Hernández Juárez repeated that same statement during the Ordinary General Miners’ Convention in May 2008, to which he also was invited. His statement fell on us like a bucket of ice water. Abascal had given me a warning, but it came so close to the outbreak of aggression that we didn’t have sufficient time to prepare a defense strategy and counterattack.
Though I felt great anger upon hearing Hernández statement, I knew we had to keep our focus on defending the union and finding justice for our lost colleagues. We were now over a year into the conflict, and we were still fighting the bank fraud charges and seeking justice for Pasta de Conchos. Yet we had just won a significant victory: In March 2007, shortly before our annual convention, the Fourth Collegiate Tribunal for Labor Matters of the First Circuit declared that I was the legitimate leader of the Miners’ Union, and that the labor department had abused its authority and failed to follow correct procedures in its refusal to recognize me as such. According to the ruling, the government was obliged to officially recognize me as general secretary with a toma de nota within forty-eight hours. Lozano grudgingly complied. Elías Morales was at last stripped of the title he had held in name only.
Yet, rather than admit defeat, the forces allied against us were to show no signs of letting up. In fact, following my official reinstatement as general secretary, the conspirators ratcheted up their attacks. This time, they would throw all their efforts into the national media.
TWELVE
SLANDER AND REDEMPTION
The truth does not belong to the one who yells the most.
—RABINDRANATH TAGORE
In 2007, the union’s lawyers presented a formal complaint before the PGR for the crimes committed at Pasta de Conchos. Our complaint, in accordance with the criminal code, was a charge of industrial homicide by intentional or malicious omission—also known as “corporate murder”—leveled against Germán Larrea, Grupo México’s board of directors, Francisco Salazar, Labor Undersecretary Emilio Gómez Vives, and the rest of the officials and inspectors from the labor department. The case was presented before the Special Unit of Investigation for the Prosecution of Criminal Offenses Committed by Public Servants, under preliminary investigation number 4085/07/08.
In the more than five years since we made that complaint, the PGR has neglected to conduct even a preliminary investigation and has never looked into the facts we reported. Instead, it has frozen and attempted to drop our lawsuit completely. It has continued to try to lay blame for the disaster on the union itself, once again exposing its ongoing bias toward Grupo México. And it has continued to support Grupo México’s efforts to prosecute me and my four colleagues for crimes we didn’t commit, in an effort to distract attention from the real perpetrators of industrial homicide. Officials at the attorney general’s office seem to have forgotten the sixty-five lives lost in February 2006 and the families who have been affected by these deaths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have shown no interest in exposing the wrongdoing of their powerful allies.
Yet, Los Mineros still held out hope of justice. Despite the fact that I’d been fully acting in the capacity of general secretary over the previous year, even from my station in Vancouver, the Supreme Court’s official reinstatement of me as leader of the union gave us hope that the entire legal system hadn’t been corrupted. We had received a just—if long delayed—ruling, and the labor department had been rightly criticized for its actions. At last, the workers’ desire to rid themselves of the traitor Elías Morales had been respected.
The victory lifted the spirits of the entire organization, but for Grupo México and the labor department, it was a humiliation. Faced with this chastening from the Supreme Court and slow progress in their legal campaign against us—and still infuriated by our accusations of industrial homicide—the union’s enemies began working on a new plan. Since the beginning of the conflict, Grupo México had held meetings every Wednesday specifically to discuss their efforts against Los Mineros. In attendance at these meetings were high-level Grupo México officials, the company’s internal lawyers and its criminal lawyers, and former government officials who were on its payroll. They also invited publicists, psychologists, and consultants to advise them on the best way to carry out their attacks. In these meetings, they gave each party an assignment for the week—deciding who could best bribe whom, who could best pressure whom. Following the rebuke from the Supreme Court, this perverted mastermind group decided to shift its full focus to the national media. Their plan was to turn the general public against me in any way they could.
