Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  Next Acosta became a mercenary lawyer for Grupo México—though to best serve their purposes, he acted as if he were an independent attorney. Since early 2007, just after his dismissal from Calderón’s cabinet, Acosta had served Grupo México. The company had recruited him specifically to take on the case of Morales, Castilleja, and Perales and lead the charge in the case against me and my colleagues. Though judges had blocked arrest warrant after arrest warrant, Acosta kept on pushing. It should have been obvious that Germán Larrea was footing the bill for his fees; Morales and the others never could have afforded this lawyer and a drawn-out legal battle on their own salaries. Acosta’s services would have cost many times more than the three accusers’ annual pay combined. (The protracted legal battle was a financial drain on the union, too, of course—one of the most important lawyers from Grupo México, Salvador Rocha, approached Marco del Toro in a restaurant and cynically said, “Keep filing those amparos, Marco. You’re making me rich!”)

  In every media appearance, Agustín Acosta behaved like a Grupo México spokesperson, publicly insulting the union’s executive committee as though he himself were a party in the conflict. He acted as if he were defending thousands of righteously angry miners rather than three tools of a morally bankrupt corporation. Acosta, through Grupo México, also enjoyed cozy relationships with many judges, court officials, and the PGR, and he often got word of resolutions in the case before they were officially announced. He would often share verdicts with reporters before they were formally issued—at a time when only the judge himself could have legally known the outcome. When making these “predictions” to the media, he acted as though he were some sort of soothsayer.

  During Linares’s trial, Acosta didn’t make a single move without consulting Grupo México’s primary legal firm: Zinser, Esponda, and Gómez Mont. Acosta constantly denied any connection to the firm, but the truth proved difficult to hide. One of the younger attorneys at that firm, a man named Roberto García, was given the assignment of coaching Acosta through the Linares case. García would show up at every one of the hearings in the Linares case and sit very near the front. Naturally, the judge did not allow García to participate, since he was not a party in the trial and was not representing anyone involved. Yet at almost every public hearing, there he was, sitting in right at the front of the courtroom. Marco del Toro, fully aware of the relationship between García and Acosta, would each time ask the judge to have him move further to the back, declaring that García had been sent by Grupo México to support Acosta. After each time this happened, García would move to the back of the room but then slowly and surreptitiously make his way back up to the front, closer to Acosta, as the day progressed.

  One day, Marco turned around during a hearing to see García handing Acosta a small yellow slip of paper. Marco immediately shouted for the judge’s attention. Judge Silvia Carrasco, like a schoolteacher reprimanding children for passing notes, ordered that Acosta hand over the paper. Clearly embarrassed, Acosta obeyed. It turned out to be a Post-it, on which García had written a series of questions for Acosta to ask the person being cross-examined that day. At Marco’s request, the court certified that this transaction between García and Acosta had occurred, and the Post-it was added to the case file as evidence. There it remains as irrefutable proof that Grupo México is the driving force behind the persecution of Juan Linares, and by extension, all of Los Mineros.

  Over the course of Linares’s defense, the judge heard many statements that confirmed Juan’s innocence. The executives of Scotiabank themselves—the former trustees of the Mining Trust—were once again very clear in saying that the union’s finances had been managed honestly, and the same was said by accounting experts, both the officially appointed ones and the one acting on behalf of the defense.

  But there was one witness Marco wanted above all others. There was one person who deeply understood the conflict that had led to Juan’s arrest, a man who had been involved for decades, and who had been instrumental in setting up the very Mining Trust that was being disputed. More than anything, Marco del Toro wanted to get Germán Larrea in the courtroom. On January 9, 2009, before Judge Trujillo had taken over the case from Judge Carrasco, Marco entered testimony from Germán Feliciano Larrea and his brother Genaro as evidence in the case. (Genaro has held several top positions within Grupo México and was familiar with the case as well.) This move on Marco’s part meant that the two Larrea brothers were going to be required to make a formal declaration about the circumstances behind the fraud accusation—specifically against Linares, but they were the same charges as those against me and the others. We were extremely curious about what Larrea would say under Marco’s cross-examination, since Germán himself had in 1990 signed a document clearly stating that the $55 million was for the union, not for the individual workers (and that distinction was the basis of Morales’s claim). Calling Germán and Genaro as witnesses was a simple development, but it would change the course of the entire trial.

  As soon as he heard he was going to be summoned to testify before Judge Trujillo, Germán Larrea told his counselors to prevent his appearance at all costs. He is a famously secretive man who has never given an interview and rarely appears at public social events. Indeed, few people had even seen a picture of him until the Miners’ Union obtained one (we would later legally acquire a copy of his driver’s license and passport) and distributed it. Though Larrea is listed as the second-wealthiest person in Mexico, he lives such a hermetic, introverted, anonymous life that taking pictures of or with him is strictly prohibited. Nowhere—on the Internet or in any of the company’s materials—are there photographs of him.

