Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  Grupo México’s entire approach to the rescue was wrong. Pasta de Conchos was not a complicated or especially deep mine; the company knew where the workers were when the explosion happened, and they could have expanded the six- to eight-inch respiration holes that ran about 400 feet from the surface and to the bottom of the mine. As we saw later in the Chilean miner rescue, these holes can be expanded to accommodate the passage of those trapped below. Trying to break through the rock slides one after the other was laborious and far more hazardous, but it was all the untrained rescue team could do.

  We proposed again and again that they take the approach of widening the boreholes, but they showed no interest, falsely claiming that the drill could cause an explosion. For them, it was no problem to force the miners to use blowtorches in a highly explosive work site, but using a drill to expand the respiration holes was unthinkable. After the explosion, references to the boreholes would mysteriously disappear from inspection video footage.

  Given the possibility of widening these holes to locate the miners and sustain them until they could be pulled out, why would Grupo México and the labor department not fully support the effort? In my mind, the answer is simple: With those miners, they would have retrieved sixty-five individual stories of the company’s abuse, neglect, and greed. The media would explode with the story of the heroic miners, and the atrocious manner in which Grupo México operated would be exposed, along with the submissive, self-interested role played by labor department officials. And with the miners alive, it would be much easier to file criminal charges.

  The company did use one of the respiration holes to lower a small camera into the mine, but the contents of that video were never officially released. On our third day there, a young engineer told Oralia that the camera had captured images of the miners’ bodies—not torn apart or incinerated, but intact, seated or lying down in a circle. We couldn’t verify this report—the following day the engineer disappeared from Pasta de Conchos—but the possibility that the miners did survive for a time underground haunted everyone.

  After the third day at the mine, company and government officials had grown even more tight-lipped and reclusive. Though I was getting updates on the rescue from union members on the rescue team, they avoided me at all costs. The silence didn’t bode well, but their next move shocked everyone.

  On the fifth day, they gathered the families and, in a roundabout manner, explained that the condition of the mine would not allow for any further rescue activities. Without consulting the Miners’ Union or the workers, Salazar and Grupo México officials said that they were suspending rescue efforts. The levels of toxic gas in the mine were too high, they said, and they could not continue to risk the lives of the rescuers. According to them, there had been no signs of life and the rescue had to be called off, despite the fact that the miners’ colleagues were willing to continue their work in the reasonable hope that some of the miners, if not all, were still alive. The families, suddenly facing the reality that they would never see their brothers, fathers, and sons again, began shouting, many in tears.

  Had there been political will or a sense of responsibility on the part of the operators of the mine, the bodies at least could have been retrieved. But since Grupo México closed the mine in a matter of days after the explosion, it left in place the well-founded suspicion that the company wanted to hide the true causes of the explosion: its own negligence and irresponsibility.

  Our grief at the end of the rescue efforts was beyond words. These were men we all knew and respected, and now the high-rolling officials who had written their death sentence were turning their backs and leaving them underground as if they were no more than animals, and as if the mine were little more than a giant coffin. It was the first time since 1889 that workers had not been recovered, dead or alive, from the site of a mining accident in Mexico.

  The day Salazar made the announcement, one former miner, consumed with rage, approached the labor secretary, grabbed him by the neck, and pushed him to the ground, screaming that the rescue couldn’t stop. The man shouted that he had been fired a month earlier but that his brother was still trapped in the mine, and he wouldn’t leave without his brother. The crowd roared in support, and a few people threw objects at Salazar. He quickly ran off, whisked away by security guards, but a cameraman caught the whole incident on film. I have no doubt that had this miner had a gun, Salazar would have been killed. Footage of the distraught brother attacking the labor secretary was run on television segments all over Mexico for the next several days, speaking for the fury every miner and every family member felt at the betrayal of their government.

  President Fox himself could barely conceal his own guilt in the Pasta de Conchos disaster. Cameras were rolling after a stop on his tour of northern Mexico, when Fox, approaching the presidential fleet waiting to take him away, was asked by a young student why he hadn’t traveled to Pasta de Conchos in the aftermath of the explosion. Fox, with a gesture of profound irritation, answered aggressively, stating that he was visiting an indigenous community in another part of northern Mexico. After his short, unconvincing excuse, he shouted “And did you go? Did you?” at the student and immediately turned his back.

  After Grupo México abandoned Pasta de Conchos, it left behind soldiers to guard the mine. Despite the army and the official abandonment of Pasta de Conchos, a group of volunteers and union workers stayed at the site and continued their effort without help from Grupo México or the government. If there was a way to bring up the bodies of their colleagues, we were determined to find it.