Though the media had been biased against us from the start, Grupo México now initiated an expensive paid publicity campaign against the leaders of the Miners’ Union. It was a hatchet job unlike any other attack on a union leader in Mexican history. Beginning on April 20, they launched a campaign consisting of a series of slanderous TV advertisements that denounced me for supposed misuse of the $55 million Mining Trust. Over foreboding, dramatic music, a voiceover depicted me as a heartless criminal and portrayed the supposed “victims” of my crimes—the miners—as hoping to see me end up in jail. At the conclusion of the spot, the parties allegedly responsible for the spot are identified in small print: “Section XI of the Union of Miners of Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua, and Section VI Charcas, San Luis Potosí.” In these sections, Grupo México had lied to, bribed, and threatened members of Los Mineros until they renounced the union. This unlawful coercion worked on a small minority of locals, and we lost a few union sections that had belonged to the organization for more than fifty years—though, of course, these union locals could never have afforded this kind of publicity. The truth is that this multimillion-dollar campaign was financed exclusively by Grupo México.
The ad was broadcast nationally on Televisa’s Channel 2 (not coincidentally, both Germán Larrea and Alberto Bailleres sit on the board of Televisa and are supposedly shareholders). Another spot, broadcast nationally on Televisa’s Channel 2 and on Televisión Azteca’s Channel 13, made the same claim and again stated that the same union sections—both belonging to workers of Grupo México—had paid for it. For eight months, from April to December, the ads ran during peak times—during highly anticipated soccer games, for example—taking up the most desirable and high-dollar ad space. We estimated that in the end, these defamatory ads were run a total of about eight hundred times, all in prime “triple A” airtime.
Germán Larrea had plenty of money to put toward the cause, and, true to his cynical nature, he didn’t care about the fact that everyone knew where the real backing for the ads came from. All in all, we have estimated, based on the cost of this premium media space, that Grupo México invested close to $200 million on the eight-month campaign. (The absurdity of this being nearly four times the entire amount of the Mining Trust was not lost on us.) In fact, Jaime Lomelín, CEO of Grupo Peñoles, the second-largest mining company in Mexico, told me that Larrea had been saying that he did not mind losing his fortune in his fight against the Miners’ Union. I heard a similar story from one of our tax lawyers who has a connection with a member of Larrea’s defense team. The company shamelessly threw money at their efforts to drag me through the mud and insert themselves into the union’s operations. They hired more than thirty law firms to help them fight us, even as they made a big show of giving pitifully small amounts to the families of the men who died at Pasta de Conchos. The allocation of money to these two causes clearly reveals Germán Larrea’s priorities.
What just country would allow TV ads to be bought and broadcast against an individual who should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise? What country would allow—and in fact support—such propaganda, which has the sole purpose of turning the public against a man who they all know is innocent? It seems that being on the board of Televisa, as is the case of Germán Larrea and Alberto Bailleres, has its advantages. No one intervened to stop the airing of these malicious ads, although we presented the request before several authorities. We presented a series of appeals to the media
outlets airing slander against us and requested the legal right to a response. None of us were suing for a cent of damages, though the spots clearly justified that claim; we only wanted the right to reply when our accusers published articles or presented information that was false or slanderous. Each one of our appeals was ignored.
Because we didn’t have the financial resources to mount a counterattack in the media (our accounts were still frozen by the government), the union members instead took their retaliation to the streets. In a national campaign, the miners spent their own time making huge posters and displaying them in public areas, particularly in the swanky neighborhoods where Larrea would be most ashamed. In large red lettering, the posters read “Larrea—Assassin of Miners” and “Grupo México Corrupt.” Volunteers also printed many handouts and leaflets to give out, each of them showing the truth of the situation that was so egregiously distorted in the media and displaying a large photo of the reclusive Larrea. It wasn’t as high-caliber as Larrea’s multimillion-dollar national media blitz, but it was the best we could do to defend our honor and reveal Larrea and his cronies for what they are.
