Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  Right-wing politicians have lost their moral compass. The government has the ability to relieve many of the injuries it has caused; the legal, economic, and political structure of Mexico is fundamentally very solid. It has been dismantled and broken, but it is not destroyed. It will take a long time to repair the damage, but we must pick up the task urgently. The path of decay we are on can only lead to a profound national crisis.

  Since Fox and the PAN took the helm of the country, our difficulties have increased exponentially. And Calderón, Fox’s successor, has waged an ill-conceived war against organized crime that has seen the deaths or missing of more then 150,000 since 2006. Unemployment is rampant, and many young people without prospects for work or school are attracted to organized crime. Official figures show that seven million young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four lack education and jobs. Mexicans call them “NINI”—no education, no jobs—and they make up a huge potential market for organized crime. Unemployment among the total labor force of Mexico was estimated at 14 million in 2012. Capital has fled the country. Foreign and domestic debt is growing at an alarming rate. Prices, especially for consumer products, have spiked. There is corruption on all sides, in the legal system as well as in Los Pinos. The governing class has impunity with respect to nearly all its crimes. All these evils have reached insufferable levels, and the Mexican people are losing patience.

  Yet our struggle has implications beyond the turmoil currently seen in Mexico. The principles we fight for are applicable to the struggles of our fellow unions in countries throughout the world. Multinational and global companies tend to exploit manual labor and natural resources—especially the nonrenewable, like minerals, oil, and gas—even more in less advanced countries, because these nations’ governments allow them to. In the National Miners’ Union we have insisted vigorously on fair treatment for laborers, and this has been the basis of one of my main conflicts with the government. The Mexican government should be more demanding with both Mexican and foreign investors regarding respect for working, health, and safety conditions as well as environmental contamination. Investors have a social and legal responsibility. They should not exploit natural resources indiscriminately, with no regulations, taking them out of the country and removing the profits from Mexico. They should temper their focus on amassing profits even at the cost of leaving the soil and subsoil depleted.

  The basic principles on which these companies operate must change. Working conditions in globalized companies tend to get worse all the time in terms of workers’ interests, and at the same time we perceive a global policy focus on the defense of these companies’ common interests. Therefore, we have proposed to other labor leaders around the world that, just as transnational companies globalize, unions and the union struggle needs to globalize. We can no longer afford to fight the battle for workers’ rights one strike or even one nation at a time; we must expand the front to cover the whole world.

  The global mining and metals sector now consists of huge multinational corporations implementing common strategies to defend their interests—companies like Grupo México; the British-Australian Rio Tinto and its Canadian subsidiary Rio Tinto Alcan; Brazil’s Vale; and the British-Australian BHP Billiton. Equipped with advanced technologies and huge financial reserves, they cross borders and oceans in order to exploit natural resources and manual labor. In this environment, workers need a global strategy for the defense of their common interests more than ever. Working together will give workers and unions strength, and the ability to withstand the collaboration of corporations and public officials against them.

  Fortunately, we have seen the response to these ideas. In June 2012, in a world congress of the three most important international labor federations celebrated in Copenhagen, Denmark, IndustriALL Global Union was created, a new federation representing more than fifty million members from 140 countries. I was honored to be unanimously elected by 1,400 delegates as a member of the new executive committee.

  We must bring together members of the working class from far and wide, and from every industry. Without organizations to serve as a counterweight to the ambitions, greed, and massive exploitation of companies and governments that worship the free market, worldwide inequality will continue and worsen, sooner or later generating huge social and political crises across the globe. A country that protects the individual interests of a few and exploits the manual labor of the majority is doomed to failure, when the ongoing frustration of the repressed leads to widespread unrest and violence. Because unions supply the counterweight to this inequality and exploitation, they are far from becoming outdated or irrelevant. The opposite is true: They are needed more than ever.

  TEN

  DASHED HOPE

  Governments, like fish, begin to rot from the head.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  In mid-November 2006, the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) held a press conference in the 11 de Julio theater next to Los Mineros’ Mexico City headquarters. In the theater—named after the day the union was founded in 1934—and before a large delegation of union leaders who had traveled to Mexico from around the world, the IMF’s general secretary, Marcello Malentacchi, announced a Day of Global Solidarity with the Miners’ Union, to be held on December 11. Malentacchi had personally urged many congressman and senators to pressure the government to end its aggression against the union, and at the press conference that day, he encouraged workers to do the same on a global scale.

  He announced that labor organizations around the world would be petitioning the Mexican embassies in their countries on December 11, protesting the Mexican government’s collusion with the private sector and its efforts to strip the Miners’ Union of its autonomy.

  When December 11 arrived, I was ecstatic and honored by the international outpouring of solidarity for our cause. Union organizations in more than thirty countries on six continents—from Kenya to France to Japan—sent letters to their Mexican ambassadors, urging them to support respect for basic labor rights. Many of these organizations held marches and protests in front of the embassies and spoke to the press about the situation in Mexico and how the government’s actions revealed a fundamental disrespect for workers. Up in Vancouver, I worked with the USW and several smaller unions to organize an event in front of the Mexican consulate there. I spoke to the crowd about the nearly one-year-old conflict, stressing the need to fight for the dignity and freedom of workers wherever it was threatened.

