From the day we declared the strike, on July 30, 2007, everything about it was legal. When unionized workers begin negotiations with any company, they draft a list of demands. That document always states that, according to the collective bargaining agreement, the workers are entitled to strike if an agreement isn’t reached by a certain date. If the date arrives and the company has refused to negotiate, we file the strike with the JFCA. We followed the rules and had extremely good reason to strike at Cananea. It was, in the words of many miners, a “Pasta de Conchos waiting to happen.”
Regardless of our adherence to procedure, Grupo México did everything it could to have the strike declared illegal. It provided the JFCA with false documents claiming that we hadn’t started the strike on time. According to Mexican labor law, strikes must start at the declared time, and a public notary must observe and record this. We had followed this policy precisely, but the company simply lied to the labor court and said we hadn’t. We also ran into complications because of my lack of toma de nota. After Lozano denied me recognition in June 2008, Grupo México could easily criticize the strike’s legitimacy by saying that I had no legal authority to approve it. To get around this, we always had one of our labor lawyers or an executive committee member who did have toma de nota sign the documents that called for the strike. Loyal union members Javier Zuñiga and Sergio Beltrán did have official recognition, so they handled a lot of the Cananea paperwork.
Every time Grupo México presented false evidence, the JFCA would buy the company’s lies and declare the strike illegal. Just as quickly, our lawyers would file amparo against the decision. On and on it went.
In January 2008, federal forces took over the mine and tried to evict the Cananea miners by force, but we quickly filed an amparo and were allowed to stay while the outcome was decided; the government had to withdraw its troops. But a few months later, in May 2008, as the strike continued, Grupo México representatives violated the collective bargaining agreement with the union by calling a meeting with the personnel of the Ronquillo hospital and announcing that the facility would be closed, meaning that the community would lose its only remaining healthcare facility available to the workers of Cananea. (Grupo México had shut down the union-run Workers’ Clinic in the 1990s—unilaterally, without the union’s approval.) The move left ten thousand miners and family members without medical care. Many of them suffered from severe sickness and disability, including cancer and silicosis, much of it directly related to their work in the poorly maintained copper mine. Under their collective bargaining agreements with the company, the union’s members were entitled to medical care as a condition of their employment. Grupo México didn’t care. The company refused to transport the sick—even those in need of dialysis—to the nearest hospital, in Hermosillo, several hours away. Patients in need of immediate care were forced to hitchhike. It was yet another burden piled on the backs of the workers of Cananea and their families, who were already suffering from the company’s decision to cut gas, electricity, education, and potable water services.
Nevertheless, in early July we had won a court ruling that officially reversed the JFCA’s second denial of the strike. Grupo México wasn’t about to let that stand, though. On July 30, 2008, on the one-year anniversary of the strike’s declaration, the company appealed the court’s decision, and two months later, the Sixth Collegiate Tribunal in Labor Matters of the First Circuit—led by Judges Genaro Rivera, Carolina Pichardo, and Marco Antonio Bello—revoked the decision issued by the Fourth District Judge and provided amparo to the company. Now, the JFCA would be required to hear Grupo México’s arguments against the strike for a third time. After a hearing, the JFCA, unbelievably, declared the strike nonexistent for the third time. In the ensuing months, we went through the now-familiar process: We appealed for amparo and were granted it by the courts in January 2009. The JFCA’s third attempt to end the strike was ruled without force.
The union’s labor attorneys, led by Nestor and Carlos de Buen, had won each of these trials in a systematic manner, showing each time that the strike was indeed both warranted and legal. Despite Germán Larrea’s powerful friends in the departments of labor and the economy, he was unable to completely manipulate the legal system and win control of Cananea. The judges consistently saw through the manipulations of Larrea and his lawyers. De Buen had given the company’s lawyers a lesson in how to practice law.
Grupo México had now run out of pretexts to declare the strike illegitimate. Germán Larrea, however, is a man of perverse creativity. With the help of his “cat” Lozano Alarcón in the labor department, he concocted a new strategy. In March of 2009, the company requested that Mexico’s General Mines Director, from the department of the economy, inspect the Cananea facilities. The company claimed that there was “destruction, deterioration, robbery, and vandalism in the facilities and special equipments of the mine, of such dimensions, that they made its functioning impossible.” According to the company, it was the workers who had done all this damage during the strike, even though we never destroyed any company property; it was the company’s own negligence that had left the facilities in such a sorry state. Nevertheless, Grupo México now argued that this damage constituted a force majeure—the contractual clause that would have freed the company from liability in the case of a weather disaster, war, flood, or earthquake. Based on this, the company said, sarcastically, that after almost three years of the workers’ legal strike, it could no longer continue production in the copper mine. The employment agreement with the miners, they argued, would therefore have to be canceled.
The simple fact is that under the federal labor law, force majeure does not apply when a company has let its own greed and neglect deteriorate an operation. It was a fraudulent, unprecedented move, concocted merely to end the strike. Now that the courts had upheld the strike three times, it was their only recourse.
