Collapse of Dignity (26 page)

Calderón and Lozano's promised “solution” to the conflict—my resignation—disregarded entirely the views of the workers, our bylaws, the Mexican Constitution, and the country's federal labor law, in which it is established that the government must respect union autonomy. In addition, the Mexican government has ratified several agreements with the International Labor Organization over the past sixty years, including Agreement 87, which establishes freedom of association and gives the workers the right to create and join organizations of their own choosing and freely elect the leaders of those organizations, all without government intervention. No matter how many times it was suggested to us, my fellow leaders and I absolutely refused to give up the responsibility to which we had been democratically and legally elected by the worker base, much less yield to the whims of voracious corporations who had caused the deaths of sixty-five of our colleagues at Pasta de Conchos.

Beginning in April 2007, representatives of the Mexican government began traveling to Canada to meet with me about resolving the conflict, though we never received the direct audience with Calderón we had requested. Among those who came to Canada was the then undersecretary of the interior department, Abraham González Uyeda. González was a former engineer and owner of a large dairy business, and two years earlier, he had thrown a lavish birthday party for himself at Las Palmas, his dairy ranch in his home state of Jalisco. With many important PAN politicians in attendance, González got up and made the suggestion that Felipe Calderón run as the party's presidential candidate. This proposal quickly took on the nature of an official launch for Calderón's candidacy, and the media widely reported the story the next day. President Fox, who like all Mexican presidents maintained a tight grip on the workings of his party, was not pleased by this unofficial announcement—it was clearly outside the PAN's rules for selecting candidates. Calderón, then serving as Fox's secretary of energy, was quickly dismissed as punishment.

When González arrived in Canada in 2007 on behalf of the Mexican government, he carried the message that Calderón was looking for a solution to the conflict. González and I met in Toronto, but his proposal, like Lozano's, was unacceptable: Its first stipulation was that I resign as leader of the Miners' Union. Only then, González said, would they suspend the accusations against me and against the other union leaders. It was the same story, the same unlawful purpose, with false accusations invented by the government. There really was no possibility of finding a solution; they simply did not want to negotiate, preferring to impose their arbitrary decision.

Month after month went by without any solution in sight. On the contrary, the government's actions against the union were becoming even more radical. Calderón and his administration quickly came around to the old patterns of the Fox administration and began obeying the whims of Germán Larrea and the Villarreal brothers. Our initial misgivings had been confirmed. It seemed that Calderón had met with these businessmen and been convinced by their arguments for the destruction of the democratic and autonomous Miners' Union.

Meanwhile, the state-level banking charges against us were still dragging on. By 2007 we were making headway, though; Marco del Toro and his team had succeeded in convincing the federal judiciary that the arrest warrants issued in Sonora and in San Luis Potosí should be referred to the Federal District, since there was a clear lack of jurisdiction in both cases. That meant that the whole affair was now concentrated in Mexico City, in the Eighteenth Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in San Luis Potosí), the Fifty-first Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in Sonora) and the Thirty-second Federal Court (corresponding to the warrant in Nuevo León). We were expending vast amounts of energy and resources on fighting these charges, and Calderón and Lozano allowed it to go on, though they were fully aware that our supposed crimes were entirely fabricated.

I do not believe, observing the past six years in retrospect, that anyone in the Calderón administration ever had the sincere intention of seeking a solution through negotiation. It was nothing but a deceptive posture intended to distract and manipulate us. They tried to sound smooth and reasonable, so we would place our confidence in their black hands as they waited for the time to tighten the noose and unlawfully install a union leadership that would obey their whims. From 2006 to the present, we have continued to be subjected to the political persecution of the Calderón government, who simply inherited the Fox government's commitments to corporate ambition and continued support of Grupo México on one hand and Grupo Villacero on the other. And Calderón's unvarying support of business interests extends beyond the mining and metal sector; for example, he has actively protected the former head of Mexicana Airlines, Gastón Azcárraga, who bankrupted the company and caused the dismissal of most of its employees.

No doubt Calderón's myopia stems from the fact that he owes his elevation to the capital provided by businessmen who are determined to control him. Since his first day in office, they have extorted him with reminders of who placed him in Los Pinos; otherwise, there is no explanation of his obvious submission to their every wish. In practice, it seems that Germán Feliciano Larrea and his ilk—not President
Calderón—are the ones who lead Mexico. These fabulously wealthy tycoons have hijacked Felipe Calderón, just as they did with Vicente Fox before him.