In its aim of co-opting the national press and discrediting me, Grupo México had hired García Puebla Consultores, a top publicity firm that has represented many politicians—and is owned by Eduardo García Puebla, a former PRI press secretary—on top of its stable of consultants, counselors, and psychologists. The company even directly hired mercenary media outlets to publish its words. One of our own publicists obtained a copy of an “order for publicity” through which García Puebla Consultores purchased a 10-by-15-inch space in the publication Milenio and provided the paper with the full text of an article to be published. The space purchased by Grupo México was in the paper’s first section and included text and a photograph. The order for publicity is dated July 23, 2007, and indicates that the space is for publication on the following day. The title of the ordered article to be published is “Napistas [a term used to refer to followers of Napoleón] Continue to Take Advantage of the Pasta de Conchos Widows”; as the title suggests, it was a biased, fallacious story about how Los Mineros themselves were exploiting the widows of the lost miners for political reasons.
In the order for publicity, the publicist from García Puebla Consultores had the nerve to write the following: “Once the design of the page has been done please send it to the following email address: [email protected].” The request to approve an advertisement is common; the problem is that this was no regular advertisement. It appeared on an odd-numbered page (ads typically appear on even-numbered pages, on the left side of a spread), and it was laid out in Milenio’s typography, the type used for serious stories. There is absolutely no indication that the article was paid for, leading the reader to believe that this is a “news” article researched and reported by Milenio rather than PR for Grupo México.
This form of deception has been systematically employed throughout the conflict and up to the present day, using several different newspapers that allow this misleading practice. One newspaper, El Universal, one of the most widely read in Mexico, called a meeting with one of the union’s lawyers and offered to publish articles favorable to me and the union—if we paid them. Over lunch in a bustling Mexico City mall, the El Universal representative told our lawyer that to make it believable, they’d have to start with small references to the conflict and short articles but then gradually move to longer articles giving the union’s side. According to this man, Grupo México had paid them $800,000 for a year’s worth of attacks against us, but that the agreement had been terminated and had not yet been renewed. Our lawyer was then told that for the same amount—and without the need for any kind of paperwork or receipt—they would publish articles in my favor, and they would also air stories that showed the union’s side on the radio stations belonging to their group.
During this conversation, our lawyer noticed a small red dot of light hovering near their table, looking a lot like the laser sight of a gun. It soon disappeared without event, but after talking to a friend in the government, the lawyer realized it hadn’t been a gun sight but a device for eavesdropping. That was the level of obsession the union’s enemies had fallen to.
Before he refused El Universal’s offer (a given, since we would never resort to the same tactics employed by our enemies), our lawyer asked the paper’s representative about Pedro Ferriz, a radio host under their corporate umbrella who systematically attacked me on his radio program while refusing to listen to my version of events. The man simply said that Ferriz was paid his professional fees and that he had to follow the politics of the company. Plus, one strict stipulation of the owners was that no hosts or guests could attack the president or any member of the clergy. Sadly, and to the detriment of the Mexican press in general, many other employees have similarly complied with immoral orders from their bosses.
We, of course, summarily turned down El Universal’s offer to sell us the “privilege” of fair reporting. Grupo México did however eventually renew its contract, and antiunion articles continued to run in the paper. In fact, El Universal may have solicited us for a deal only to wrest even higher payments from Grupo México. Surely Grupo México’s arrangement with El Universal wasn’t unique. We heard that the company had in fact paid an even larger sum to money and investing newspaper El Financiero for positive coverage: $3,000,0000 per year. We have no doubt that they similarly contracted many other Mexican news outlets.
Adding to these attacks in major newspapers and TV stations, there were some new publications created solely for the purpose of attacking the Miners’ Union. The most prominent of these was a magazine called MX, created jointly by Grupo México, PAN politicians, and President Fox himself. They tried to disguise the periodical as serious by including a handful of other features, but its main topic was always Los Mineros. Only five or six issues came out in 2006 before MX disappeared from the market, unable to sustain itself on lies alone.
