Collapse of Dignity

by Napoleon Gomez

  This pathetic, scattershot investigation confirmed to us that the PGR was again covering for Grupo México and making a mockery of the court. Our legal team asked to interrogate the AFI agents about the deficient investigation they undertook. Our request was denied.

  After the Larreas had missed their final deadline twenty times, Judge Trujillo issued a writ to the attorneys of both sides, asking for their formal responses to the AFI’s failed search. Agustín Acosta called up Marco to ask if he’d received the writ, and Marco told him yes. Acosta then asked Marco to email over his response. Marco agreed and asked Acosta to send his as well. Marco received a rather routine statement and forwarded it on to my son, who was closely following the case.

  Shortly thereafter, Marco got a reply from Alejandro. “Did you see the email below?” my son asked. Scrolling down, Marco now saw that when Acosta had forwarded his response to the judge’s writ, he had also included several emails below it, one of which was to Roberto García, one of the attorneys of Grupo México. From the email chain, Marco saw that Acosta had also sent his response to the writ to García, and García had given him feedback and made a few changes. When García emailed it back, he copied Armando Ortega, legal director for Grupo México. So much for Acosta being totally independent of the company’s legal team.

  Here is the email from García that Acosta accidentally sent to us:

  From: Roberto García González

  Sent on: Friday, July 31, 2009 07:04 p.m.

  To: Armando Ortega; Agustín Acosta

  Subject: GM – COMMENTS REPORT AFI

  Thank you, Agustín, I made a couple of suggestions. We shall see what they think about them.

  I understand that our opportunity to comment on their remarks ends next Tuesday. The public prosecutor asked me to do it on Tuesday and said that he preferred to make his on Monday.

  I am still wondering whether we should include the question regarding the legal assistance, considering the previous criticisms that have been made implying that you are just another lawyer for the witness.

  We have from now until Tuesday. Have a good weekend.

  Regards,

  RG

  First of all, this email further proves that Acosta takes his orders from Grupo México and its lawyers. But it also reveals the relationship between García and the public prosecutor from the PGR. Because the company has no part in the matter—the Larreas were called as witnesses only—its lawyers have no right to communicate with the PGR’s office about the case. In the last part of the email, García is doubtful about whether Acosta should intervene on the matter of the Larreas’ testimony, considering that Marco was constantly criticizing him for acting as just another defense attorney for the Larreas (which he, in fact, is). Acosta’s role has always been that of Larrea’s defender. We always knew it, but the email proved it irrefutably.

  A while after the failed AFI search and after they had escaped testifying in court close to twenty times, we finally got word that Genaro Larrea had surfaced and would appear in court. Sure enough, he showed up at the North Prison courthouse with a whole battalion of lawyers headed by Roberto García (who now, for once, had an actual reason to be present in the hearing). Once Genaro and his team had arrived, Marco del Toro stood and made an announcement that stunned everyone: “We’re not going to cross-examine Mr. Genaro Larrea.” The room erupted in gasps and shouts. “We asked for testimony from both brothers,” Marco argued. “If I cross-examine this man, he will immediately run to his brother and tell him all the questions he will be asked. We’re not going to cross-examine him!” Marco had a point, and his argument held up in front of the judge. Germán was the one we really needed to talk to, and we wouldn’t accept just his brother. As Genaro left the courthouse surrounded by his legal team, he shook his head and said ruefully, “I don’t understand Mexico.”

  Soon after all this, Judge Trujillo, despite issuing the arrest warrant for the Larrea brothers in the first place—and notwithstanding their lack of compliance with such order—reduced their penalty from a three-day arrest to a fine. In other words, Trujillo was refusing to make any further move to physically take the brothers into custody to appear in Linares’s trial. It was a decision that blatantly favored the plaintiffs and put Juan Linares at a severe disadvantage. In October 2010, based on this biased action, we filed a criminal complaint against Judge Trujillo for crimes against the administration of justice.

