Collapse of Dignity (13 page)

They also began accusing the Miners' Union and its members of signing inspection certificates in which there was no report of serious safety conditions. At the same time they began to put forth the idea of possible human error, carelessness, lack of ability, or inexperience. Salazar, in ignorance of actual events, would later try to defend himself in televised
interviews by saying that on February 7, two weeks before the explosion, the last inspection visit had taken place and that of thirty-four observations of safety concerns, twenty-eight were addressed and the other six were not, because they were in areas that were closed to the operation—a bold-faced lie. A little over a week after the collapse, Salazar told a
Televisa
reporter on national TV that the miners were on drugs and drinking alcohol before descending into the mine, to motivate themselves and provide “courage.” Federal labor law clearly ascribes responsibility to the company for any accident, except under very specific circumstances, as when there is a conflict between workers or a worker is drunk. With his statement, Salazar proved himself willing to slander the name of our colleagues in order to save Germán Larrea and the other leaders of Grupo México from the consequences of their actions.

When Salazar came to Pasta de Conchos, it was not to begin rescue operations of the miners or to help the families. He was there on a mission to protect the interests of the Fox administration and Grupo México. His pronouncements became more and more negative, and it was clear to everyone that damage control was his priority, to the point that he was ready to close up and abandon the mine and the surrounding town as soon as possible. Everyone in the government simply wanted to forget that Pasta de Conchos ever existed. The miners were filled with anger; they understood that he had gone to Pasta de Conchos to finish off the job and bury alive any possible survivors, with the sole purpose of covering the criminal negligence of Grupo México.

The only thing that can be said for Salazar is that he had the courage to show his face at Pasta de Conchos. President Vicente Fox could not be troubled to make an appearance, much less the elusive coward Germán Larrea, whose own company was directly responsible for the catastrophe. Neither of them even expressed condolences to the family, and there were certainly no offers of material support.

Despite the appalling condition of the mine, the poorly organized rescue efforts, and the infuriating behavior of Salazar and the officials from Grupo México, we maintained hope of finding our trapped colleagues alive. The volunteer rescuers, though not trained for the work,
put their hearts into the effort. César Humberto Calvillo Fernández, the local union section's social services secretary, joined one of the rescue teams on Wednesday; his brother was among the lost men.

We knew it was possible that they'd all died a sudden death, but we held out hope that we would encounter signs of life and find them hidden in a sheltered area of the coal mine. But with every day that passed without the results we longed for, despair grew among the families and colleagues of the trapped men. The rescuers, totaling about twenty-six, and going down in six-person shifts, succeeded in breaking through about one slide a day, but each time they didn't make it far before they encountered another slide that was equally or even more dramatic. They updated the families on their progress twice a day, but the long hours between updates were torturous.

Grupo México's entire approach to the rescue was wrong. Pasta de Conchos was not a complicated or especially deep mine; the company knew where the workers were when the explosion happened, and they could have expanded the six- to eight-inch respiration holes that ran about 400 feet from the surface and to the bottom of the mine. As we saw later in the Chilean miner rescue, these holes can be expanded to accommodate the passage of those trapped below. Trying to break through the rock slides one after the other was laborious and far more hazardous, but it was all the untrained rescue team could do.

We proposed again and again that they take the approach of widening the boreholes, but they showed no interest, falsely claiming that the drill could cause an explosion. For them, it was no problem to force the miners to use blowtorches in a highly explosive work site, but using a drill to expand the respiration holes was unthinkable. After the explosion, references to the boreholes would mysteriously disappear from inspection video footage.

Given the possibility of widening these holes to locate the miners and sustain them until they could be pulled out, why would Grupo México and the labor department not fully support the effort? In my mind, the answer is simple: With those miners, they would have retrieved sixty-five individual stories of the company's abuse, neglect, and greed. The media
would explode with the story of the heroic miners, and the atrocious manner in which Grupo México operated would be exposed, along with the submissive, self-interested role played by labor department officials. And with the miners alive, it would be much easier to file criminal charges.

The company did use one of the respiration holes to lower a small camera into the mine, but the contents of that video were never officially released. On our third day there, a young engineer told Oralia that the camera had captured images of the miners' bodies—not torn apart or incinerated, but intact, seated or lying down in a circle. We couldn't verify this report—the following day the engineer disappeared from Pasta de Conchos—but the possibility that the miners did survive for a time underground haunted everyone.

After the third day at the mine, company and government officials
had grown even more tight-lipped and reclusive. Though I was getting updates on the rescue from union members on the rescue team, they avoided me at all costs. The silence didn't bode well, but their next move shocked everyone.

On the fifth day, they gathered the families and, in a roundabout manner, explained that the condition of the mine would not allow for any further rescue activities. Without consulting the Miners' Union or the workers, Salazar and Grupo México officials said that they were suspending rescue efforts. The levels of toxic gas in the mine were too high, they said, and they could not continue to risk the lives of the rescuers. According to them, there had been no signs of life and the rescue had to be called off, despite the fact that the miners' colleagues were willing to continue their work in the reasonable hope that some of the miners, if not all, were still alive. The families, suddenly facing the reality that they would never see their brothers, fathers, and sons again, began shouting, many in tears.

Had there been political will or a sense of responsibility on the part of the operators of the mine, the bodies at least could have been retrieved. But since Grupo México closed the mine in a matter of days after the
explosion, it left in place the well-founded suspicion that the company wanted to hide the true causes of the explosion: its own negligence and irresponsibility.