  I felt optimistic that day, with so many showing their support for Los Mineros. In our battle against industrial titans, we would certainly need it. I was also pleased that the demonstrations would send a strong message to Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, who had taken over for Vicente Fox on December 1. It had been a hotly debated election that brought up many questions about the legality and transparency of the electoral process, but at least Fox was out of office. Through a request hand-delivered by Jack Layton, president of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), Los Mineros had requested an audience with Calderón. The prospect of a new president had awoken some hope in the members of the Miners’ Union; we didn’t think it could get much worse than President Fox and his wife, and Calderón seemed to be open to negotiating an end to the conflict. We were to be sorely disappointed.

  At the end of 2006, two months before Vicente Fox’s government left office, Interior Secretary Abascal sent me a message in which he told me it would be best to arrive at an arrangement with the outgoing administration rather than continue the call for recognition of the union’s true leadership into the Calderón administration. Abascal insisted that it was better to seek an arrangement with President Fox before president-elect Calderón took up residence at Los Pinos. The incoming government was going to be, in Abascal’s words, “much worse and more aggressive.” The Calderón administration would never want to seek an arrangement with the union or me; on the contrary, they would push the confrontation to the point of destroying the Miners’ Uni
on, my family, and me. Abascal said that if I would resign, the Fox administration would cease its accusations against my union colleagues and me and end their campaign of slander before Calderón took office.

  I didn’t consider caving to this indecent proposal—this last pathetic attempt at extortion—for one second. There was no way I would validate their claims—or tacitly erase their hand in the Pasta de Conchos disaster—by acceding to their demand. Had I stepped down, I would have been implicitly admitting that the leaders of the Miners’ Union had committed some kind of failure or abuse against the workers’ interests, and there was no way I would help propagate that lie. My message in reply to Abascal was simple: “I am leader of the National Miners’ Union based on the free and democratic decision of the workers, in which they voted unanimously. They are the only ones who can decide whether I should continue as head of the union. It is not a decision that the government can or should make, much less the companies who employ our members.”

  When Fox stepped down from the presidency, all the union’s demands were still in place: that our autonomy be respected; that those responsible for Pasta de Conchos be held accountable; that the bodies of our colleagues be recovered; and that fair compensation be paid to the families immediately.

  In the days after he became president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa had his new and then-unknown secretary of labor, Javier Lozano Alarcón, set meetings with some of my colleagues from the executive committee and our labor counselors, Carlos and Nestor de Buen. In his initial communications with them, Labor Secretary Lozano expressed the administration’s apparent intention of seeking a negotiated settlement to the strikes that were ongoing in some union sections and of determining the source of the aggression against the Miners’ Union. He seemed to want a return to normalcy, and there were some indications that a favorable solution might be brewing.

  Lozano said that Calderón had not created the conflict but had simply inherited it from the Fox administration, and that they wanted a resolution. Despite Abascal’s warning, the new administration’s intentions seemed good that December. One week before Christmas, Lozano told members of the union’s executive committee and our labor attorneys that he had specific instructions from the president to terminate this conflict and to negotiate a solution consistent with the law and union autonomy. Lozano even said he was not going to leave for vacation yet, in the expectation that a solution would be reached soon. Of course it was a lie—with only fifteen days in office, we knew he had no such vacation planned.

  Lozano’s supposed intention to negotiate fairly with us did not translate into reality, and his promises quickly fell by the wayside. The year 2007 began with two meetings in the labor secretary’s office, with several executive committee members and our labor counselors in attendance. Lozano made a point of never addressing me as general secretary. These loose, unstructured talks failed: Lozano said the incoming government was willing to end the conflict and halt the charges against us, but their first requirement was my resignation as general secretary, along with the resignation of the entire executive committee of the union. After two meetings, my colleagues got the feeling that the conflict wasn’t going to be solved. They demanded that Lozano make the third meeting more formal, saying that he needed to send me a letter announcing the meeting and that it should address me as their general secretary. At that moment, Lozano said he would do it, but I never received anything from him. The third meeting never took place. It seemed nothing had changed since just a couple of months before, when we had been dealing with Fox and Salazar.

  Calderón and Lozano’s promised “solution” to the conflict—my resignation—disregarded entirely the views of the workers, our bylaws, the Mexican Constitution, and the country’s federal labor law, in which it is established that the government must respect union autonomy. In addition, the Mexican government has ratified several agreements with the International Labor Organization over the past sixty years, including Agreement 87, which establishes freedom of association and gives the workers the right to create and join organizations of their own choosing and freely elect the leaders of those organizations, all without government intervention. No matter how many times it was suggested to us, my fellow leaders and I absolutely refused to give up the responsibility to which we had been democratically and legally elected by the worker base, much less yield to the whims of voracious corporations who had caused the deaths of sixty-five of our colleagues at Pasta de Conchos.

