Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  On the night of Saturday, February 18, 2006, a few hours before the main tunnel of Mine 8 would become choked with tons of coal and rock, Francisco Perez was preparing to leave home for the third shift, which began at 11:00 p.m. It was his wife’s birthday, and her party was just getting started. Francisco’s family begged him to stay, arguing that he could always invent an excuse to justify his absence the next day, even if he just said he was sick. The miner reluctantly agreed—it was his wife’s birthday, after all. It was a decision that saved his life.

  Whether it was pure luck or some sort of premonition on the part of Francisco’s family is impossible to say. But one thing is certain: The miners knew that their lives were at risk that night. Earlier on Saturday, the workers of the first and second shifts had decided to suspend work because of the miserable conditions they found in the mine: high concentrations of gas, dust, smoke, chemical substances, and materials that they felt in the atmosphere, getting denser all the time. It was apparent that the mine was ripe for a disaster. Some of the miners got together that day, and a colleague proposed that a formal work stoppage begin, starting officially after a meeting that would take place on the following Tuesday, February 21. Those present agreed that on the twenty-first, they would gather all the miners and vote on the strike, to establish the majority support that Mexican labor law requires before a stoppage begins. The law does allow for an emergency stoppage before the vote, but they wanted to follow the whole procedure before they officially walked off the job on Tuesday. They knew Salazar had it in for the union, and they thought it would be better to follow the most legally defensible path.

  Most of these miners were probably working in the vault at the far end of the mine when the explosion occurred, and it is where any survivors were probably trapped. This is true despite the fact that, in a correctly overseen operation, the workers would have been spaced out and distributed throughout the length of the mine, some producing coal, some providing maintenance, and some monitoring production. But General de Hulla ordered all its non-union contractors to the back of the mine, where they were told to weld with a blowtorch, putting the workers at incredible risk. (It was routine for the company to give nonunion workers the most dangerous jobs. It clearly felt not the slightest responsibility for their lives.) A single spark from an electrical failure or friction would immediately ignite the explosive methane gas and spread quickly to the coal dust piled along the mine’s floor, which is precisely what happened at 2:20 a.m. on February 19, 2006.

  There’s no doubt that the explosion was large. In a fraction of a second, it raged through the mile and a half of the mine and burned like an underground wildfire. “I imagine it was like lighting a firework in a bottle,” said Elias Aguilera, an employee of General de Hulla who survived that day. The explosion consumed all the air in the mine and weakened the tunnel’s already weak construction. The impact of the blast reached the outside concentration plant and the coking ovens, quickly spreading from the four-hundred-foot depth to the surface. The large receiving hopper, which received the extracted coal, and the transporter belts were totally destroyed. A few men were saved by their close proximity to the inclined tunnel that led to the surface, though these survivors suffered serious burns.

  In my visits with the nine hospitalized workers who survived the explosion, they told me that at 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 18, the workers were proceeding toward the bottom of the mine. It was the third shift (miners at Pasta de Conchos worked twenty-four hours a day in three shifts). As some of the survivors explained, each noise heard in the bottom of the mine as the workers advanced slowly, extracting the coal, filled some of them with fear, imagining that something very serious could happen that workday. The heat was increasingly intense inside the deeper they got.

  According to what some of the survivors told me, the workers were walking slowly toward the mine’s interior, worried the whole time by presentiments of danger for them and other colleagues. From here the descent toward the work areas at the bottom of the mine occurred slowly, in silence, as if they knew that they were walking to the last workday of their lives.

  Of course, their concerns were well founded. To this day, no one knows exactly what befell the sixty-three unrecovered men in their final hours, and we don’t know whether those final hours took place immediately after or days after the explosion itself. Rather than take responsibility for the tragedy and do their best to recover the men, Grupo México botched the recovery efforts and claimed its mines were safe. Indeed, the company and Labor Secretary Salazar blamed the victims themselves, claiming that they drank and did drugs before entering the mine, because they were scared to go inside.

  This slander infuriated the families of the lost men and all their colleagues in the Miners’ Union. Ignoring the litany of safety violations and the absurd lack of oversight from his own department, Labor Secretary Salazar insisted that the tragedy was due to the miners at Pasta de Conchos “screwing up” by taking drugs, smoking marijuana, or drinking alcohol before they entered the mine, to give themselves courage. All of this was filmed in a documentary called The Fallen that the union produced together with an independent filmmaker.

  There’s not a shred of proof that any of the miners were compromised in any way on the night of the explosion, and if they were scared, they certainly had a right to be. Germán Larrea himself refuses to enter his own mines, since, according to a comment he made in the mining industry press, he suffers from claustrophobia. The fault was with the owner and shareholders of Grupo México, who pressured public officials to ignore the blatant safety violations to satisfy their inordinate desire for profit—regardless of the cost to the miners.