  On January 14, the court sent a clerk to Grupo México’s headquarters in Mexico City to deliver the official legal summons. The clerk was received at the building by a secretary, who said that the Larreas did indeed work on the fourth floor. She told the clerk that neither man was there at the moment, but that she would deliver the documents to them when they returned. Two days later, however, she sent the summons back to the court with a note claiming that the Larreas did not in fact work at the building in question. As we expected, Germán wasn’t going to make this easy.

  About a month later, Marco del Toro had done some research into the woman who’d received the clerk. Her name was Marisol Barragán, and not only did she work for Grupo México, but she was actually one of the company’s internal lawyers. Marco petitioned the judge to summon her to the court and, unlike her bosses, she did appear. However, under cross-examination, she refused to cooperate and wouldn’t explain why she had covered for the brothers Germán and Genaro. Finally, Marco stood up and declared to the judge that Barragán was lying to the court. That was a crime, Marco announced, so he would be pressing charges against her. Barragán’s face went white as a sheet, and she reluctantly admitted that she did in fact serve as internal counsel for Grupo México.

  We’d caught Barragán in a lie, but we still didn’t have the brothers. The two of them would entirely disregard a series of judicial orders over the following months, flouting the law shamelessly. When Germán was summoned to appear in U.S. courts, as he had been recently in a case in Texas involving Grupo México subsidiary ASARCO, he did obey the judge’s order to appear. But in Mexico, Germán thought he could get away with nearly anything.

  Throughout our attempts to get Larrea into court, the PGR itself got involved. Bizarrely, its efforts were not on behalf of the court but on behalf of the resisting witnesses. Rather than ensuring Juan Linares’s right to a fair trial, the attorney general’s office filed a series of amparos against the admission of the Larreas’ testimony in the case. Not once did it explain what conceivable reason it had for such an action. (Of course, we knew the real story—that the PGR was, as usual, defending powerful business interests.)

  Fortunately, the PGR’s attempts to have Larrea’s testimony thrown out were denied, and the Sixth Unitary Court in Criminal Matters of the First Circuit confirmed our right to interrogate the L
arreas. But the brothers still wouldn’t cooperate. On a total of nineteen occasions, they failed to comply with the court summons.

  The Larreas’ lawyers at Zinser, Esponda, and Gómez Mont had also gotten involved; they too had begun filing amparos against the summons. These lawyers used every legal ruse they could think of to keep the brothers out of court, but Marco argued successfully against them, and amparo was denied. The Larreas were now racking up fines for their refusal to appear, and by March, Marco requested that the court order a three-day arrest of both brothers.

  On March 24, 2009, the newspaper Milenio published the following story:

  The First District Court in Federal Criminal Procedures ordered the administrative arrest for 36 hours of the owner of Grupo México, Germán Larrea Mota Velasco, and of the [supposed] former union leader, Elías Morales Chávez, due to being in contempt of a judicial order.

  According to Marco Antonio del Toro, legal representative of the Miners’ Union, the judge ordered that both men present themselves to give testimony in regards to the mining trust, and the alleged misuse of $55 million at the North Prison of Mexico City, Federal District.

  “Employees of Grupo México have attempted to hide Germán Larrea, and this has been proven before the Federal Court, and it is for such reason that we requested he be taken by the Federal Police and compelled to appear before the court,” he stated.

  As soon as the story ran, Agustín Acosta began calling the paper and denying what had been stated in Milenio, again acting as if he were a Grupo México spokesperson. The journalist who wrote the story, Blanca Valadez, got in touch with Marco del Toro—she was concerned she may have inadvertently published something inaccurate in her article. Carlos Marín, editorial director of Grupo Milenio, had apparently scolded her about the story, since he had received many phone calls, from Acosta and others, claiming that there was no arrest warrant for Germán Larrea. Marco assured her that indeed there was, and Valadez asked him if he could provide proof that backed up her story.

  Marco promptly sent her a copy of the judicial decision, which explicitly confirmed the truth of the article she’d written. Seeing the proof, both Marín and Valadez thanked us for setting the record clear, relieved that the paper had not published any false information.

  Yet, on the following day, Milenio published another story about the Larrea summons that, strangely, hardly mentioned the document we’d sent them. Instead, the article dedicates most of its space to Acosta and is presented with a headline that quotes his blatant lie: “Larrea ‘did not receive an arrest warrant.’”

  Valadez writes in the second article:

  Attorney Agustín Acosta denied that there was any warning and even less an administrative arrest warrant for 36 hours against the businessman and owner of Grupo México, Germán Larrea Mota Velasco, as the Miners’ Union stated last Monday.

  Acosta said that Silvia Carrasco, judge of the First District Court in Federal Criminal Matters, only issued a summons and that this procedure had been definitively suspended due to the fact that the Federal Judicial Council had determined to send the entire file regarding the investigation into the alleged embezzlement of $55 million to Judge José Miguel Trujillo Salcedo.

  Acosta added that Judge Trujillo, to whose docket the file was sent, said that he was “prevented by law from having knowledge of the case and had suspended all hearings, everything. There are no summons, well, there are even no copies. The procedure is suspended.”

