Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  PROOF OF CONSPIRACY

  The bureaucracy is a giant machine managed by pygmies.

  —HONORE DE BALZAC

  On February 19, 2007—on the first anniversary of the tragedy of the coal mine of Pasta de Conchos—Humberto Moreira, governor of Coahuila, made a stunning public allegation against the recently supplanted Vicente Fox. In a radio interview with veteran Mexican journalist Jacobo Zabludovsky, Moreira claimed that, a year earlier, President Fox had summoned him to Los Pinos to discuss the aftermath of the mining disaster, in a meeting also attended by Interior Secretary Abascal and Labor Secretary Salazar. Moreira stated that the four of them were in the president’s office talking about how best to satisfy the demands of the miners’ families when Fox suddenly interrupted to ask the governor whether there was any way he could find a charge to level against Napoleón Gómez, leader of the Miners’ Union.

  Of course, I had done nothing to warrant a charge in Coahuila, but the president was looking for the quickest way to cover up his administration’s role in the negligence that led to the sixty-five deaths. He knew I would be the most vocal and visible of their accusers, and he needed a way to tarnish my reputation. In his mind, getting rid of a troublesome union leader was an added bonus. Moreira told the interviewer that he had informed Fox that I was innocent of any crime in his state, but the president had insisted that he invent a crime—anything they could accuse me of. Moreira repeated that I had committed no crimes in his state. They went round and round, the president encouraging the governor to make up crimes, and the governor protesting that he couldn’t. Each time Moreira insisted he couldn’t jail someone without a crime, the president would say, “I understand, but how would we do it?” Finally they parted, with President Fox telling Moreira to keep quiet about their discussion. “You never keep your mouth shut,” Fox had told him.

  “With all due respect,” Moreira replied, “neither do you.”

  The governor’s sensational story made national headlines. On February 20, 2007, La Jornada published a story under the headline “Moreira Is Willing to Remind Fox of His Proposal to Jail the Mining Leader”:

  Humberto Moreira, governor of Coahuila, confirmed that he is willing to remind Vicente Fox that, after the tragedy at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, the former president of Mexico proposed that he begin a criminal procedure against deposed union leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and send him to prison, in order to “distract attention.”

  “The Secretary of the Interior and the Labor Secretary were there and were clearly his collaborators, but I am willing to face him and tell him directly,” Moreira said to Zabludovsky.

  “You would say it to him?” asked the journalist.

  “That, and also how the conversation took place. He may have forgotten, given how many governors he holds conversations with, but a governor never forgets when he talks to the president,” the governor responded.

  The La Jornada story goes on to cover why the governor waited until a year after the tragedy to report this discussion. Moreira said that he came out with it then because of the PGR’s intensifying focus on the fraud charges against me and the other members of the executive committee. Their diversion tactics, meant to confuse the citizens of Coahuila, were coming to a head, Moreira argued, so that was why he was speaking out to reveal the charges as just that: diversion.

  He also claimed he did tell the media about Fox’s statements at the time of the mine collapse and that he was the only one who told the media that the miners were dead, even as Salazar continued to say that they might still be alive. In reality, Moreira had only said that he would reveal the immoral propositions President Fox had made to him at the time. Not until a year later did he explain what those propositions had been.

  What was the true cause of the delay? I believe that Felipe Calderón encouraged Moreira to make the statement. Fox, now out of office, had the annoying habit of making public statements as if he were still president. He acted as Calderón’s shadow, angering the new president—particularly because Calderón was doing his best to look like a legitimate president even as the PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador made repeated claims that the election win was a fraud. By encouraging Moreira to go public, Calderón hoped to make Fox look bad and hopefully silence him for a while.

  On the radio with Zabludovsky, Moreira insisted that he had acted purely out of his own conscience and that he wanted the people responsible for the tragedy to be punished. “I am interested in having those responsible punished, number one,” he said. “Number two, I want the commitments to the widows to be complied with, and three, I want to see the necessary personnel and resources assigned in order to avoid more tragedies such as this in my state.”

