him no comfort. Before Oralia and I left for our motel, I told him simply that we would get to the bottom of who was responsible for the collapse.

  The following day, my youngest son, Napoleón, and Oralia’s sister, Darlinda, arrived in Coahuila, and we went with a few members of the executive committee to visit the workers who had been injured in the explosion. There were several miners in a nearby hospital, some with second- and third-degree burns. We talked with those who were able to speak to us, asking them to describe to us what occurred and to narrate their recollection of the tragedy.

  One survivor we talked to had his hands and part of his face burned. Despite his injuries, he was able to speak, and he was very happy about having a visit from us. He told me that he escaped with his life because he was below, in the
bottom of the mine, supervising the mobile belts that were transporting coal to the outside. Every twenty minutes he inspected the bands, ensuring that they were working properly and were free of faults and technical problems. He was stationed close the concrete slab in the subterranean vestibule of the mine, which sat at the bottom of the access tunnel that slanted up to the outside.

  “I was there,” he told us, “when suddenly I heard a sound like a roar, a loud boom. I didn’t have time to react, because within a fraction of a second a strong blow hit me and threw me against the wall, with a force so brutal that I couldn’t protect myself. I lost consciousness, but they said they found me facedown on the floor of the mine, near the entrance. Later, hours later, I sensed lights around me and saw that they were coming from the miners’ helmets. They were rescue workers, and when they saw me they lifted me up and took me out of the mine.”

  This colleague assumed that his life was saved because, between the gas in the mine and the powder on the floor, there was a layer of oxygen approximately three feet high. “I breathed that oxygen,” he said, “and I didn’t suffocate on the methane gas or the smoke or the dust. That strip of oxygen was what allowed me to keep breathing.”

  For him the experience was indescribable: It had happened so fast that he couldn’t estimate the size of the explosion. All he could tell us was that it was violent and monstrously hot. He said that, although he could not be certain, he doubted that his trapped colleagues could have survived the force and heat of the explosion.

  In the face of this loss and the complete incompetence of Grupo México’s rescue effort, the first thing I proposed was the rescue of our colleagues and a focus on supporting the families—morally and materially. Their lives had radically changed from this moment, and they needed to know that they could rely on the leaders of the Miners’ Union.

  Our second focus was on speaking the truth: explaining to the families, the workers, and the public what had caused this inexcusable loss of life. For a few gifts and the occasional fancy dinner given by Grupo México, the inspectors from the labor department had abandoned their responsibility to ensure that the Pasta de Conchos mine was safe. The inspectors, their higher-ups in the Fox administration, and the leaders of Grupo México had all let safety go by the wayside, ignoring our vociferous complaints about the mine and the complaints from the local union’s Joint Health and Safety Commission. It was they who had set the cost of the lives of the workers.

  Our trapped colleagues, despite being highly qualified and having vast experience, had been working in very dangerous conditions at Pasta de Conchos. Javier de la Fuente and General de Hulla constantly threatened them with dismissal if they voiced their concerns, and now the same companies were helping cover for Labor Secretary Salazar, who had failed to ensure the inspections that were and are required by law. The government never filed charges against Pedro Camarillo, Coahuila’s delegate from the labor department, because he is Salazar’s son-in-law. Now that their negligence had run its course, these companies were woefully incapable of handling anything. Had the company not received professional support from other companies’ teams of technicians, Grupo México never would have been capable mounting even the smallest rescue effort.

  For the sake of our trapped colleagues—and for the sake of all miners who every day faced working conditions similar to those at Pasta de Conchos—I knew we needed to reveal the reality of the situation. We didn’t want anyone to think the collapse of the mine was an act of God or the result of the miners’ own mistakes. This was a tragedy that could have been prevented. The lives of the lost men lay squarely on the shoulders of the leaders of Grupo México and their cronies in Fox’s labor department. The company had, and still has, investments in mines, plants, and foundries in Peru and the United States where workers are treated the same and worse, and we knew this event needed to be seen as an international disgrace to a company that operates with no regard for anything but its own profits.

  As Monday and Tuesday went by with no positive developments, Salazar and Grupo México officials became more defensive, seeming to strongly resent the presence of the families and the national and international communication media, who were constantly pressuring them for information about the rescue efforts. The company consistently refused to provide clear information, instead giving only evasive answers.