  The new judge declared himself legally incapacitated to handle the case, as he had previously decided on some amparos, precisely, from persons of the Miners’ Union.

  Therefore, the attorney indicated, there is no summons and no judicial decision issued against Germán Larrea.

  However, Marco Antonio del Toro, attorney of Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, leader of the Miners’ Union, presented as evidence file 140/2008, which orders an arrest due to the fact that the court had been unable to successfully summon the men.

  This is a shocking example of how wealthy individuals can directly sway the supposedly unbiased press. Apparently a few phone calls from Grupo México’s people were sufficient to relegate our hard evidence to the tail end of the article. To blur the truth, they gave us only a small paragraph and didn’t even clearly explain the incontrovertible proof we supplied. This was on top of the fact that Acosta once again had no reason to defend Larrea, since he stated repeatedly that Larrea and Grupo México were not his clients and were not involved in his efforts on behalf of Morales, Castilleja, and Perales. All throughout this drama, we released press releases about Germán Larrea’s unconscionable avoidance, doing our best to present the truth that wasn’t being shown in the mainstream media.

  Nearly six months after our original request for the Larreas’ testimony, we still hadn’t laid eyes on Germán or his brother. In accordance with the court’s ruling that we had a right to such testimony, the PGR was required to make every effort to produce these witnesses. In the fulfillment of that task, it should have made full use of the Agencia Federal de Investigacion (AFI)—a federal agency similar to the FBI—over which the PGR exerts control. Yet given the PGR’s attitude on the matter thus far, we doubted they were trying very hard to bring Germán and Genaro in.

  In mid-June, AFI agent Mario Martínez was brought into court to explain his agency’s efforts to find and arrest the brothers. After hearing about the completely ineffective methods employed by the AFI thus far, Judge Trujillo ruled that the agency had not done professional work. Their attempts were half-baked and not serious. Before Martínez left the courtroom, he was ordered to bring in both Larreas to be cross-examined by July 27, 2009. The judge told him that this time he needed to use professionals to do it and to use local authorities as necessary. He made it clear that there would be no excuses for not finding them by the deadline. That order was given on June 15, giving the AFI forty-three days to investigate the Larreas’ whereabouts and bring them in.

  When July 27 rolled around, the judge was presented not with the Larreas but with a document signed by two AFI agents from the judicial-orders unit and their subcommander. This report was a chronicle of laziness and stupidity that was hard to take seriously. Over the previous months, Marco and his team had requested possible addresses for the Larreas from every state in the country; we had gathered data from the Internet; we had even obtained copies of both men’s passports and gotten confirmation of a good address from Grupo México CEO Xavier García de Quevedo. There was no shortage of information. Yet the two AFI agents assigned to the case had massively bungled their task—probably on orders from above.

  First, the document stated that the PGR had located an address in its database registered as belonging to Genaro Larrea. The agents reported that they undertook surveillance of the building every day between June 16 and June 22 and never once saw either of the Larreas. Then, on June 23, they interrogated a person who came in and out of the building frequently. This person ended up being an attorney who was the owner of the building, which is used as offices for his practice. In other words, it took these brilliant agents a full eight days to realize that the building was not a home but the offices of a law firm.

  After this failed attempt, the agents continued their search at another address in the database, this time for an apartment in a twelve-story building in another part of Mexico City. On June 29, they began surveillance of the complex and continued it until July 6. Again, there was no sign of either Larrea brother. On July 7, they spoke with the receptionist at the front desk of the apartment building, who informed them that for the past five years unit 1202 had been inhabited by a person who rented the apartment from Germán Larrea, and that Larrea lived in the United States. The agents knocked on the door of unit 1202 repeatedly to confirm the story, but there was no response. The agents had spent another eight days to find out that Larrea had not lived in the building for five years.

  Their next stop was at an address in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, where they
interrogated the receptionist of a third address connected to the Larreas. This person told them that the building did indeed belong to Grupo México but had been vacated over a year before. The receptionist also said that he thought the Larrea brothers now lived in the United States.

  Next, the AFI agents were off to the Mexico City airport to see if they could find evidence of either Larrea leaving the country. They claim to have spoken with representatives from nine different airlines, all of whom denied them the information they were looking for. They had to have known this would happen going in; such information could have been given to a public prosecutor, perhaps, but certainly not an investigating agent. The agents make no mention of the time periods of the records they asked for or why they had requested this data only verbally. They also fail to address why they asked only nine airlines of the twenty-four that operate at the airport, or why those nine were chosen.

  The final conclusion of the two agents was so stupid that there was no doubt they were trying to mislead us and waste our time. “There’s a chance that the way to find the Larreas,” the report stated, “is to travel to Phoenix, Arizona.” No reason was given for why the Larreas might be in Phoenix. We knew that the offices of Asarco, a copper-mining company controlled by Grupo México, are located in Arizona, but it’s unlikely the agents even knew that much—they were likely just told what to say.