  Following the company’s departure, I stayed at the mine to comfort the families and help mount whatever effort we could. It was an extremely tense time—violence bubbled over several times in conflicts between the army and the families, and the streets of the town were dark and deserted, like a ghost town. Plus, Oralia and I sensed coming danger: My pronouncements about Grupo México’s abuses and the labor department’s complicity had angered many powerful people. In press conferences at Pasta de Conchos, I had publicly accused the company and the government inspectors of industrial homicide—a term commonly used by the IMF and other labor organizations to describe death directly due to a company’s negligence. (In Western nations, it is called “corporate murder.”) Jorge Campos and Jorge Almeida, director and assistant, respectively, of the Latin American office of the IMF, confirmed the appropriateness of the use of this term; they said the explosion was clearly an industrial homicide.

  Fortunately, Oralia and I had the support and protection of the miners and their families. In the days after Pasta de Conchos, they took us in their homes, hiding us from danger around the clock. President Fox and Germán Larrea were both undoubtedly eager to see me gone, and I felt we were in real danger. After she’d spent several days comforting the families, Oralia traveled to Monterrey at my request. There, in the city where I’d grown up, I felt she would be safer.

  On February 28, 2006, barely eleven days after the explosion, and while I was still at the mine, Labor Secretary Salazar made an official public announcement that I had been removed by the government as general secretary of the Miners’ Union. My replacement, of course, was Elías Morales. Like a coward, Salazar never once contacted me about this matter. He never mentioned it even when giving me updates during the few days he spent in Coahuila. He just sent a press release to all the major news outlets, and I first heard about the official announcement on a television news program. Despite Morales’s expulsion six years before, despite the hatred of the workers toward him, and despite the lack of any election, the labor department was pleased to announce that it would help this traitor assume leadership of Los Mineros. Morales had no experience or courage, and no leadership ability, but he had one thing: a willingness to sell out each of the union members for his own gain.

  The opening salvo in the violent campaign against me and Los Mineros had occurred a few days before the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, with the assault on the union’s headquarters and the
toma de nota passed to Morales. But now the explosion and my declaration of industrial homicide had rapidly heightened the aggression against us. I was prepared to reveal their blood-stained hands and publicize their unpardonable exploitation that had led to sixty-five deaths—and they needed me gone, fast. To them, it was no problem violating labor law, the union’s autonomy, and basic morality to turn the miners and the general public against me. Obedient to Grupo México and the Fox administration, reporters printed lies and slander about me: It was my fault the mine had collapsed; I was a thief; I didn’t care about the miners.

  Salazar’s granting of the toma de nota stripped Los Mineros of the powers guaranteed to them in law—specifically, their right to choose their own directors. Such power is enshrined in the General Constitution of the Republic and in the Federal Labor Law, in Agreement 87, signed by the government of Mexico in 1960 with the International Labor Organization, and in the bylaws of the Miners’ Union itself. The only purpose of Salazar’s declaration was to remove me—a leader disinclined to protect the interests of Grupo México—and in my place impose a person who was utterly in the company’s service. Salazar acted as if he were the owner of the unions and not as if there were laws that he, as the supposed labor official, had to abide by and respect more than anyone.

  Members of Los Mineros were furious about being told by a government official who their leader would be. They had elected someone whom they trusted to defend them; now they were trying to replace me with a proven traitor to the workers’ cause. In the first days of March 2006, there were some isolated and loosely organized work stoppages at union sections throughout Mexico in protest of Salazar’s announcement. But we planned to take it much further than that. The executive committee began planning a national extraordinary convention to take place in Monclova, Coahuila, in the middle of the month. There, we would decide exactly how Los Mineros as a whole would respond to the abuses and injustices that had taken place at Pasta de Conchos and beyond.

  FIVE

  IN THE MINE

  Most of the things one imagines in hell are there in the coal mine—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.

  — GEORGE ORWELL

  I was sixteen years old the first time I set foot in a mine. My father, newly elected as leader of the Miners’ Union, had asked me to come along on his visit to the Real del Monte y Pachuca silver and gold mine in the state of Hidalgo. It was one of the oldest mines in the country, and also one of the deepest and most massive, containing somewhere around three thousand miles of tunnels. When we arrived, my father chatted with the workers as I was equipped for our descent into the 3,000-foot-deep mine. It felt like a ritual, putting on the overalls and heavy, steel-toed boots; being fitted with a miner’s helmet; strapping on the belt containing a first-aid kit and battery for the lamp; and putting on the harness and ropes that the workers relied on for survival.

  As we went down into the mine in a very rudimentary elevator that was lowered by a winch, my father explained that in each mine there are levels, just like the floors of a building, although in the mines there are typically 125 or 150 feet between the levels. Moments after we’d started to descend, the whole elevator began to shake. I grabbed the side of the elevator, terrified, but my dad only laughed and shouted up to the surface. “Don’t worry,” he said, “the men just like to shake the winch to scare first-timers.”

  After about ten minutes, the elevator slowed and stopped at a level about 2,000 feet below the surface. We stepped off into the dark, hot, dusty chamber and visited briefly with a few miners. My nervousness started to wear off as I listened to them talk and saw how enthusiastic they were about talking with my father. Soon we were back on the elevator, on our way down to the very bottom level, about 3,000 feet deep.