  Regardless of his true motivation for making the statement when he did, Moreira had refused to comply with the whims of President Fox in the days after Pasta de Conchos and throw me in prison. No doubt Fox had made similar appeals to state officials in Sonora, San Luis Potosí, and Nuevo León—the three states who did move forward with the fabricated case against my colleagues and me when the PGR sent over its file.

  As shocking as it was that a standing president would order the arrest of an innocent citizen, Moreira’s story didn’t surprise me when my lawyers called with news of the interview. It was just another piece of evidence that the campaign against us was not a lawful execution of justice but rather a calculated effort to silence a union leader who was giving private interests more trouble than they wanted. Fox was trying to recruit Moreira into the group that had been conspiring for the demise of the Miners’ Union since long before Pasta de Conchos.

  As my family and I approached the first anniversary of our departure from Mexico, it started to become clear just how calculated the conspirators’ actions were. There was now a pile of evidence that the antiunion assault was the product of a coordinated plot conducted out of view of the Mexican people. The first sign of direct collusion in crippling our union had been Abascal’s warning at Governor Moreira’s inauguration in late 2005, when he’d told me that Larrea, Bailleres, and the Villarreal brothers were meeting with Fox about their displeasure over the power of the Miners’ Union.

  Another piece of evidence had come to light just after I left Mexico amidst the flurry of death threats and media slander. Halfway through March 2006, I called Roberto Madrazo, the PRI candidate for president of the republic (he would lose to Calderón later that year). I had talked with Madrazo, who served as president of the PRI from 2002 to 2005, numerous times since before he was nominated as a candidate for president. He once attended a dinner with members of the union’s executive committee, and my colleagues asked that, were he to be the official presidential candidate of the PRI, he support me as a candidate for Senator of the Republic, representing my home state of Nuevo León. The Miners’ Union in previous years had had two senators and ten federal deputies, and so it was logical to request the restoration of political commitments between the PRI and the miners—the majority of whom voted for PRI candidates and helped with their campaigns.

  I hoped Madrazo would still honor his commitment to support my candidacy, but my main purpose in calling him that day was to ask for his intervention with the government of Vicente Fox; I hoped he could convince them to stop this absurd confrontation and show them it would lead to no good for anyone. When Madrazo answered the cell phone he greeted me warmly and asked me how and where I was. I gave him my customary answer—“Closer than you imagine”—and told him I was fine but disgusted with the political persecution headed up by Fox, Salazar, and Larrea, with its accompanying vicious smear campaign in the media, which by then had begun in earnest.

  Roberto told me he would talk to Fox on my behalf and told me to call him again should I need anything, and he also assured me that the attack against us would not affect his support of my candidacy for the Mexican senate. But before we ended the conversation, Madrazo said, “Guess who came to see me a few days ago.” I told him I couldn’t imagine, since there must be
thousands of people eager to say hello to a presidential candidate in Mexico. He told me that the group of businessmen headed by Larrea, Ancira, Bailleres, and Julio Villarreal came to his office to ask him not to support my run for the Senate because it would increase my power to a level they were uncomfortable with. If I won, I would be simultaneously a Senator of the Republic, the leader of the Miners’ Union, and vice president of the Labor Congress (as voted in February 2006). That was a prospect that terrified them; they knew I would fight for the workers’ interests and not blindly do as they wished.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  “I told them to go to hell,” said Madrazo, “because who I support for Senator is an internal decision of the party. I told them that you lead hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them activists and organizers who have the right to have their national leader represent them in the Senate.” Madrazo’s report of pressure from the business sector was utterly believable. I had no doubt that these reactionary businessmen were desperate to limit the power of the Miners’ Union, and here was another story of them working behind the scenes to achieve their self-interested objectives.