  Judge Trujillo immediately recused himself from the case. In order to justify dropping Linares’s case from his docket, he presented a copy of the criminal complaint we filed, even though under the law he should not have had access to the document. As Judge Trujillo should well know, the secrecy of every criminal investigation is crucial, and his knowledge of our filing constituted a crime. Nonetheless, he argued that due to the complaint, he now felt enmity against Juan Linares and should not preside in the case. Juan would just have to wait, unjustly imprisoned, while the case was transferred to a different judge.

  SEVENTEEN

  A NEW CASUALTY

  He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

  —BEN JONSON

  Grupo Peñoles was perhaps the only one of the country’s metal companies that did not directly participate in the shady privatization boom of the 1980s and ’90s. However, Peñoles does have a history of staunchly opposing unionism. In 2009, as we fought against the arrest warrants for me, Linares, and the others, the company’s current president, Alberto Bailleres, joined in the outright aggression against the Miners’ Union. He took up Carlos Pavón as his pawn, using him much as Germán Larrea was using Elías Morales.

  Bailleres’s father, Raul, hadn’t gotten Grupo Peñoles off to a good start. The late Jorge Leipen Garay—director of Sidermex, the government holding company that had controlled several companies, including Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA), before privatization—told me on a trip to Vancouver about Raul’s shady dealings. According to Leipen Garay, the elder Bailleres had made his fortune shortly before and during the global conflagration of World War II. Although Mexico was aligned with the Allies, Raul mined mercury in Huitzuco, Guerrero, and secretly sold it to the Japanese, who used it to make powerful chemical weapons for the Axis powers. The mercury was transported to the port of Acapulco in small to medium-size trucks and then carried by boat fifteen or twenty miles offshore. There, Japanese ships would be waiting to purchase the mercury at dramatically inflated prices. Thanks to Raul Bailleres’s clandestine trafficking, the Axis powers got their hands on precious—and dangerous—Mexican resources. Leipen Garay also gave me a copy of Juan Alberto Cedillo’s The Nazis in Mexico, and although the book doesn’t name Raul Bailleres specifically, it gives a general picture of how he and other Nazi sympathizers in the mining and steel sector created a whole line of business selling minerals to Mexico’s enemies.

  According to Leipen, Raul’s son Alberto inherited his father’s habit of disloyalty. Many Mexican businessmen have repeated one particular story of his unethical business dealings. It is said that Alberto was once dining with his friend Carlos Trouyet, the most prominent Mexican businessman of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, when Trouyet told him that he planned to buy El Palacio de Hierro, a chain of department stores, from García Cisneros Group, a large Spanish holding company. Bailleres, upon learning of his friend’s intent to purchase the chain, immediately sent one of his partners to Spain to meet with the García Cisneros Group, instructing him to offer slightly more money than Trouyet had. Bailleres, taking advantage of his friend’s confidence, won the department store chain for himself.

  After Carlos Pavón was released from prison and made off with the union’s bail money, Alberto Bailleres used the traitor to actively promote dissidence among the union’s members. Bailleres set up the now openly treacherous Pavón in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, just southeast of the striking workers at Grupo México’s mine in Sombrerete. The Fresnillo worksite, where Section 62 of the Miners’ Union was set up, boasted the largest silver m
ine in the country, run by Grupo Peñoles subsidiary Fresnillo PLC. The workers at the site had temporarily suspended work when they heard news of the unlawful arrests of Pavón and Linares back in December 2008. Now the man they had gone on strike for had returned, but he was singing a new song. He now took every chance to appear in the media and slander my name and disparage Los Mineros.

  Pavón quickly set about establishing a useless company union in Fresnillo at the behest of Grupo Peñoles and Calderón’s labor department. To aid him in this villainous effort, Grupo Peñoles did its best to divide the forces loyal to the Miners’ Union at the silver mine; the company handed out illicit money to workers and threatened them with violence and job termination if they didn’t side with Pavón.

