Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  I refused once again.

  Ancira insisted on giving me his numbers and told me to think about it. “If you don’t accept this, you’ll be making a mistake, and you will come to regret it.”

  “Is that a threat?” I asked. “Are you trying to intimidate me? My colleagues and union friends in Mexico and all over the world are prepared to deal with whatever happens. They haven’t deserted me so far, and they never will.”

  By then, the meeting had lasted more than four hours; it was now past one in the afternoon. I finally told Ancira I’d had enough, that I had to get back to Oralia. Before I left, I once more gave him a clear and emphatic answer. I then stood up from the table and walked out of the hotel restaurant without looking back.

  That night I went out to dinner with Oralia to celebrate her birthday. After a while, I told her I had just rejected a very important offer, but that I felt good about having made the decision. “They offered me $100 million, Oralia,” I said.

  “In exchange for what?” she asked, unperturbed.

  After I recounted the whole conversation, she said, “You know what? You made the right decision. You are like your father—a man of integrity, honesty, and courage. I know you would never lower yourself to their level. It would torment you forever. You know that the whole family is with you, and that we’ll keep supporting you until the truth is known. Things seem to be getting worse sometimes, but the time will come when that will change.

  “The repression, corruption, and irresponsibility of a few do not represent the vast majority of Mexicans,” Oralia continued. “When the transformation begins, you will be there. Men of courage, decent men with ability and knowledge, consistent and honest men who love their country and are ready to commit everything to her are very rare. You are among this small group, and that is why you are and you will be the best example for me, for our children, for the whole family. You are a great inspiration for the workers of the world. They have been and will continue to be with us through this struggle.”

  Oralia’s words had touched me deeply, and we enjoyed the rest of our dinner quietly. I had never been happier to celebrate another year of having this generous and marvelous woman by my side.

  Ancira’s visit had been a straightforward attempt at bribery. I have never believed—and still don’t—that a union should be treated as a business, subject to bribes and personal interest, and I do not say this romantically or idealistically but with all the realism and toughness of character of which I am capable.

  Many have asked why we continue the struggle. What’s the point in so stubbornly maintaining our position? My answer is that we are not the stubborn ones. We have been willing to discuss the problems at the root of the conflict. Ours is not a personal dispute with one or more businessmen or politicians. Our fight is for the noble values in which we believe. It is for justice, respect, dignity, and equality—values that no one should throw overboard in exchange for a comfortable position or a fat check.

  I was never tempted to accept any bribe, yet the dream of returning home is always with me. Without question, we have had painful times due to our separation from our beloved Mexico. In 2009, in the midst of a long illness, my wife’s mother had a long period of physical incapacity. She always said that she was going to wait until this conflict ended and we returned to be together again, and we were in constant communication with her by telephone and videoconference. However, that was no substitute for personal, caring contact. When my mother-in-law eventually passed away, she hadn’t fulfilled her dream of having us back in Mexico. For all of us, but especially for my wife, it was extremely painful to not to be able to caress her or kiss her in her final moments. It was one of the incredibly high costs we had to pay to maintain our integrity—but better to pay that price than to lose ourselves, to buy our return to Mexico by selling out the miners of Mexico. As painful as it was to be separated from our homeland, that betrayal was an impossibility.

  FIFTEEN

  A FAULTY BRIDGE

  Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

  —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  On November 4, 2008, Juan Camilo Mouriño, Felipe Calderón’s secretary of the interior, was flying into Mexico City in a Learjet that had departed from a small airport in San Luis Potosí. In the plane with Mouriño was security advisor and former federal prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos as well as several other officials. As they approached the heart of Mexico City, the pilot suddenly lost control, and the craft plummeted toward the earth. The jet slammed into rush-hour traffic on a street in the middle of Mexico City, less than a mile from Los Pinos. It burst into flames on impact, killing all eight people on board, in addition to six people on the ground.