  Beginning in April 2007, representatives of the Mexican government began traveling to Canada to meet with me about resolving the conflict, though we never received the direct audience with Calderón we had requested. Among those who came to Canada was the then undersecretary of the interior department, Abraham González Uyeda. González was a former engineer and owner of a large dairy business, and two years earlier, he had thrown a lavish birthday party for himself at Las Palmas, his dairy ranch in his home state of Jalisco. With many important PAN politicians in attendance, González got up and made the suggestion that Felipe Calderón run as the party’s presidential candidate. This proposal quickly took on the nature of an official launch for Calderón’s candidacy, and the media widely reported the story the next day. President Fox, who like all Mexican presidents maintained a tight grip on the workings of his party, was not pleased by this unofficial announcement—it was clearly outside the PAN’s rules for selecting candidates. Calderón, then serving as Fox’s secretary of energy, was quickly dismissed as punishment.

  When González arrived in Canada in 2007 on behalf of the Mexican government, he carried the message that Calderón was looking for a solution to the conflict. González and I met in Toronto, but his proposal, like Lozano’s, was unacceptable: Its first stipulation was that I resign as leader of the Miners’ Union. Only then, González said, would they suspend the accusations against me and against the other union leaders. It was the same story, the same unlawful purpose, with false accusations invented by the government. There really was no possibility of finding a solution; they simply did not want to negotiate, preferring to impose their arbitrary decision.

  Month after month went by without any solution in sight. On the contrary, the government’s actions against the union were becoming even more radical. Calderón and his administration quickly came around to the old patterns of the Fox administration and began obeying the whims of Germán Larrea and the Villarreal brothers. Our initial misgivings had been confirmed. It seemed that Calderón had met with these businessmen and been convinced by their arguments for the destruction of the democratic and autonomous Miners’ Union.

  Meanwhile, the state-level banking charges against us were still dragging on. By 2007 we were making headway, though; Marco del Toro and his team had succeeded in convincing the federal judiciary that the arrest warrants issued in Sonora and in San Luis Potosí should be referred to the Federal District, since there was a clear lack of jurisdiction in both cases. That meant that the whole affair was now concentrated in Mexico City, in the Eighteenth Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in San Luis Potosí), the Fifty-first Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in Sonora) and the Thirty-second Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in Nuevo León). We were expending vast amounts of energy and resources on fighting these charges, and Calderón and Lozano allowed it to go on, though they were fully aware that our supposed crimes were entirely fabricated.

  I do not believe, observing the past six years in retrospect, that anyone in the Calderón administration ever had the sincere intention of seeking a solution through negotiation. It was nothing but a deceptive posture intended to distract and manipulate us. They tried to sound smooth and reasonable, so we would place our confidence in their black hands as they waited for the time to tighten the noose and unlawfully install a union leadership that would obey their whims. From 2006 to the present, we have continued to be subjected to the political persecution of the Calderón government, who simply inherited the Fox government’s commitments t
o corporate ambition and continued support of Grupo México on one hand and Grupo Villacero on the other. And Calderón’s unvarying support of business interests extends beyond the mining and metal sector; for example, he has actively protected the former head of Mexicana Airlines, Gastón Azcárraga, who bankrupted the company and caused the dismissal of most of its employees.

  No doubt Calderón’s myopia stems from the fact that he owes his elevation to the capital provided by businessmen who are determined to control him. Since his first day in office, they have extorted him with reminders of who placed him in Los Pinos; otherwise, there is no explanation of his obvious submission to their every wish. In practice, it seems that Germán Feliciano Larrea and his ilk—not President Calderón—are the ones who lead Mexico. These fabulously wealthy tycoons have hijacked Felipe Calderón, just as they did with Vicente Fox before him.

  Larrea, according Forbes’s latest ranking of the world’s wealthiest individuals, stands at second place in the list of the super-rich in Mexico, with a net worth of $16 billion. Alberto Bailleres Gonzalez comes in at third place with a net worth of $11 billion. His holding company, Grupo Bal, controls Grupo Peñoles and the department store chain Palacio de Hierro; Grupo Peñoles, just like Grupo México, has set up mining work sites that resemble concentration camps, with extremely run-down and dangerous conditions. The same Forbes list is peppered with other enemies of the miners, including Ricardo Salinas Pliego of TV Azteca and Emilio Azcárraga of Televisa—both prominent persecutors of the union and friends of Vicente Fox, Marta Sahagún, and Germán Larrea.

  A longer look at the Forbes list reveals that the combined fortunes of eleven Mexican businessmen amounts to $125 billion—which is equivalent to 12.4 percent of Mexico’s yearly GDP and exceeds the country’s international currency reserves of $121 billion. At the same time, about 50 million Mexicans, nearly half of the country’s population, live in poverty, and we repeatedly hear that there is no money to help fund any level of public education or to meet the growing demand for health care, jobs, and infrastructure improvements. Of course, one of the main desires of these businessmen was that Calderón maintain his persecution of the Miners’ Union and other independent, democratic trade unions in Mexico, such as the Electrical Workers’ Union and the Aviation Workers’ Union (representing pilots and baggage handlers), who have faced during the last three years struggles similar to ours.