Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  Yet the Canadian police couldn’t stop all the abuses. It is sad, to say the least, but I, my family, my lawyers, and many of our colleagues had become used to the fact that our every communication is being listened to, primarily through phone taps. Since I’d been elected general secretary in 2002, I’d suspected that my phones had been tapped and that government officials made a habit of listening in to union business. But after Pasta de Conchos and my departure from Mexico, I became absolutely certain of it. The union’s legal team, some of whom had connections in the PGR and in the Department of the Interior, assured me that politicians were capable of phone tapping—unlawful, of course—and employed it routinely. My response to this criminal eavesdropping is simple: they should feel free to listen, listen, and keep on listening. The invasion of our privacy is inexcusable, but I have absolutely nothing to hide.

  The year 2008 brought more threats against my family and an assassination plot, but it also brought other forms of pressure for me to step down—gentler methods of persuasion, but no less infuriating. From the start, businessmen, politicians, and union leaders had made the trip from Mexico to Canada to visit me, including Alonso Ancira and Graco Ramírez, a former PRD senator and a friend of mine (he would be elected governor of the state of Morelos in July 2012). I had telephone conversations with Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a PRI senator, former governor of Sonora, and current leader of the Mexican Congress, with PRI congressman Emilio Gamboa Patrón, who is today the leader of the Mexican Senate; and with many others. All these visitors declared the same intention: they wanted to help negotiate a solution to the conflict. However, none of their proposals for mediation were serious. Each encouraged me in his own way to give up my position; none of them had an authentic desire to resolve the conflict legally and with respect for union autonomy and freedom of association. It seemed that for many of them the union was merchandise to be traded, and their only solutions were based on destroying the organization. For my colleagues and me, who remember the sacrifices of those who came before us, that solution was unacceptable in every respect.

  Two of my colleagues in the labor movement—Elba Esther Gordillo and Carlos Romero Deschamps, national leaders of the Teachers’ and Petroleum Workers’ Unions, respectively—made the trip to Canada as well. They too said their intent was to intercede and negotiate. Yet when we began discussing a solution, they had the same solution as everyone else: They hoped to convince me to step down. These two union leaders both told me this would allow Calderón and Lozano to appoint a new person at the head of Los Mineros; that way, all the fabricated accusations would be dropped and I could return to Mexico with my family. They were convinced that things would calm down eventually, probably not until the PAN government ended, but that I could then return to my position in the union. It was the same argument I had heard from crooked businessman and power-obsessed politicians. They wanted me to lay down my arms and abandon my colleagues.

  I consulted many times with my colleagues on this matter. The answer from the workers was always unanimous: Napoleón Gómez Urrutia is the one we elected and, with toma de nota or without toma de nota, he will continue to be our leader. To accept their proposal would be to acknowledge that we had done something wrong. As I repeated to anyone who made the suggestion that I simply leave the union: The workers are my bosses, not the companies or any politician.

  Of all the parties interested in seeing me step down, it was the mining and steel companies of Mexico who had the most to gain. Without any truly democratic unions in their sector, they would reign supreme. Unchecked, they would continue to rake in profits and manipulate politicians. Thus, it was the businessmen of Mexico who made the most strenuous efforts to end my leadership, and they were willing to pay me handsomely to get out of their way. The most remarkable of these bribery attempts came from Alonso Ancira himself.

  At the beginning of the administration of Carlos Salinas, Ancira’s company, Altos Hornos de México, had been owned by the Mexican government. During his privatization spree, Salinas sold the company—which was and is Mexico’s largest steel producer—to the Ancira Elizondo brothers. Alonso Ancira, being a close friend of Salinas, became the largest shareholder and stepped into the role of chairman and CEO. As in most of Salinas’s privatization deals, the new owners got the company practically for free. Altos Hornos de México had a value estimated by its own governmental technicians and bureaucrats at more than $4 billion. The government sold it to the Ancira brothers for less than $150 million. The inventory the company had in warehouses at the time of the sale was by itself worth more than the purchase price.

  Ancira—just like Germán Larrea, the Villarreal brothers, and Alberto Bailleres—is an active opponent of the workers who were the lifeblood of his own business. He’s also a deeply narcissistic person. A portly man, he seems locked in a perpetual struggle to lose weight, and as he aged, he’s had several surgeries to make himself look younger and slimmer. Wherever he goes, he’s surrounded by at least one or two young, beautiful assistants, typically girls around twenty years old, whom he pays large sums of money to accompany him on trips. He’s also constantly trying to play himself off as some kind of academic or legal expert, though he often exposes his own lack of knowledge. At his core, he is not scholar but a businessman.

  One of Ancira’s favorite tricks was to prop up union leaders who served his interests and then begin persecuting them—often by throwing them in jail—when they ceased to be useful or opposed him. And he resented any progress made by the workers of Mexico; he could not stand to see any of his employees become educated, out of fear that it would reflect badly on his own lack of a college education. He even prevented the upper echelons of his company’s staff—the managers and directors—from living comfortable lives. If they did, Ancira reasoned, they would be equal to him, the all-powerful businessman. He also thought he was so important that no rules or laws applied to him; for years, he hid in Israel, refusing to pay off massive debts to his creditors, including a huge tax debt to the Mexican government.