  Though the cause of the crash was eventually determined to be pilot error, there was wide speculation of a terrorist attack perpetrated by one of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, particularly in light of the fact that Vasconcelos and, to a lesser extent, Interior Secretary Mouriño had been key figures in Calderón’s war on drugs. By November 2008, that war had already cost thousands of lives, and violence against government officials was rising. But regardless of the cause of the crash, Mexico was in shock at the loss of Mouriño, the country’s second-most-important public official. (In Mexico, the office of interior secretary is much like the vice president’s in the United States.)

  Mouriño had been a controversial figure and certainly no friend of the miners—in fact, he’d allegedly been instrumental in recruiting General Arturo Acosta, killer of leftists, to come to Vancouver and assassinate me. Mouriño had taken over the job of interior secretary the previous January, when Calderón fired Francisco Javier Ramírez Acuña, a provincial and repressive official who did nothing to resolve the mining conflict but instead threw up roadblocks all along the way. Some groups had called for Mouriño’s resignation immediately after his appointment, saying that he had rewarded his father’s company with government contracts while holding the office of undersecretary of energy. But Calderón supported his appointee, and Mouriño kept his job. The underhanded dealings of which he was accused were, after all, commonplace in the administration. During his tenure as interior secretary, Mouriño had done nothing to resolve the problems the union faced, besides a few just-for-show meetings (and of course, the effort to—according to General Acosta—send a hit man after me).

  The day Mouriño’s jet went down, the United States held its presidential election, and the people selected Barack Obama as their first nonwhite president. This development built great hope in our American colleagues, including the AFL-CIO, the USW, the UAW, and many others, all of whom had contributed thousands of organizers in support of Obama’s campaign. It sparked hope in me, too, and the other members of Los Mineros. With a more liberal president who respected workers’ rights, we hoped the United States would join with Canada to exert pressure on President Calderón to end the aggression and political persecution against us and the ongoing lack of respect for human rights. After all, the Mexican government’s actions clearly violate the parts of NAFTA that cover labor rights and freedom of association.

  As harmful as Mouriño had been to our cause, when I got news a few days after the plane crash of whom Calderón had appointed as his successor, I was sure we had moved from bad to worse. Calderón’s pick was a man named Fernando Gómez Mont. Like so many appointees in the last two PAN cabinets, Gómez Mont was by profession a corporate lawyer. But it got a lot worse: This man—as part of the law firm Esponda, Zinser, and Gómez Mont—had for years been retained as a criminal attorney by none other than Grupo México itself. Up to the very day he took public office, Gómez Mont had been Germán Larrea’s professional defender.

  The entire mining union was distraught. We couldn’t believe that the legal counsel of our number-one enemy, with no political experience at all, had been given the enormous responsibility of conducting Mexico’s interior policy. We saw nothing but sharpened persecution in our futu
re. Earlier in 2008, several of my colleagues on the national executive committee had been in a meeting in Javier Lozano’s office along with Gómez Mont and another Grupo México lawyer. The group had been very close to reaching an agreement that would end the conflict—and they might have done so had not Gómez Mont strongly opposed one of the conditions. The business lawyer, with an arrogant and insensitive attitude, insisted that the false accusations against me and my colleagues remain in place. Gómez Mont’s opposition ended the meeting, and no agreement was reached.

  Days after Gómez Mont took on his new role in the interior department, our defense lawyer, Marco del Toro, got a flurry of phone calls from him. Gómez Mont called Marco repeatedly and left insistent voice-mails asking if the two of them could meet. It was strange: Typically one doesn’t have the second-highest government official in the land beating down your door for a meeting. Curious, Marco called Gómez Mont back and agreed to meet with him and Alberto Zinser, one of Gómez Mont’s colleagues in his law firm. (Esponda, the third lawyer in the firm, had been best friends with Calderón in law school.)