Our grief at the end of the rescue efforts was beyond words. These were men we all knew and respected, and now the high-rolling officials who had written their death sentence were turning their backs and leaving them underground as if they were no more than animals, and as if the mine were little more than a giant coffin. It was the first time since 1889 that workers had not been recovered, dead or alive, from the site of a mining accident in Mexico.

The day Salazar made the announcement, one former miner, consumed with rage, approached the labor secretary, grabbed him by the neck, and pushed him to the ground, screaming that the rescue couldn't stop. The man shouted that he had been fired a month earlier but that his brother was still trapped in the mine, and he wouldn't leave without his brother. The crowd roared in support, and a few people threw objects at Salazar. He quickly ran off, whisked away by security guards, but a cameraman caught the whole incident on film. I have no doubt that had this miner had a gun, Salazar would have been killed. Footage of the distraught brother attacking the labor secretary was run on television segments all over Mexico for the next several days, speaking for the fury every miner and every family member felt at the betrayal of their government.

President Fox himself could barely conceal his own guilt in the Pasta de Conchos disaster. Cameras were rolling after a stop on his tour of northern Mexico, when Fox, approaching the presidential fleet waiting to take him away, was asked by a young student why he hadn't traveled to Pasta de Conchos in the aftermath of the explosion. Fox, with a gesture of profound irritation, answered aggressively, stating that he was visiting an indigenous community in another part of northern Mexico. After his short, unconvincing excuse, he shouted “And did you go? Did you?” at the student and immediately turned his back.

After Grupo México abandoned Pasta de Conchos, it left behind soldiers to guard the mine. Despite the army and the official abandonment
of Pasta de Conchos, a group of volunteers and union workers stayed at the site and continued their effort without help from Grupo México or the government. If there was a way to bring up the bodies of their colleagues, we were determined to find it.

Following the company's departure, I stayed at the mine to
comfort the families and help mount whatever effort we could. It was an extremely tense time—violence bubbled over several times in conflicts between the army and the families, and the streets of the town were dark and deserted, like a ghost town. Plus, Oralia and I sensed coming danger: My pronouncements about Grupo México's abuses and the labor department's complicity had angered many powerful people. In press conferences at Pasta de Conchos, I had publicly accused the company and the government inspectors of
industrial homicide
—a term commonly used by the IMF and other labor organizations to describe death directly due to a company's negligence. (In Western nations, it is called “corporate murder.”) Jorge Campos and Jorge Almeida, director and assistant, respectively, of the Latin American office of the IMF, confirmed the appropriateness of the use of this term; they said the explosion was clearly an industrial homicide.

Fortunately, Oralia and I had the support and protection of the miners and their families. In the days after Pasta de Conchos, they took us in their homes, hiding us from danger around the clock. President Fox and Germán Larrea were both undoubtedly eager to see me gone, and I felt we were in real danger. After she'd spent several days comforting the families, Oralia traveled to Monterrey at my request. There, in the city where I'd grown up, I felt she would be safer.

On February 28, 2006, barely eleven days after the explosion, and while I was still at the mine, Labor Secretary Salazar made an official public announcement that I had been removed by the government as general secretary of the Miners' Union. My replacement, of course, was Elías Morales. Like a coward, Salazar never once contacted me about this matter. He never mentioned it even when giving me updates
during the few days he spent in Coahuila. He just sent a press release to all the major news outlets, and I first heard about the official announcement on a television news program. Despite Morales's expulsion six years before, despite the hatred of the workers toward him, and despite the lack of any election, the labor department was pleased to announce that it would help this traitor assume leadership of Los Mineros. Morales had no experience or courage, and no leadership ability, but he had one thing: a willingness to sell out each of the union members for his own gain.

The opening salvo in the violent campaign against me and Los Mineros had occurred a few days before the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, with the assault on the union's headquarters and the
toma de nota
passed to Morales. But now the explosion and my declaration of industrial homicide had rapidly heightened the aggression against us. I was prepared to reveal their blood-stained hands and publicize their unpardonable exploitation that had led to sixty-five deaths—and they needed me gone, fast. To them, it was no problem violating labor law, the union's autonomy, and basic morality to turn the miners and the general public against me. Obedient to Grupo México and the Fox administration, reporters printed lies and slander about me: It was my fault the mine had collapsed; I was a thief; I didn't care about the miners.

Salazar's granting of the
toma de nota
stripped Los Mineros of the powers guaranteed to them in law—specifically, their right to choose their own directors. Such power is enshrined in the General Constitution of the Republic and in the Federal Labor Law, in Agreement 87, signed by the government of Mexico in 1960 with the International Labor Organization, and in the bylaws of the Miners' Union itself. The only purpose of Salazar's declaration was to remove me—a leader disinclined to protect the interests of Grupo México—and in my place impose a person who was utterly in the company's service. Salazar acted as if he were the owner of the unions and not as if there were laws that he, as the supposed labor official, had to abide by and respect more than anyone.

Members of Los Mineros were furious about being told by a government official who their leader would be. They had elected someone
whom they trusted to defend them; now they were trying to replace me with a proven traitor to the workers' cause. In the first days of March 2006, there were some isolated and loosely organized work stoppages at union sections throughout Mexico in protest of Salazar's announcement. But we planned to take it much further than that. The executive committee began planning a national extraordinary convention to take place in Monclova, Coahuila, in the middle of the month. There, we would decide exactly how Los Mineros as a whole would respond to the abuses and injustices that had taken place at Pasta de Conchos and beyond.