  They held press conferences daily around 9:00 p.m., outside the gates of the Pasta de Conchos work site. The late hour allowed for a delay between their announcements and the reports the next day, and Salazar and Grupo México officials used that time to pressure reporters into editing their stories to hide the truth of what happened. They even prepared questions and gave them to reporters to ask in the press conferences. In their responses, Salazar, Quevedo, and Ruben Escudero, the mine’s manager, were visibly scared, nervous, sweating, and often delivering their words in a broken, halting voice. Each event was completely disorganized, people shouting over each other and the officials giving poor, ambiguous information on their progress. The local reporters tended to be the most aggressive, shouting their questions over each other during the conferences.

  Though Salazar hadn’t directly confronted me about the situation with Elías Morales, he never referred to me in any of the press conferences as leader of Los Mineros. In the government’s eyes—and their eyes alone—Morales held that position, though not once did he show his face at Pasta de Conchos, something even a poor leader would have done. When I addressed the media and the families, Salazar would simply turn around and retreat to Industrial Minera offices as if he didn’t know who I was, too cowardly to even listen to Los Mineros’ position.

  As the days passed, Salazar and company officials grew more vexed by the search for answers, and their statements grew increasingly offensive. Juan Rebolledo Gout, Grupo México’s official spokesman (and the former personal secretary of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in his last year as president), said on television that Grupo México always had adequate safety measures and worked within international guidelines, and that is why it had an outstanding position in the global market. This type of cynical, outright lie infuriated every union member who’d seen the company’s negligence firsthand, and it was a slap in the face to the families of the trapped men, who at the time were consumed with sickening grief over the sudden loss of the miners.

  They also began accusing the Miners’ Union and its members of signing inspection certificates in which there was no report of serious safety conditions. At the same time they began to put forth the idea of possible human error, carelessness, lack of ability, or inexperience. Salazar, in ignorance of actual events, would later try to defend himself in televised interviews by saying that on February 7, two weeks before the explosion, the last inspection visit had taken place and that of thirty-four observations of safety concerns, twenty-eight were addressed and the other six were not, because they were in areas that were closed to the operation—a bold-faced lie. A little over a week after the collapse, Salazar told a Televisa reporter on national TV that the miners were on drugs and drinking alcohol before descending into the mine, to motivate themselves and provide “courage.” Federal labor law clearly ascribes responsibility to the company for any accident, except under very specific circumstances, as when there is a conflict between workers or a worker is drunk. With his statement, Salazar proved himself willing to slander the name of our colleagues in order to save Germán Larrea and the other leaders of Grupo México from the consequences of their actions.

  When Salazar came to Pasta de Conchos, it was not to begin rescue operations of the miners or to help the families. He was there on a mission to protect the interests of the Fox administration and Grupo México. His pronouncements became more and more negative, and it was clear to everyone that damage control was his priority, to the point that he was ready to close up and abandon the mine and the surrounding town as soon as possible. Everyone in the government simply wanted to forget that Pasta de Conchos ever existed. The miners were fil
led with anger; they understood that he had gone to Pasta de Conchos to finish off the job and bury alive any possible survivors, with the sole purpose of covering the criminal negligence of Grupo México.

  The only thing that can be said for Salazar is that he had the courage to show his face at Pasta de Conchos. President Vicente Fox could not be troubled to make an appearance, much less the elusive coward Germán Larrea, whose own company was directly responsible for the catastrophe. Neither of them even expressed condolences to the family, and there were certainly no offers of material support.

  Despite the appalling condition of the mine, the poorly organized rescue efforts, and the infuriating behavior of Salazar and the officials from Grupo México, we maintained hope of finding our trapped colleagues alive. The volunteer rescuers, though not trained for the work, put their hearts into the effort. César Humberto Calvillo Fernández, the local union section’s social services secretary, joined one of the rescue teams on Wednesday; his brother was among the lost men.

  We knew it was possible that they’d all died a sudden death, but we held out hope that we would encounter signs of life and find them hidden in a sheltered area of the coal mine. But with every day that passed without the results we longed for, despair grew among the families and colleagues of the trapped men. The rescuers, totaling about twenty-six, and going down in six-person shifts, succeeded in breaking through about one slide a day, but each time they didn’t make it far before they encountered another slide that was equally or even more dramatic. They updated the families on their progress twice a day, but the long hours between updates were torturous.