  The meeting was held in a Mexico City hotel on a Sunday morning, even though Marco knew that Gómez Mont rarely (if ever) worked early or on weekends. Gómez Mont and Alberto Zinser arrived via helicopter. During the meeting, Marco was surprised to see before him a person whose attitude toward Los Mineros seemed to have changed dramatically. “Listen,” Gómez Mont told Marco, “now that I’ve been appointed as interior secretary, I’m no longer on Grupo México’s side. I’m not going to even pursue the case anymore. I’m not even going to follow it. I won’t go against you or Napoleón in any way—I just want to help find a solution.”

  Gómez Mont adamantly assured Marco that he had freed himself from his previous job as Grupo México’s lawyer, and that his relationship with Larrea might actually help Los Mineros: He told Marco that he wanted to be a “communication bridge” between Grupo México and the Miners’ Union. He claimed he wanted to help solve the ongoing strikes at Cananea, Taxco, and Sombrerete. Marco thanked him, the meeting ended, and the new interior secretary was whisked back to his helicopter.

  Not being born yesterday, we had trouble believing Gómez Mont’s claims. In fact, when Marco told me about the meeting, we agreed on his true motive: he simply wanted to get to us before we went to the media and publicized his direct connection with Grupo México. That explained the rush to meet, and his insistence that we would see a new, fairer Gómez Mont in office. He didn’t want to help. He just didn’t want us pointing out in public how outrageous Calderón’s appointment was.

  Gómez Mont immediately validated our doubts. In the following weeks, he called several union leaders from the Cananea copper mine to his office to discuss the continuing strike, but each time, he made them enter through a secret door, saying he wanted to “avoid creating false expectations.” He knew full well he wasn’t about to negotiate fairly with us. Nevertheless, our colleagues attended the meetings in the spirit of wanting to give him a chance. Gómez Mont also pointedly excluded members of the national union’s executive committee from these meetings—a gesture meant to show his solidarity with Lozano’s recent denial of toma de nota and with the calls for me and for the rest of the committee to resign. Meeting with any member of the executive committee would be a tacit acknowledgment of my leadership, and Gómez Mont refused to cross that line.

  But the new interior secretary’s antiunion actions weren’t limited to ignoring the democratically elected leadership. In fact, he was about to perpetrate some of the worst direct aggression we had seen from the government in a while.

  In the Federal District courts where our defense lawyers had consolidated the state-level banking charges against us, Elías Morales’s accusations were beginning to fail. Though the PGR always appealed rulings in our favor, it was becoming clear that, ultimately, the nearly three-year-old charges wouldn’t stick. This was infuriating for our enemies.

  So, Grupo México’s mastermind group got together once again and came up with a new offensive. They would start back at the original banking-fraud investigation, they decided—the one that the Mexican banking commission (CNBV) had declared without basis. But, since the charges were exactly the same as they were in 2006, what would make the outcome different this time? In a country like Mexico, the answer was simple: They decided to simply skip the CNBV, even though the commission’s review is required by law. In late 2008, the PGR sent the old criminal file straight back to federal court. The plaintiffs were the same—Grupo México lackeys Elías Morales, Martín Perales, and Miguel Castilleja. The three spuriously claimed to be representing “thousands” of workers. The defendants were also the same: me, Héctor Félix, José Angel, and Juan Linares (although this time they left out Gregorio Pérez, the courier who had been charged in the first case, and who had already ended up spending a good deal of time in jail). The CNBV report from 2006, which stated that the case could not proceed because no crime had been committed, was left out. The judge at the First District Court in Criminal Procedures, unaware of the CNBV report, issued all four warrants without hesitation.

  Now it was time for our “communication bridge” to get involved. Mere weeks after his appointment, Gómez Mont ordered that all the union’s bank accounts and all my family’s accounts be re-seized based on the new charges. Our defense team had fought long and hard after the 2006 bank account sequestrations and had recently regained control of most of our assets, but now we were back at square one. Obeying Gómez Mont, SIEDO, the PGR’s organized-crime division, again froze my personal account as well as those of my wife, my three sons, and my sister in Monterrey. Once again, we were relying fully on the solidarity and support of Los Mineros and the USW. The accounts of all twelve members of the executive committee were also refrozen, along with all the national union’s accounts and those of all union sections in the country. We immediately filed an amparo against all of the freezes, but we knew it would be just the beginning of a long fight. Once again, they were out to financially asphyxiate us and reduce our ability to fight back, especially at Cananea, Taxco, and Sombrerete, which were by now in their sixteenth month of striking.

