Collapse of Dignity (21 page)

Grupo Villacero didn't benefit from the brutal tactics, either. Its repressive activities and refusal to listen to the demands of the workers had cost it millions of dollars. At the end of 2006, the company was forced to sell its share of the Sicartsa complex to ArcelorMittal, currently the largest private steel-producing company in the world (and a model of efficiency in its collective bargaining agreements with unions in Mexico). Though we ultimately overcame the government's repression perpetrated on April 20, 2006, the memory of Héctor and Mario gave us fresh incentive to continue fighting with our utmost strength against the lies and slander of President Fox and his corporate supporters.

Men without ethics are like wild beasts released in this world.

—
ALBERT CAMUS

Two days before one thousand armed men descended on the workers
of Lázaro Cárdenas, the enemies of Los Mineros had initiated a new phase in the legal persecution of our union. Elías Morales and his corporate backers had been blocked in their initial complaint by the CNBV's formal opinion, which deemed the extinction of the Mining Trust and the use of its assets completely legitimate and legal—the commission unequivocally stated that no banking crime had been committed. But Germán Feliciano Larrea of Grupo México and its collaborators weren't about to let that stop them from charging full speed ahead in their mission to see us discredited and distract attention from the sixty-five dead miners of Pasta de Conchos. They had asked themselves what they could possibly do to overcome this roadblock, enlisted the help of the attorney general, and hatched a new plan.

In Mexico, sadly, the office of the federal attorney general—the Procuraduría General de la República, or PGR—is often used by politicians and other powerful people to attack their enemies. Such was the case in the fight against Los Mineros. At the urging of Grupo México and Morales, the PGR decided to give it a fresh start at the
state
level. In early April, unbeknownst to us, the PGR had been casting about for state attorneys general—especially in states with many miners and steelworkers—who would move forward with the complaint against us.

On April 18, 2006, the PGR took its file from the mother claim, made copies, and sent each one to all the states, with special emphasis on Sonora, San Luis Potosí, and Nuevo León. Of course there was no mention of the CNBV ruling that had halted the case at the federal level (it would take us two years to even get our hands on a copy of this document). In these three states, they had found officials willing to go along with their plan, supposedly on behalf of the union members who lived there. Of course this was absurd; far from being the plaintiffs in a case against me, Los Mineros were actively protesting the attempt to remove me. There was no way of foreseeing this despicable plan, but we knew we were dealing with perverse characters. No action on their part would have surprised us.

As the failed mother claim spawned three identical sub-claims, aggression at the federal level was ongoing. Immediately following Morales's complaint in early March, the Mexican Mediation and Arbitration Board—the Junta Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje, or JFCA— had ordered the seizure of all the union's bank accounts, including more than $20 million of the disputed $55 million. (The JFCA, the court that rules in all labor-related matters, is, absurdly, part of the executive branch even though it is a quasi-judicial entity. The arrangement leaves politicians an opening to meddle in matters of a purely legal nature.)

Personal bank accounts of all those charged in Morales's complaint were also frozen, in an attempt to financially strangle the union's leaders. The government's Financial Intelligence Unit made these unlawful seizures of personal assets notwithstanding the CNBV's report. (The CNBV, once it issues its opinion, has no authority to stop actions that are inconsistent with that opinion; thus, the banking commission did not impede seizures of union and personal assets and cooperated with the unit making them.) My family's home in Mexico City was seized, along with all its contents. The government even took possession of a house belonging to my wife's grandmother in Monterrey. Now abroad in Canada, all my family had were the few possessions we'd taken with us out of the country.

The fact that Grupo México encouraged the government to continue
going after me and the other four men charged is not only absurd from a legal standpoint; it is also inconsistent with earlier statements made by its head, Germán Feliciano Larrea.

The entirety of the charges leveled at us is based on the $55 million that my father had won in negotiations with Grupo México in 1989 and 1990. Following the privatization of Mexicana de Cobre de Nacozari and Mexicana de Cananea, the government and Grupo México had made a clear commitment to take 5 percent of the stock of both companies and give it to a trust controlled by the Miners' Union, to be used for social, educational, and growth plans. The use of the money was to be entirely at the union's discretion. The arrangement was approved by the National Financial Authority, the government bank that facilitated the privatization of the two companies. After fighting tooth and nail against keeping their end of the bargain, and only after I initiated a long legal process against them, the company had finally paid the debt in 2005, placing $55 million into the Mining Trust. Subsequently, in 2005, the trustees voted to dissolve the trust and transfer its assets to the union.

Now, enraged by my accusation of industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos, Grupo México (through its puppets like Morales) began to argue, just two years after finally honoring their obligation, that the simple act of dissolving the trust was a financial crime and that the union's leaders had nefariously used the money for its own purposes. The charge would have been funny had not so many officials—and the Mexican media—jumped on the bandwagon. The union kept meticulous records of each transaction involving the $55 million, and we could prove that a huge part of the assets, almost $22 million, had been paid out to workers who lost their jobs as a result of the privatizations at Canahen and Nacozari and to their families, while other smaller amounts went to legal and bank fees, publicity costs, real estate investments, and renovations—all expenses that served the union and all of its members.