  The events that formed the backdrop of the entire conflict, by themselves, were plenty of evidence that there was an orchestrated conspiracy to eliminate my leadership and destroy Los Mineros. Three separate events had happened too close to one another to be any kind of coincidence—it is clear that important men had to be pulling strings behind the scenes. First, certain members of the Labor Congress, led by Victor Flores, had thrown their lot in with Fox and his PAN administration on February 15, 2006, renouncing democracy and trading support for Fox’s labor reforms for their positions. Not two days later, the group of hired thugs descended on the Miners’ Union headquarters. Fox and the rest knew we posed the biggest threat to derailing their scheme, so they resorted to physical violence and vandalism. And of course, the following day we discovered that Salazar had granted Elías Morales the toma de nota, acknowledging him as the leader of the Miners’ Union—an event that had occurred two days prior but that we only discovered on February 16, 2006.

  These near-simultaneous events had involved many different players and all but proved that Fox, Salazar, Abascal, and the business leaders who had them in their pockets had carefully designed this plan. How else had Victor Flores and Elías Morales come up with the toma de nota so quickly? And were we supposed to believe that a roving band of thugs had coincidentally attacked the union headquarters in the same week the conspirators tried to unlawfully remove me from the head of the union? At the time, though, thoughts of conspiracy were not at the front of our minds. With the tragedy occurring in Coahuila on the very same weekend, we were entirely focused on the rescue of our colleagues and on keeping our union alive so it could continue the fight on behalf of the miners.

  I didn’t fully understand just how far back this conspiracy stretched until April of 2007, when the head of one of the largest employers in the steel industry visited me in Vancouver. We had a busy day of meetings, discussing collective bargaining agreements and a new productivity agreement that we both hoped would bring benefits for both the company and the workers. After a long but fruitful day, we went to dinner. As we ordered our food and unwound, we were both relaxed and pleased with the outcome of our discussions.

  Over dinner, I asked what he thought about the mining conflict. Though this employer had always had a strong relationship with the Miners’ Union, I had little doubt that he knew quite a bit about how Mexican businessmen operated behind closed doors. Right away, he began telling me that at the beginning of 2005, he had been invited to several meetings at the offices of the secretary of economy, Fernando Canales Clariond, and of the former labor secretary Carlos María Abascal. He had also received an invitation to a dinner at the Monterrey home of Julio Villarreal Guajardo, one of the three Villarreal brothers who led Grupo Villacero. The meetings were ostensibly to discuss the future of Mexico’s mining and metal industry, and Los Mineros would have been a big obstacle in the future Clariond and Abascal saw for this sector. This business owner said he had declined these events, but that he had been told who attended them. The guest list he related to me was a Who’s Who of the most vicious of the miners’ enemies: the Villarreal brothers; Germán Larrea; Xavier García de Quevedo; Carlos María Abascal; Francisco Javier Salazar; labor department undersecretary Emilio Gómez Vives; Alberto Bailleres Gonzáles of Grupo Peñoles and his colleague Jaime Lomelín; Alonso Ancira Elizondo of Altos Hornos de México; Fernando Canales, Fox’s secretary of the economy (and cousin to Bernardo Canales, our former lawyer who mounted a pathetic defense and made off with his fees); and Fernando’s cousin, Santiago Clariond, president of a subsidiary of Grupo IMSA, a steel manufacturer owned by the Clariond family.

  But there were two more attendees who signaled to me that this was no ordinary business dinner: none other than Elías Morales and his longtime collaborator in criminal activities, Benito Ortiz Elizalde. These were the two men who had been kicked out of the Miners’ Union years before, in 2000, charged with proven treason, corruption, and spying for the businesses and government. Now this man was telling me they had been hobnobbing with the leaders of the coalition against us a full year before aggression broke out. There was no reason for those two to be there unless these businessmen and politicians hoped to use them as their traitorous pawns, which is indeed what happened. I now knew without a doubt that Morales and his coconspirators, lacking scruples and consumed by greed, had been working with Grupo México to plot our downfall since early 2005. (Of course, the union would still exist in name according to their plan, but it would be a puppet union in the hands of people like Morales—people who place their own ambition before the loyalty and honesty that characterize true leaders.) Those individuals, who were willing to sell out their fellow union members for their own gain, had been enlisted to spy on us, obtain any information they could, and create doubts and internal divisions wherever possible.