  The workers of Union Section 62 and the leaders of the national union were outraged by these threats and bribes, though a minority, including local head David Navarro, caved in to the pressure and sided with Pavón’s new company union. In response, a group of loyal union members from around the country requested a meeting on June 10, 2009, to reveal Pavón and the other traitors at Fresnillo as violators of the union’s unity and democracy. At the meeting, they hoped to reestablish the section’s solidarity with the executive committee of Los Mineros and show that Pavón was a tool of Bailleres.

  Grupo Peñoles’s reaction to this attempt at peaceful dialogue inside the union was to put together a group of armed paramilitaries backed by a gang of civilian drug addicts and thugs to suppress the workers loyal to Los Mineros. Led by Pavón, Pavón’s brother Héctor, and David Navarro, these attack forces were sent to meet the group that had traveled to the Fresnillo mine to discuss Pavón’s new union. At 7:00 a.m. on June 10, the armed men began a surprise attack in a parking lot outside the mine.

  To disguise the attack, the assailants used posts, baseball bats, stones, and metal tubes to beat the Miners’ Union members—high-powered firearms would have indicated federal police and the army, which would have led observers back to the true source of the aggression: the government and Grupo Peñoles. The attackers did have firearms, but they simply flashed them and shot them off into the air to intimidate the union members.

  During this aggression, the buses that brought the union members to Fresnillo were burned, and the representatives of Los Mineros were savagely assaulted. Ten union members received severe injuries, and our colleague Juventino Flores Salas was beaten on the head by the men hired by Grupo Peñoles so badly that he died at the scene. Another man, Alejandro Vega Morales, was stuck so violently that he today still suffers from brain damage. With this terror and abuse, the leaders of Grupo Peñoles warned Los Mineros that coming back to the silver mine at Fresnillo would be a bad idea.

  It was clear to everyone present that this aggression was premeditated and that the assault groups had been prepared inside the company: the pipes and sticks with which Pavón’s supporters were armed were all identical, and the attack was too coordinated to be spontaneous. And as we tried in the days and weeks following the attack to prosecute those responsible for the death of Juventino Flores, it also became clear that, once again, this aggression was fully supported by the government.

  When they heard about the death caused by Pavón and his cronies, union sections throughout the county protested loudly. The members of the national executive committee went straight to Amalia García Medina, governor of the state of Zacatecas, to demand the prosecution of those responsible for this aggression, with criminal charges brought against the men who did the killing. García, a member of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and thus presumably a leftist, began an investigation at the insistence of our workers, calling witnesses to present testimony and evidence in order to assign criminal responsibility for the murder. And there was plenty of evidence that pointed to the responsible parties, including statements from eyewitnesses, expert testimony, photographs, and news accounts. At least initially, Governor García seemed committed to completing an investigation so that, as the governor said, “justice will fall where it may.”

  But García broke her word and did absolutely nothing to bring Juventino’s killers to justice. Months passed, with no action being taken against Pavón and the other traitors. By the fall of 2009, it had been several months since the attack, and we were becoming impatient. In a meeting of delegates from all the union sections in the country, both the executive committee and the union’s Safety and Justice Council agreed that a delegation of union members would travel to Zacatecas’s capital city (also called Zacatecas) to demand that the state government meet its responsibility to apply justice.

  On November 25, 2009, more than four hundred workers began a bus trip to protest the aggression against Los Mineros and the death of Juventino Salas. When they reached the border of the city of Zacatecas, however, they were intercepted by a heavily armed group of federal and state police who told them they could not enter. The union members were treated like criminals who were on a mission to assault the city, not like workers exercising their constitutional right to free association and freedom of movement.