  It was based on this irrefutable negligence that I had accused Grupo México and the principal officials of the Department of Labor with industrial homicide, loudly pointing out their misdeeds to the families, volunteers, and reporters gathered at Pasta de Conchos. Grupo México did not respect standards or laws regarding safety. It violated the Collective Bargaining Agreement it had signed in 2005 with the Miners’ Union, which in article 68, section 13, states the following: “The Company shall maintain the mines in a state that guarantees the highest degree of protection for the workers’ life and health. For this purpose, all shafts shall have their corresponding returns, which must be wide enough to guarantee optimum ventilation of the mine and transit of the miners.”

  It also violated the Federal Labor Law, which in its article 132, Section XVII, requires that all companies, not just mining companies, “comply with the safety and hygiene provisions in laws and regulations to prevent accidents and illness in the work centers and generally in the places where the work must be performed, and make available at all times the medications and first-aid materials that are indispensible according to the instructions issued for the timely and efficient application of first aid; and the responsibility to notify the competent authority of each accident that occurs.”

  The corporation also violated Article 123 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, which states in Section XIV that “companies shall be responsible for work accidents and workers’ job-related illnesses, suffered because of or in the exercise of their profession or work; therefore, owners must make the corresponding payments as a consequence of the death or temporary or permanent disability of the workers, as determined by law. This responsibility shall apply even if the owner hires the worker through an intermediary.”

  It also violated Section XV of Constitutional Article 123, which states that “the owner must observe, according to the nature of the negotiation, legal precepts regarding hygiene and security in the facilities of his establishment, and adopt appropriate measures to prevent accidents in the use of machines, instruments, and work materials, as well as organize such that it provides the highest degree of protection for the health and life of the workers, and the unborn baby in the case of pregnant women. The laws shall contain the applicable penalties in each case.”

  The la
bor department has never, previously or now, even though informed and bound by this regulation, enforced the correction of Pasta de Conchos’s safety deficiencies or punished Grupo México for the above violations. In fact, they rose to the company’s defense, laying blame squarely on the shoulders of the very men who lost their lives deep in the Pasta de Conchos mine. But a special committee of the International Labor Organization (ILO), set up to investigate the explosion, concluded that “the Government of Mexico did not do all that was reasonably expected of it to avoid or minimize the effects of the Accident which had such devastating effects with the loss of life of as many as 65 miners.”

  In those first days after the explosion, Salazar was totally focused on the financial interests of Grupo México. We recall that when Fox assumed power he said that his government was “of businessmen, by businessmen, and for businessmen,” thereby betraying the citizens who voted for him in the hope of a change to propel the financial recovery into development, expansion of opportunity, and the building of a better future for the whole country.

  I’m sometimes asked whether it was up to the Miners’ Union to prevent the tragedy of February 19, 2006. I believe the people who wonder whether we were partially to blame do not understand the reality of the irrational, irresponsible system we were up against. Disaster-prevention measures are part of our collective bargaining agreements, but if there is no government responsible for monitoring the fulfillment of these obligations, violations will continue, and more tragedies will take place.

  To keep our workers safe in the Pasta de Conchos mine, we would have had to be on permanent strike, since despite Grupo México’s high earnings—and the fact that their riches depended on the sacrifice and effort of the miners—the company invested hardly anything in the safety of its coal mines in Coahuila. Even though we faced a company that was firmly committed to not spending a penny on the safety of the mine and a right-wing government that gave its full support to businessmen of any kind, we did continually strike and raise concerns about the safety of many mines in Mexico. Each of our workers is instructed by the National Union, the National Executive Committee, and me personally that when the slightest risk is encountered in a mine, the worker should suspend activities until the defects are corrected or it is verified that the danger no longer exists. If the hazard persists, then the worker should demand the shutdown or closure of activity until the basic problem is corrected. But the miners of Mexico need work, and many are willing to risk their lives to support their families. “It’s not safe,” said Adrián Cárdenas Limón, a subcontractor with General de Hulla, “but we need the jobs. There’s no way out.”

  The fault was not in our failure to call attention to the danger: Between 2002 and 2005, we called fourteen different strikes against Grupo México, primarily in protest of substandard working conditions in the mines they controlled. The honestly prepared reports written by the union’s Joint Health and Safety Commission were going to be the basis for striking the Pasta de Conchos mine and charging Grupo México with violations of the collective bargaining agreement’s provisions regarding health, safety, and hygiene, among other matters.

  Because that strike happened too late, those documents now form the basis, along with the testimony of the rescuers, of the criminal complaint of industrial homicide that the Miners’ Union has presented in Coahuila against Grupo México and its shareholders, in addition to Francisco Javier Salazar and the rest of the officials and inspectors from the department of labor. Sadly, our battle to hold the people responsible for the Pasta de Conchos tragedy still goes on, more than seven years since it occurred.

  Of course, this unforeseen catastrophe presented a fresh opportunity for Fox’s government and the mining companies to continue the attack on the Miners’ Union that had begun in the days before the accident. Rather than face their own culpability, they decided to double their efforts to depose me as head of the Miners’ Union. In their ignorance, they believed that their assault on the union and me personally would force us to come begging for peace or negotiation within a week or two. They were mistaken, and they will continue to be mistaken. We have never forgotten the bodies of sixty-three coworkers who have been abandoned some 370 feet below the earth’s surface, still awaiting a proper burial, and we have never forgotten precisely who put them there.