Morales's claim, besides being utterly false, had its basis in the distinction between money belonging to the Miners' Union and money belonging to the
members
of the union as individuals. Morales and the
other two argued that the workers, not the union, owned the assets. Yet, back in August of 1990, fresh from negotiations with my father about the 5 percent of privatization proceeds, Germán Larrea had personally disproven this claim. That month, Grupo México was undergoing bankruptcy, and during the proceedings, the First Court in Bankruptcy Matters in Mexico City mistakenly referred in writing to the 5 percent of shares of Mexicana de Cananea as belonging to the workers of the company, when in fact, as Larrea well knew, the shares had been explicitly negotiated to become the property of the Miners' Union itself.

Larrea, after spotting the error in the court's document, filed a petition requesting that the judge correct the mistake and clarify that the funds correspond exclusively to the union, not to the workers individually. The petition, which we have copies of, signed by Larrea in his capacity as legal representative of Mexicana de Cananea, contains this passage:

In other words, Larrea himself said in August 1990 that the assets were the union's, directly contradicting the argument he would later use as the pretext for his persecution against me, some sixteen years later. Upon receiving Larrea's petition in that original matter, the judge issued an order modifying the sentence in the bankruptcy document to show that the assets belonged to the union, not to any particular group of workers:

From the moment the correction was made, it was crystal clear that the contents of the Mining Trust belonged to the union. In alignment with this and with our proof of having used the assets appropriately, the PGR had received a clear opinion from the CNBV that the union and its executive committee were innocent of any mishandling of the $55 million. Now, as 2006 progressed, the PGR and the labor department were ignoring the obvious truth and working together to widen and complicate the legal onslaught against us—all at the behest of Grupo México.

Germán Feliciano Larrea, aided by the Villarreal Brothers, was doing all he could to demonize me to the public and persuade public officials to persecute me on his behalf. We were told by a confidential source that he offered payments and gifts to Interior Secretary Abascal, Labor
Secretary Salazar, Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, Secretary of Finance Francisco Gil Díaz, PAN senator Ramón Muñoz, and the presidential couple themselves, among many more, hoping to succeed in destroying the legitimate leadership of the Miners' Union. Larrea reportedly dangled a huge financial carrot in front of each one of these individuals, offering between $10 million and $30 million if they could help the government-corporate cabal reach its objective of destroying, at any cost, both my leadership and the Miners' Union itself.

At the beginning of 2007 in a private meeting between Germán Larrea and one of the vice presidents of Televisa, Alejandro Quintero, Larrea told Quintero that he would pay whatever it took to launch a smear media campaign in order to discredit me, the union, and my family. (Larrea is also a member of the board of directors and a shareholder of Televisa.) He told Quintero that he would risk his fortune just to break the union and break me too. In 2011, Xavier García de Quevedo, one of the closest accomplices of Larrea and a top official in Grupo México, made a public statement saying that the conflict with Los Mineros had cost them at that time more than $4 billion.

In Vancouver, I watched the conflict escalate in the spring of 2006
with a heavy heart. The bodies of sixty-three miners still lay buried at Pasta de Conchos. The failed eviction at Lázaro Cárdenas had proven the government's willingness to use lethal violence against us. My family had been forced into a strange land, with all our assets in the hands of the government. And it was looking more and more like our stay in Canada might last longer than we originally hoped. I was also getting discouraging calls urging me to step down as head of Los Mineros. Alonso Ancira and his advisor, Moises Kolteniuk—who supposedly had been a friend a long time before—both tried to convince me to surrender the fight and allow Salazar to impose Elías Morales on the workers. I was unwilling to even entertain the thought. Doing so would be tantamount to a confession, and it would be a betrayal of my fellow workers and my father's legacy.

Through it all, though, we had the stalwart support of our friends in the USW, and of the miners and steelworkers of Mexico. They refused to accept the lies of politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Upon hearing the full story, no one could believe that Morales was anything but a liar and traitor. He hadn't even troubled to show up at Pasta de Conchos. The only time he'd set foot in the union's headquarters in the past six years had been while trying to raid and destroy it with a band of intoxicated vandals. Since I'd left Mexico, he hadn't become involved in the union's work in any way, never negotiating a single issue on the workers' behalf. All Morales did was give libelous interviews in the media and attend official ceremonies where, in the presence of companies and government officials, he was presented as general secretary of the union.

The loyalty of Los Mineros, the USW, and the global labor community was unwavering in the wake of Pasta de Conchos, but securing legal help proved more difficult. In stark contrast to excellent lawyers like Nestor de Buen and his son Carlos, who worked on the labor side, and steadfast supporters like Marco del Toro, who would take on our case later, we would encounter our share of lawyers who let us down.