  Like most heads of Mexican mining and steel companies, Ancira was closely tied to the conservative PAN governments of Fox and Calderón, including having donated huge sums to Marta Sahagún’s Vamos Mexico Foundation. Ancira’s powerful influence had even swayed Coahuila governor Humberto Moreira to allow suppression of the workers in his state. In 2008, workers from union sections in Monclova, Piedras Negras, and Nava—the three most important sections in Coahuila—planned a meeting to report on a recent review of local workers’ collective bargaining contracts. The night before the meeting was to be held, Ancira sent more than five hundred thugs—mainly drunks and drug addicts from the poor areas of the state—to attack and set fire to the meeting rooms of Sections 288 and 147 of Monclova and 293 of Nava in order to prevent the members from meeting and expressing their opinions about the agreements. Ancira could not have perpetrated this action without Moreira’s tolerance and help in covering it up after the fact.

  The governor’s complicity with Ancira is shameful and disappointing—especially considering that Moreira had been a unionist as a member of the National Teachers’ Union, and considering the fact that he had previously asked for and received support from the union in his 2005 bid for governor. (And of course, he previously publicly denounced Vicente Fox for trying to have me unlawfully imprisoned.) Sadly, Moreira had begun associating with Ancira, and the businessman had persuaded him to renege on his union past and sign off on further persecution of the miners. Ancira, like Larrea, Bailleres, and the Villarreal brothers, was intent on his mission to disband the union and set up a company union in its stead.

  On three occasions Ancira had visited me in Canada to try and convince me to abandon the union’s leadership. Each time he came to Vancouver—first in 2006, then in 2007, and again in early 2008—he had offered many personal benefits in exchange for a resignation, and the “benefits package” increased every time we met. In October 2006, after the first months of aggression and threats
from the government, Ancira had offered me $10 million. His next two offers were for $20 million.

  These meetings ended in failure, of course—he should have known I wouldn’t take a bribe. But in June 2008, I got another call from Ancira. He said he was on a business trip in the United States and wanted to fly in from New York to meet with me on June 23. I told him I had to refuse because it was my wife’s birthday and I had promised to dedicate the day to her. Oralia and I had planned to do something special that day, hoping to forget for a short time the aggression that had now lasted over two years.

  Ancira insisted. I have no doubt that he knew the date’s significance and arranged his trip accordingly—it’s a prime example of how he and his ilk express their perversity, even in the smallest of ways. This fourth meeting was crucial, Ancira said. This time he had a clear proposal to end the conflict, one that would be suitable for everyone.

  I finally agreed—albeit unhappily—to meet for a brief one-on-one breakfast at 9:00 a.m. at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver. The restaurant was crowded when I arrived, but we were seated at a private table tucked away from most of the commotion. Ancira’s demeanor was chilly; neither of us trusted the other.

  He quickly told me that he had a new offer—this one much more appealing than those of previous years. He told me that some high government officials, headed by Labor Secretary Lozano, had met with a group of businessmen who belonged to the Chamber of Mining, including Germán Larrea, Alberto Bailleres, and the Villarreal brothers. Lozano had pressured all of them into pooling funds to offer me a payment in exchange for stepping down. Lozano told the group that they had provoked the situation, and that, with the prices of metals back up to sky-high levels, the Miners’ Union under my leadership was a significant threat to their ever-fattening profit. If they wanted to keep the cost of labor down, Lozano told the assembled businessmen, this was the easiest way to do it.

  Together they put together a sum of $100 million. The amount was nothing compared to the money they would save with the obstacle of Los Mineros removed. Now Ancira had come to offer the money to me on the condition that I resign immediately as general secretary of the Miners’ Union. As part of the deal, I would also allow them to impose a new person at the head of the organization—without consulting the workers, of course. Finally, I would stay outside Mexico for three years, until the end of the Calderón administration in 2012. I would then be able to return to my home country without any problem, and they would immediately cancel and withdraw all false accusations they had leveled against me.

  As he explained the deal, Ancira made sure to not include himself as one of this group of conspirators; he spun himself as the “negotiator,” and acted like he was ever respectful of my leadership. At times he mentioned the concepts of loyalty and friendship—two things he obviously does not understand. At last he looked me directly in the eyes and said, “So, what do you think? A hundred million dollars is nothing to sneeze at. You and your family will have a comfortable life, tranquil, with no worries. You will live in peace and you could dedicate yourself to traveling, reading, writing, and giving conferences—anything you want.”