  _____________________

  1 Data from the Mining Museum of Cumberland, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

  SIX

  DEPARTURE

  Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

  — STEFAN ZWEIG

  Once the rescue efforts at Pasta de Conchos had been called off, Salazar turned his back and fled Coahuila and the angry families of the miners, thereby issuing a death sentence for any men who may have been buried alive in the bottom of the mine. Of course he had no interest in identifying the true cause of the disaster, knowing full well it was the negligence and irresponsibility of himself and Grupo México. Xavier García de Quevedo, along with the other managers and operators of Grupo México, fled the scene as well.

  A small volunteer rescue team remained behind, and I remained in Coahuila as well, along with several of my colleagues from the executive committee. Meanwhile, in union sections across the country, miners were holding assemblies in protest of Elías Morales’s company-backed takeover attempt and Grupo México’s appalling mishandling of Pasta de Conchos.

  In the media, Grupo México and the Fox administration had launched an all-out smear campaign against me, rooted in Morales’s baseless accusation that several members of the executive committee and I had made inappropriate use of the $55 million Mining Trust. Morales himself arranged many interviews in which he elaborated on this supposed fraud. Ruben Aguilar, President Fox’s press secretary, appeared on television calling us criminals, and saying that the government would investigate our misuse of the funds. Slanderous articles—undoubtedly paid for by Germán Larrea, who sits on the board of Televisa, the largest Spanish-language media company in the world—appeared in national newspapers and magazines with the intention of confusing the Mexican people and the workers of Los Mineros and convincing them that Morales was the “good guy” who would stand up for them. Every single day, some new piece of pro-Morales, anti-Napoleón propaganda appeared in the media.

  Televisión Azteca, a company that previously belonged to the state under the name Instituto Mexicano de Televisión, Imevisión, and was privatized under Carlos Salinas, showed unequivocal aggression and perversity against the Miners’ Union and me personally. During the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, Javier Alatorre, the news director of TV Azteca, interviewed me in the mine itself. We had a long and detailed interview in which I was able to explain openly the causes of the explosion. I mentioned the responsibility of Grupo México and its owner Germán Larrea: its criminal negligence and that of its board of directors, its management, and its shareholders. It was a wide-ranging interview that was never aired, not even a minute of it, neither on TV Azteca nor Televisa nor on any other communication linked to this company.

  The fear and anger of antiunion businessmen and PAN politicians was such that their campaign against the union and me personally was as vicious as if we were a group of dangerous drug traffickers. They were infuriated by our accurate assignment of responsibility for the loss of life at Pasta de Conchos, and they were now more desperate than ever to discredit us and place Morales at the head of the union. There, he would destroy the autonomy of the Miners’ Union and smash it into two pieces: one for mining and one for the iron and steel industry. Of course the union under Morales—whether in one or two pieces—would be purely for show. Every one of its actions would be in the service of companies like Grupo México and Grupo Villacero. This was their dream. The pressure Los Mineros exerted on mining and steel companies in defense of the workers would finally be at an end.

  As the media campaign heated up in the week after Pasta de Co
nchos, unveiled threats began reaching me in Coahuila. I got death threats and anonymous calls saying that terrible things would happen to my family and me if I didn’t end my accusations of industrial homicide. As soon as Oralia got to Monterrey, she too began receiving the same warnings through phone calls and emails. The phone would ring, and a voice, using vulgar, violent language, would tell her that if I didn’t stop they would kill our children and cut her up into little pieces. She got email stating that they would use all their power to destroy our family. My youngest son, Napoleón, then a student at the University of Monterrey, UDEM, got out of class one day soon after the Pasta de Conchos tragedy and found a note and a bullet on his windshield that threatened the same thing: If I didn’t shut my mouth about the government and Grupo México’s lies and abuses, my family would pay with their lives. Phone calls to his cell phone, the phones of my other sons, and the union’s headquarters in Mexico City reiterated the point.

  These menacing messages came steadily, and the senders always knew where my family and I were located. They had access to our private numbers. It was clear that we were being spied upon by professionals—most likely by the government, through CISEN, its equivalent of the CIA.

  The threat of death and bodily harm from our enemies was real, but there were also rumors swirling that members of the executive committee would soon be arrested in Coahuila based on Morales’s false complaint against us. We stood firm in our innocence, but we knew not to underestimate the abuses of law that could be practiced in Mexico. Though no formal charge had been made against us, were a judge to issue an arrest warrant based on the false accusations, we could be thrown in jail with no way to defend ourselves. Presumption of innocence, a crucial principle in many countries, was and is not respected in Mexico, especially in cases like ours, cases of political persecution, where powerful interests have cause to keep an innocent person in jail. If they arrested us, we could be held for years with no bail and no access to a fair trial—or even worse. And with men like Germán Larrea and Francisco Javier Salazar at his back, we had little doubt that Elías Morales would eventually procure such help from the justice system.