  My teenage mind was quite impressed by the working area at the mine’s floor. It was sweltering, and the workers were clad in little more than loincloths, boots, and helmets. As they advanced ever deeper into small tunnels that followed the mineral vein, they were tethered by a rope at the waist to a safety cable along the wall. They sweated incessantly and profusely in the intense heat, their arms dirty from the powder that clogged the air in the mine tunnels. The only light came from the miners’ lamps and occasionally from some rudimentary light fixtures in the bottoms of the tunnels.

  I was struck by the fact that humans could work in the bottom of a mine and extract metals and minerals under such high-risk conditions. I was in awe of the sacrifice and effort involved in moving about the mine despite the lack of space, oxygen, and light, entrusting your life to your own skills, or perhaps the benevolence of a higher being.

  My father observed the working conditions within Real del Monte y Pachuca. He shook hands with the miners and asked them how they were feeling, what work they were doing, how the company and supervisors were treating them. He asked them to tell him anything that was bothering them. My father was reinforcing to me the way he thought a union leader should work. He liked to hear from the workers themselves, and unlike most of the men who owned the mines, he wasn’t afraid to go into the dark and dangerous places where they labored.

  When we left for the surface after nearly three hours and once again saw the light of day and felt the fresh air, I was shocked by the blazing light of the sun. We were given dark glasses before exiting; after hours in the bottom of the dark tunnels, a person’s vision becomes accustomed to the low light. We had spent a while in the mine, but I was amazed thinking about how most miners spent eight full hours or more a day in the depths of the earth.

  It was the first of many trips I would make down into mines with my father. Later I accompanied my father to mines in Chihuahua and Coahuila. I went down into the San Francisco del Oro and Santa Barbara mines, both in Chihuahua and both very deep. The working conditions were risky in these sites, but seeing them with my own eyes made me understand the courage of the miners, whose labor brings the wealth of the earth to the surface, where it can be used to benefit the people of Mexico.

  We often ate at the bottom of the mine during these tours, dining on food offered to us by the miners, typically meat empanadas, steak or chicken pies, or corn tortillas filled with eggs, beans, and salsa, served with water or coffee that had been prepared at the surface. Eating three thousand feet below the ground gives the person a temporary illusion that he is working at a normal activity on the surface. We would sit in caves that had been transformed into makeshift dining rooms, complete with tables and chairs, where the miners ate halfway through their workday. They get a half-hour or forty minutes to eat, as established in the collective bargaining agreements at each mine. If one of these dining areas was unsafe or unhealthy—if the ventilation was poor, or the concentrations of gas and debris too high—Don Napoleón would demand that the mine owners correct it. He firmly believed that these men, who couldn’t even go to the surface for a proper meal, at least needed hygienic dining areas.

  The memory of my early mine visits were vivid in my mind during the first days after the Pasta de Conchos collapse. I’d descended to the bottom of many coal mines, and I knew what it felt like down there. I remembered the feeling of being closed up inside the earth in tunnels brimming with throat-choking coal dust. I couldn’t fathom what it would feel like to be trapped down there after such a collapse, with little or no hope of rescue.

  The U.S. labor department has stated that since the beginning of mining, the extraction of coal and other ground minerals “has been considered one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.” The state of Coahuila produces the vast majority of Mexico’s coal, and coal mines like the one at Pasta de Conchos are considered among the most dangerous and complicated of all mines, primarily because of the amount of methane gas and carbon monoxide associated with coal extraction. These gases are odorless and colorless and act very subtly when breathed in and circulated in the miner’s body. One becomes drowsy, and once unconsciousness occurs death can come slowly as one falls
into a sleep from which there is no awakening. Coal mining also generates vast amounts of coal dust, and the danger is directly proportional to the degree of ventilation at the level where the worker is occupied. The greater the distance and depth from the entrance, the greater the amount of methane gas, coal dust, smoke, and heat, and the more critical the need for adequate ventilation.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the beginning of the twentieth, miners would protect themselves by bringing canary cages to the mines—the classic example of animals used as sentinels to ensure the safety of humans. If methane or carbon monoxide was present in dangerous quantities, the bird would die before the men felt the negative effects of the noxious gases, giving them time to escape the mine or put on gas masks.

  The speed of the canary’s death depended on the degree of concentration of the gas in the particular coal mine. When the percentage is below 0.09 percent, after being in the mine for an hour, the bird begins to feel initial pain. As the gas content increases to 0.15 percent, the canary begins to suffer weakness and general discomfort, and in eighteen minutes, the small bird falls from its perch. If the gas level increases to 0.20 percent, the pain is evident a minute and a half after exposure to the methane begins, and in less than five minutes the canary falls on the ground. Finally, with a degree of gas accumulation of 0.24 percent, the canary falls off its perch and dies in a short time: about two-and-a-half minutes.1