  These seizures were the first actions of our new mediator, the supposed “communication bridge” between Grupo México and the Miners’ Union. Next on his agenda was to follow Germán Larrea’s request for the physical capture of the executive committee’s most prominent members.

  In Mexico, there are two types of offenses: “serious” and “not serious.” The only difference between the two is that for a “serious” offense (a delito grave in Spanish), the accused person can be held without bail and is not eligible for a stay of legal punishment while the validity of an amparo filing is with a judge. Thus, many people accused of a “serious” crime are imprisoned with no bail regardless of an ongoing amparo proceeding—not because they are a flight risk or a danger to society, but because the crime they are charged with happens to be in a catalog of offenses the Mexican legal system has deemed “serious.” The arrangement creates a fertile climate for political persecution.

  The banking fraud charges were categorized as serious, and that’s a big part of why I had to leave the country; had they managed to apprehend me, they could have held me indefinitely without having to prove anything. From the beginning, Juan Linares, secretary of the union’s Safety and Justice Council, had been named in the case brought by Elías Morales. Thanks to the amparos filed by our defense team, Juan had managed to stay out of jail while continuing to play an active role in Los Mineros. But when the PGR refiled the federal case in late 2008 and convinced judges to order new arrest warrants, Juan knew it was time to move.

  In November, Juan left Mexico City for Michoacán, hoping to stay out of sight until the union’s defense team could file for protection. The union’s enemies knew, as did I, that Juan was one of the most valuable members of the executive committee. I’d known him for over twenty years at this point. He was a kind man with a white bear
d. Many years before, my father had designated him as the committee’s delegate for the state of Sonora, a position he retained after I was elected. During my first four years as general secretary, I had made many trips to Sonora and seen Juan in action as delegate. On one occasion, we had organized a strike in La Caridad outside Nacozari, but some of the workers were more obedient to Grupo México than to their own interests, and the company was starting to make threats about calling in the army to evict the strikers. In this highly tense situation, I saw Juan’s ability to lead firsthand; he spoke to the workers and to company officials with equal amounts of conviction and without any fear. He refused to let anyone intimidate him or corrupt him, though many tried. Juan called for solidarity from every worker at La Caridad, asking in strong, eloquent language for their commitment to the cause of Los Mineros. In short, Juan was one of the pillars of the union’s executive committee, and that made him a prime target of the PGR.

  It didn’t take long for federal forces to find him in Michoacán, as they’d been ordered to do by Gómez Mont. On the afternoon of December 3, Juan was playing soccer with some union colleagues near his home. Suddenly a group of policemen interrupted the game and seized him on the field. He’d been easy to spot: large letters on his jersey read “LOS MINEROS.” Though he was innocent of any crime, it would be Juan’s last day of freedom for two years, two months, and twenty days. He was promptly taken to Mexico City’s North Prison and locked up with no bail set. He was now officially a political prisoner of Felipe Calderón.

  The very next day, they nabbed another union member who was key to us at that time. This time it was Carlos Pavón, executive committee member and the union’s secretary of political affairs. Pavón hadn’t been named in Morales’s case, but Alonso Ancira had stepped in with a completely new charge intended to further confuse the situation and create more internal divisions in Los Mineros. Weeks before Pavón’s arrest, Ancira had filed a complaint against him, Juan Linares, and executive committee member José Barajas, who had served as secretary treasurer since May 2006 and was also charged along with Juan and me in the federal fraud case. Ancira’s charges were filed in the state of Coahuila, and a judge in the town of Monclova—who happened to be a friend of Ancira’s—issued an arrest warrant for the three men.