  Ancira had an answer immediately. “Napoleón Gómez Urrutia,” I told him, “is not for sale. Neither is the Miners’ Union.” I told him that if he and his cronies truly want to resolve the conflict they had created, they needed to sit down and negotiate with respect, and immediately end the aggression. It’s thanks to the workers’ effort, commitment, and sacrifices that these businessmen are making the biggest profits in their companies’ history, I pointed out. The miners deserve fair compensation as part of the huge profits they were generating. I then told him it would be better if they took the $100 million and distributed it among the workers and their families, or used it to develop new plans for education, health, housing, and life insurance.

  Ancira listened to my speech but told me right away that I should think about it, that I should talk with my wife and family. He told me it would be a mistake not to accept the offer and its conditions.

  I told him no amount of consideration would ever change my mind. If they didn’t like the conflict, they shouldn’t have started it. It was their ignorance, arrogance, lack of vision, and insensitivity that had put them where they were. The only way forward, I said, was for company and union to develop mutual respect. I told Ancira that we would be more than happy to discuss ways to cooperate and increase productivity in a manner that aligned with our collective bargaining agreements.

  “Napoleón,” Ancira replied, “that kind of cooperation is a serious threat to these guys, and to the president they stand behind. You have a big problem—you came twenty-five years before your time. Your ideas scare them, all this training and education for workers, all this modernization and progression toward a new future for workers. Plus, Mexico’s just not ready for a union leader with graduate and postgraduate degrees in economics, who speaks multiple languages, who has international relationships. And Germán Larrea hates you, more deeply than any of the others. He’s insane. He’ll break any law if he has to in order to see you fall.”

  Of course I knew Larrea hated me, but I didn’t think the rest of Ancira’s argument made sense. Union leaders with backgrounds in economics have found success in other countries, including the general secretary of Germany’s Volkswagen Workers Union, who previously served as the country’s minister of the economy. And it wasn’t Mexico that was resistant to these changes—it was this cabal of greedy, amoral businessmen and politicians who were unwilling to move forward.

  By now, Ancira could see that I wasn’t going to accept the offer, but he wasn’t ready to end breakfast yet. I took the opportunity to get some more information out of him. “Why,” I now asked, “did President Calderón decide to continue all this? It started under Fox’s watch, and at first he acted like he didn’t want it to be his problem. Why keep it alive?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question,” Ancira said. “Germán Larrea, Alberto Bailleres, the Villarreals—they all donated enormous sums of money to Calderón’s campaign, just like they did for Fox. In exchange, Calderón gave them Lozano.” I recognized this as the truth, even coming from a man who had no scruples. Lozano had been at these businessmen’s beck and call from the beginning. “It’s to these businessmen that he owes his position—not the population at large, much less the working class,” Ancira said.

  That was true, I replied, but once the president of Mexico assumes his duties, he has all the legal power to become a statesman, a king, or a dictator. Calderón could have begun his administration by looking for a true solution to the conflict. He could have behaved like a great negotiator who faces and resolves challenges and problems as they arise.

  “You expected that of a short, ugly, conflicted person who had no personality?” Ancira replied, in his typically offensive manner. “All he does is yell and bang his hands on tables. He makes terrible rash decisions just for the sake of feeling like he’s the president. Add to that the fact that he drinks a lot while he’s making these decisions, and you’ll see why his choices have been poor.”

  Ancira’s characterization of Felipe Calderón immediately reminded me of how Germán Larrea had always referred to Vicente Fox as stupid and ignorant, and of Larrea’s insulting nicknames for Lozano. I couldn’t imagine what Larrea now called Calderón behind his back. It’s a shame that men like Calderón exist, but it’s even worse is that there are those—like Ancira and Larrea—who recognize the faults and failings of these government officials and yet cynically protect and defend them as if they were close friends.

  “Calderón won’t end the conflict on his own.” Ancira continued. “That’s why I strongly recommend that you accept their offer. If you don’t”—and here came the threat—“things are going to get worse. They are going to attack you, invent things, and slander you, your wife, your children, and your colleagues. You know they can get the media to print whatever they tell them to. And,” he added with a
n unmistakable air of complacency, “that’s just the way Mexico is: the corruption, the illegality, the abuses of authority; they can apply or interpret the laws any way they feel like it.” The people, he told me, are asleep, stultified by the propaganda that’s all over TV, newspapers, and radio. “The Mexicans are afraid. They live in terror, and that culture was created intentionally, to control their businesses, the economy, and the political environment.

  “You broke from that system,” Ancira continued, “and you became a danger to it, an obstacle. And besides, you have education and intelligence that many of us don’t. The extreme right is in power, and to these PAN politicians, social and union leaders like you are enemies of God and the Church. To them, unions are like a cancer on society and have to be removed. Calderón told us he feels precisely that way many times during the campaign.”

  I had to agree with Ancira on this last point. It had been two or three decades since Mexico had seen such vitriolic hatred toward the lower and working classes. The PAN government had brought these extreme violations back, fueled by arrogance and unbridled ambition.

  “That is why,” Ancira insisted, “you should accept the offer. If you don’t, things are going to get worse for you, your family, and the union. Think about it. You can take the money, free and clear, then just walk away.”