The General Mines Director, a person I had never met or had contact with, complied with Grupo México’s request and ordered the inspection of the Cananea facilities. Then, on March 20, 2009, he hurriedly issued a resolution stating that, based on reports from the inspectors and statements and documents from Grupo México, he concluded that the damage to the facility had indeed prevented Grupo México from carrying out the mining concession granted to them at Cananea. It was a fabrication, though; the inspections never happened. The resolution claimed that the damage to the facility and its equipment was “of such a serious nature that it makes it impossible to undertake the work in the terms set forth in the Mining Act.” He concluded that the damage was caused by “third parties,” which supposedly constituted force majeure according to Article 70, section IV, of the Regulation to the Mining Act. Not only does Article 70 not apply to the situation at Cananea, but the General Mines Director’s findings were a total fabrication. All the paperwork relating to the supposed inspection had been prepared in Grupo México’s offices.
That same day, Grupo México initiated a special proceeding before the JFCA in order to request termination of the employment relationship with Los Mineros and all its members at Cananea based on force majeure. After a hearing in which the company repeated its false claim that the workers had vandalized and destroyed the mine’s equipment and facilities, the court stated that the result of this evidence would be the immediate termination of the union’s labor contracts. In one fell swoop, the workers were fired, and Grupo México began gathering workers who were not “contaminated” by unionism. Right away, the company began hiring hundreds of contract workers from different regions of the country, even from several Central American countries, all of whom lacked sufficient training, and started up production with them. So much for Grupo México’s claim that the mine was inoperable. As usual, the company didn’t show any shame about exposing its own deceit. (The company had performed a similar maneuver as it fought the strike in Taxco: Larrea presented the Mexican Stock Exchange with reports saying that the silver mine had proven mineral reserves for forty years, bu
t in the labor courts, he was simultaneously claiming that the reserves had been exhausted and that he would therefore have to terminate the miners’ employment agreements.)
The nine hundred Cananea miners had been displaced, but they were determined to continue the strike. Following the JFCA’s approval of the termination, we filed an amparo to have the workers reinstated. Unfortunately, the case would be held up in the courts for nearly a year. When the Second Collegiate Tribunal finally made its ruling on February 11, 2010, it announced its decision: The judge had taken Grupo México’s side, and we were denied amparo. In the eyes of the court, the workers’ agreement with the company had ended, meaning the strike had ended too.
But we weren’t ready to give up. We appealed the decision to the Supreme Court and got another blow: On March 17, 2010, a year after Grupo México’s dishonest force majeure maneuver, our appeal was denied. It was now looking like Grupo México would bring in federal forces to evict us from Cananea.
Mexico’s Political Coordination Board—a governing body of the Chamber of Deputies—saw that this was a possibility and made an effort to prevent the powder keg of Cananea from exploding. In April, the board formally urged the government to avoid using force to remove the strikers, and it even asked the government to consider ending Grupo México’s concession. The company, the board argued, clearly was incapable of exercising competent stewardship over this resource. The board called for a thirty-day break followed by renewed negotiations between the workers and Grupo México.
Shortly afterward, the International Tribunal on Trade Union Rights completed a yearlong study of the situation at Cananea and announced its opinion. It called into question the court ruling that had approved the termination of the miners’ contracts and noted the government’s pervasive bias toward Grupo México.
We knew, however, that Calderón, Lozano, and Gómez Mont would never listen to such reasoning. The company was loudly complaining about the strike, claiming that the conflict had so far cost the company over $4 billion. Interior Secretary Gómez Mont, in particular, was eager to help his former legal client recoup these costs, and he helped the company organize a forceful attack. On June 6, 2010, nearly four thousand heavily armed forces from the federal government and the state government of Sonora invaded the Cananea mine. They forced workers out of the mine, chased them to the union hall, and then tear-gassed the people who had taken shelter inside, including women and children.
It’s remarkable that no one was killed in the violence. I made a call to our Cananea brothers that day and urged them not to confront their attackers or give in to their provocation, since the miners were outnumbered four to one. But the miners of Cananea did not give up without a fight. They did their best to resist nonviolently, and many were wounded. At the end of the vicious assault, the workers and their families had been terrorized and ejected from the mine facilities. Five miners were badly beaten, and twenty-two miners suspected of being leaders within the union local were arrested. The armed forces were receiving orders from top government officials, including President Calderón himself. They had never obeyed the rule of law, and they clearly lack human principles and morals.
The captured miners were subsequently released in the absence of a legal basis for the charges, although one of them, Martín Fernando Salazar, who at the time was dealing with a family medical situation in Hermosillo, is still detained in a prison in Agua Prieta, Sonora. The company pressed criminal charges against several more.
Following the full Grupo México takeover, the company brought in thousands more scabs and signed them up to a useless company union. The town of Cananea now resembled a military outpost, as hundreds of armed forces stationed themselves around the mine to keep the strikers out.
With Los Mineros out of the mine, Grupo México announced that it would invest $120 million to improve and enlarge the Cananea copper mine, while the state of Sonora would invest $440 million of its own funds in the town of Cananea.