  The man who told me about these secret meetings insisted that neither he nor any of his colleagues had attended them, much less participated in the conspiracy. His company was one of the few who saw the indecent nature of the actions against us and refused to be a part of it. He also told me that Vicente Fox and his wife were fully aware of the plot and supported its execution. The president’s involvement in such a conspiracy is of course grounds for not only dismissal but for serious criminal charges. Sadly, Mexico is one of the countries where such abuses go unspoken of, concealed by an iron wall.

  If this evidence doesn’t amount to a proof of conspiracy, I don’t know what does. A group of shameless individuals—businessmen, politicians, and union lackeys—had banded together in premeditated actions designed to destroy my colleagues, me, and the union we represent, merely because we were an obstacle to their perverted collective interests.

  Although the tragedy at the mine took the company and the government of Vicente Fox completely by surprise, they did not hesitate to use it as an opportunity to accelerate a new phase of the conspiracy they had plotted in the presidential offices of Vicente Fox. They had been conspiring against us long before the mine collapse, but that event gave them all the more reason to work together for my downfall; if they didn’t, they would be implicated in the deaths of the sixty-five men.

  Once we made the public accusation of industrial homicide, their plans for persecution kicked into high gear, falling on us from the pinnacle of economic and political power in Mexico. Their attacks made use of the previously established relationships between Fox’s labor department, the companies, and the media, and they were clearly coordinated and premeditated. These antisocial businessmen and ambitious politicians have long wanted to take advantage of the fact that the government consists of prominent individuals from the extreme, antiunion right.

  Though we have been a primary target of this plot, it should not be seen as an isolated assault against the unionized miners, metalworkers, and steelworkers of
Mexico. These businessmen and their attendant politicians are waging a general offensive against democratic and independent trade unionism; Fox, and Calderón after him, carried out aggressive actions against the Mexican Electricians Union, the Aviation Workers’ Union, and others. The Miners’ Union was merely the first on their long hit list of democratic and independent trade unions that they had prepared during their clumsy scheming in 2005.

  Certain businessmen in Mexico hope to continue collaborating with right-wing politicians to effectively nullify all unions in the Mexican landscape. Since the PAN took power in 2000, we have experienced something like a lost decade: inequality has grown exponentially and abuse of power is rampant. Our main weapon in response is solidarity. Neither Mexico nor Mexicans deserve this intolerable situation. These individuals have created a bad image of our country abroad and have caused deep losses in Mexican society. For the future of our children and grandchildren, the situation has to change.

  Following close on the heels of Moreira’s accusation against Vicente Fox came an additional report that once again confirmed the presence of a direct conspiracy against the Miners’ Union. Among the speakers at the opening ceremony of the Extraordinary General Convention of the Miners’ Union in April 2007 was Francisco Hernández Juárez, head of the Telephone Workers’ Union and president of the National Workers’ Union (UNT). I knew Hernández only formally, through union business, but that day, as I watched his speech from Vancouver through a video conference, he dropped a compelling hint about the governments early intent to weaken Los Mineros.

  During his speech he stated, to the surprise of more than nine hundred convention attendees, that at the beginning of 2005 Carlos María Abascal, then serving as secretary of labor, had said to him personally “that they were coming for Napoleón Gómez Urrutia.” This would have been a full year before Pasta de Conchos and the attempted imposition of Morales. It was further proof that they had been planning to remove me as general secretary of the union long before the official start of the conflict in February 2006.