  For hours, the authorities blocked the exits from the buses and would not allow anyone off, denying the riders food, water, and the ability to relieve themselves. It was an outright act of repression; photographs taken that day have been seen throughout the country and around the world. Only after fifteen miserable hours would the supposedly leftist governor send word that the delegates were allowed to enter the city, but only on the condition that they leave Zacatecas the following day. The next day, the delegates met some of their colleagues who were demonstrating in the main plaza outside the state capitol, increasing the size and visibility of the protest significantly.

  I personally spoke with Governor García Medina a couple of times after the outrageous mistreatment of the union members who were seeking justice for Juventino. I demanded justice and respectful treatment of our colleagues. I told her that we were not going to allow such shameful repression to occur with impunity. She agreed with me, in word anyway, that justice would prevail, but said that she did not want any violence. I assured her that our colleagues were on a mission of peace, expressing solidarity with the victims of the June 10 attack. She again promised to abide by the law and apply justice.

  But yet again, the governor of Zacatecas did not honor any of her promises or meet any of the dates agreed upon to arrive at a resolution against the aggressors. There was no justice. And so our worker colleagues, once they were in the main plaza, decided to stay there in a permanent sit-in, during which they held daily demonstrations, distributed leaflets, denounced the arbitrary acts committed against the colleagues under attack, and decried the complicity of the government of Zacatecas with Grupo Peñoles.

  The mineworkers stayed for fifteen days in Zacatecas, demonstrating peacefully. Since it was close to Christmas, the governor asked them if they could end the sit-in, promising that before Christmas justice would be done. The members of the executive committee trusted her word and agreed to vacate the portion of the plaza the demonstrators had occupied. The governor reassured us that with this action they were agreeing to her offer and that there would be legal measures before the holiday.

  Christmas went by and nothing happened. New Year’s passed with similar results. In the first week of 2010, the government of Zacatecas, through a judge, decided to deny the arrest orders that had already been issued based on the complaint against Carlos Pavón, his brother Héctor, and David Navarro, as well as seven more thugs responsible for the killing of Juventino Flores.

  The judge also denied that there were material damages, even though the evidence presented in videos, photographs, and oral and written testimony indicated the contrary. Evidently Governor García was afraid of angering Alberto Bailleres and decided to protect these criminal thugs from the law. In doing so, she proved herself to be among several Mexican governors who refused to show any decency in the face of the attacks on the Miners’ Union. Had these governors had the strength and integrity to stan
d up to the aggressors, much of the repression we experienced would not have been possible.

  The situation at the Fresnillo silver mine, which continued under Pavón’s gangs and his puppet union, deteriorated from there. The work site, without a powerful union to protect it, became something equal to or worse than a concentration camp. Jaime Lomelín, CEO of Grupo Peñoles subsidiary Fresnillo PLC, oversaw an operation marked by virtual slavery and frequent instances of torture, with full support of the “new union.” In this mine, they punished the noncompliant by exposing them naked to the inclement cold of the nights and forcing them on their knees in front of their comrades as a “lesson” for their rebellion. In 2011, the Miners’ Union would file an official complaint regarding the degraded state of the Fresnillo mine, but it would pass to federal and state authorities without prompting a response of any kind.

  Although Juan Linares remained unjustly jailed, Carlos Pavón’s betrayal stung, and Grupo México, Grupo Peñoles, and Altos Hornos de México continued their aggression, the Miners’ Union kept up negotiations with the other seventy companies with which it had contracts, obtaining the highest wage increases in the entire country, with 14 percent raises per year for its workers on average. (In 2012, we would receive increases at this level for the seventh consecutive year.) We also kept up the centerpiece of our fight against corporate corruption and governmental complicity: the ongoing strike at the open copper pit in Cananea. At this mine—the birthplace of the modern Mexican labor movement and the place where our forebears in 1906 had fought to establish the eight-hour day, to defend respect for collective bargaining agreements, and to stop the exploitation of children in the mines—the majority of workers continued their work stoppage faithfully, even in the face of continued belligerence from Grupo México and continuing declarations from the JFCA that the strike was illegal.