It seemed like a final defeat in our struggle for Cananea, but in no way were we prepared to give up fighting against the abuses of Germán Larrea. The vast majority of union members held firm, refusing any severance pay or offers to come back to their jobs under the company union. On August 11, 2010, two months after the invasion, the Ninth District Judge in Sonora—Víctor Aucencio Romero Hernández—ruled that the strike could continue. Though we had been forced out, our strike was still legally recognized, even if the government wasn’t prepared to enforce the court’s ruling.
In August of 2010, while we were still dealing with the aftermath of the Cananea assault, I got a call from a fellow labor leader in Chile. He told me that an explosion in the San José de Atacama mine, near Copiapó, had trapped thirty-three miners more than 2,300 feet below the surface. No one knew whether they were alive or dead. I immediately expressed the solidarity of Los Mineros, and soon read the reports in the national media. We watched the situation with great concern, finding it nearly impossible not to draw parallels to Pasta de Conchos.
Though Chile also has a conservative government like Mexico’s, there was an intense effort to determine the fate of the trapped miners, and all thirty-three were found alive seventeen days after the rescue began. For more than two months the whole country devoted their faith and resources to saving the miners—including the mineworkers’ unions; the communities and families; the directors of Minera San Esteban Primera, the company that owned the mine; the provincial authorities in Atacama; and even President Sebastian Pinera.
The rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners put into stark relief the enormous guilt that Mexican businessmen and governing politicians bear on their conscience for the industrial homicide that occurred on February 19, 2006, in the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila. Sixty-three miners are today still abandoned at the bottom of the mine, at less than four hundred feet of depth, on land that is smoother than the mountainous, rocky landscape of Chile. In Chile, a concerted effort was sustained for more than two months after the accident, while in Pasta de Conchos Grupo México, directed by Germán Larrea and his accomplice Xavier García de Quevedo, as well as the concealing and enabling government of Vicente Fox, closed the mine and suspended rescue operations just five days after the explosion, condemning to death the miners who might have still been alive.
And the differences continue: In Chile the rescued workers were offered payments on the order of one million dollars each, while in Mexico the relatives from Pasta de Conchos were offered miserly payments equal to only seven thousand dollars for each family of the deceased miners. This was in 2006, a year in which the income of Grupo México was on the unprecedented order of $6 billion.
When twenty-nine workers died in a tragic accident at a coal mine in West Virginia in April 2010, President Barack Obama himself went to the site of the accident on two different occasions. He ordered an investigation into who was at fault for the accident, but he also immediately pushed through reforms aimed at preventing other industrial homicides in the mines throughout the country. In the end, payments of three million dollars were ordered for each family of the miners killed.
The outcomes of these mining tragedies in other countries puts Mexican government leaders and the owners of the mining companies in a very poor light. Neither President Vicente Fox nor Germán Larrea ever visited the relatives, either to express their condolences or to offer technical, financial, or material help that would have enabled the rescue to continue. President Felipe Calderón also has not visited in the more than seven years since the Pasta de Conchos disaster and continues to ignore his responsibility in this matter.
The insensitive and egotistical attitude has continued in Mexico, since Calderón has not taken a single step to rescue the sixty-three bodies that remain abandoned in Pasta de Conchos. He also has done nothing to help the families or to make fair and respectable payments, much less to criminally prosecute those responsible for the catastrophe. Of course, neither Grupo México nor the governments of Fox and Calder�
�n have ever wanted to know the true causes of the explosion, because that would display for all to see the irresponsibility, abuses, and criminal negligence of Larrea, his board of directors, and his management staff, exposing them to criminal prosecution.
Thus, we celebrated the rescue of our mining comrades in Chile with the rest of the world, but not without a heaviness of heart. It was impossible not to speculate what the outcome would have been had the labor department forced Grupo México to carry on its rescue efforts for even as little as seventeen days, rather than the mere five allowed. Because it is a question we will never know the answer to, all we can do is fight tirelessly, day to day, as hard as we can, to bring to justice the criminals responsible for the deaths and to ensure that corporate greed and governmental deceit do not take the lives of any more of our colleagues and friends.
EIGHTEEN
THE TRICK
It is strange how casually the wicked believe everything will turn out well.
—VICTOR HUGO
On September 24, 2009, Felipe Calderón appointed a new attorney general to head up the PGR. His pick was a close friend of his, Arturo Chávez Chávez, a former director of government in Abascal’s interior department. Chávez lacked the ability or experience for the job of attorney general, and he had taken part in authorizing the deployment of armed forces against the striking workers at the Sicartsa mill at Lazaro Cárdenas in 2006. He was also widely criticized in the press for mishandling the investigation of mass murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. A cable leaked by Wikileaks in 2011 would later reveal the United States’ opinion that Chávez’s appointment was “totally unexpected and inexplicable.” To us, the appointment was absurd, but not inexplicable: Chávez was supported by Grupo México. Even though Calderón knew his friend wasn’t qualified for the position of attorney general, the company had forced him to appoint Chávez. As usual, it was as if Grupo México held the president hostage, and it succeeded in getting a new PGR head who would protect its interests.
Collapse of Dignity Page 32