During this time, the government, too, did its part to turn public opinion against the leaders of the Miners’ Union. They sent out prejudiced press releases and distorted reports regarding the miners, many of which were prepared in the Department of Labor and in the office of President Calderón himself. From there, these reports went straight into the media, with all the government’s false statements and errors duplicated. Their efforts were partially a success: slander against the Miners’ Union and myself was apparent in nearly all the Mexican media’s coverage of our conflict with Grupo México and the government.
The Mexican government’s control over the communication media is nothing new. But today, with television stations privatized, many observers rightly point out that the reverse now seems to be true—the media outlets, now properties of corporate giants, dictate to politicians what their next move should be. Through the official news agency of the government, Notimex, the institutional leadership—backed by wealthy businessmen—disseminates information that is aimed at cultivating a very specific image. Notimex, in the hands of the right-wing government, has become a sectarian instrument to manipulate public opinion. Their obsessive reporting of distortions and half-truths harks back to the statement by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist: “A lie repeated one hundred times becomes the truth for the masses.”
At times, the television stations, the government, and the powerful companies of Mexico seem to make up one large criminal organization in charge of manipulating the “truth” that reaches the Mexican people. In the twenty-first century, television in Mexico has become the opium of the people. Ownership of the largest media properties in Mexico, including Televisa and TV Azteca, is concentrated in the hands of nine families. The Department of the Interior grants concessions to these families, and in exchange, the government gets the kind of glowing coverage it wants in the national media. They mobilized this abusive system to enhance their attack on the Miners’ Union and to turn the public against us.
Is any of this reasonable and journalistically e
thical? Of course not. But the “art” of manipulating public opinion through shameful financial agreements is allowed in the Mexican culture of deeply rooted political chicanery, to the detriment of the integrity of Mexican journalism. In our country, one can buy the conscience of many journalists, who are the main conduit for bringing information to the public at large. It’s entirely possible to conduct a public lynching and print a barrage of deceptive slogans with impunity—as long as you have enough money.
From the start, many companies like Grupo México, Grupo Peñoles, and Altos Hornos de México regularly bribed communications professionals, paying many millions of dollars per year to ensure that they did not publish or broadcast a favorable word about the Miners’ Union. They have imposed a news blackout, terrified that the public may one day hear the truth. Not even objective news that presents both sides of the conflict is allowed. The only choices are distorted stories or complete silence on the subject, with no mention of our progress in the battle to defend the rights of workers. The conspirators have created a wall that shields the truth of the conflict from public view. Every time we win a trial, the press simply does not mention it. But whenever one of their falsely founded arrest warrants is issued, the press gives them all the attention they desire.
I have given many long, thoughtful interviews to reporters on the subject of Pasta de Conchos and the mining conflict—interviews that were simply never published. It happened numerous times in the weeks following the disaster and continued to happen in the following years. At the beginning of the rescue efforts at Pasta de Conchos, I denounced the atrocities and the deplorable safety conditions to many reporters—but in the end these reporters all transmitted their news as if they had never been informed of this. Not a word of my comments reached the public ear. Much later, in the fall of 2008 Javier Alatorre, the well-known journalist and news director of TV Azteca, came to Vancouver with a full team of technicians to interview me. He had also interviewed me the day after the explosion at Pasta de Conchos, but like all the others, the interview had never been published. I was still angry about that, but I attributed the omission not to Alatorre but to TV Azteca’s owner, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a close friend of Germán Larrea. At my second meeting with Alatorre, which took place as we walked down Burrard Street under a light Canadian drizzle, I gave an accurate picture of the conflict and expressed how I felt and how all of Los Mineros felt about the repression we had suffered. The result was a long and in-depth interview in which I challenged Secretary Javier Lozano to a public debate, by himself or with the businessmen who controlled him. Not a single fragment of the entire interview was ever broadcast, and Alatorre never sent me a copy of the article as he promised.
Collapse of Dignity Page 22