Larrea, according
Forbes
's latest ranking of the world's wealthiest individuals, stands at second place in the list of the super-rich in Mexico, with a net worth of $16 billion. Alberto Bailleres Gonzalez comes in at third place with a net worth of $11 billion. His holding company, Grupo Bal, controls Grupo Peñoles and the department store chain Palacio de Hierro; Grupo Peñoles, just like Grupo México, has set up mining work sites that resemble concentration camps, with extremely run-down and dangerous conditions. The same
Forbes
list is peppered with other enemies of the miners, including Ricardo Salinas Pliego of TV Azteca and Emilio Azcárraga of Televisa—both prominent persecutors of the union and friends of Vicente Fox, Marta Sahagún, and Germán Larrea.

A longer look at the
Forbes
list reveals that the combined fortunes of eleven Mexican businessmen amounts to $125 billion—which is equivalent to 12.4 percent of Mexico's yearly GDP and exceeds the country's international currency reserves of $121 billion. At the same time, about 50 million Mexicans, nearly half of the country's population, live in poverty, and we repeatedly hear that there is no money to help fund any level of public education or to meet the growing demand for health care, jobs, and infrastructure improvements. Of course, one of the main desires of these businessmen was that Calderón maintain his persecution of the Miners' Union and other independent, democratic trade unions in Mexico, such as the Electrical Workers' Union and the Aviation Workers' Union (representing pilots and baggage handlers), who have faced during the last three years struggles similar to ours.

So, in Calderón we got a man who was just as hostile to the Miners'
Union as Fox, if not more so. Just as bad, Javier Lozano, like his predecessor, Salazar, showed great enmity toward the union. Lozano used a provocative anti-mining stance to stay on good terms with Germán
Larrea, Alonso Ancira, and the rest of Mexico's reactionary business leaders throughout the entire length of his term.

Both Salazar and Lozano significantly degraded this position of public trust and broke its tradition of respect. Earlier labor secretaries, though at times inclined toward business interests, knew how to reconcile these with the interests of workers. Adolfo Lopez Mateos, secretary of labor under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58), went on to win the presidency himself in 1958 and was one of Mexico's most important leaders of the twentieth century. Under Lopez's presidency, Salomón González Blanco served as secretary of labor and did outstanding work. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, labor secretary in the era of Luis Echeverría (1970–76), was similarly perceptive and fair in the role. Salazar and Lozano shame the legacy of these conciliatory and constructive politicians. From the office of labor secretary, both have persecuted, attacked, insulted, and defamed the miners, metalworkers, and steelworkers of Mexico, and have done so with more barbarity than any other officials in the Calderón and Fox administrations—saturated as they were with individuals who have a true hatred of the working class.

As a young man, Javier Lozano attended the Escuela Libre de Derecho, where he first met Felipe Calderón. After graduation, he worked at the Bank of Mexico before starting work at Mexico's Department of the Treasury, where he held various positions, including controller of state-owned petroleum company Pemex. At this point in his career, Lozano was a member of the PRI. In 1998, President Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000) named him director of COFETEL, Mexico's telecommunications regulator. (The commission was part of the Department of Communications and Transportation, which was headed by Carlos Ruiz Sacristán. In 2011, Ruiz would join Grupo México's board of directors.) From COFETEL, Lozano showed clear favoritism toward the Unefon telephone company, giving it two simultaneous extensions, both of them unlawful, by which the company saved hundreds of millions of pesos. In 1999, while a client of Lozano's consulting firm Javier Lozano & Associates, Ricardo Salinas Pliego—one of Lozano's cronies and head of TV Azteca—purchased 50 percent of Unefon. Even in the
1990s, Lozano was using his position as a public servant to win the favor of powerful businessmen.

In 1999, Lozano Alarcón, still a member of the PRI, was appointed Undersecretary for Social Communication for the Department of the Interior. He founded the Telecommunications Law Institute and continued to serve as a private consultant in this field with Javier Lozano & Associates. In March 2003, the PRI governor of Puebla, Melquíades Morales, appointed Lozano as representative of the Puebla government in Mexico City.

In 2005, Lozano resigned as Puebla representative to join the Felipe Calderón campaign full-time with its fundraising efforts. Lozano had been seeing a lot of Calderón's brother-in-law, Juan Ignacio Zavala, and it was Ignacio who brought Lozano into the future president's inner circle, reacquainting the two men who'd known each other in their law school days. On December 1, 2006, Calderón rewarded Lozano for his “efforts” by naming him Secretary of Labor and Social Services. Early in his term, Lozano would make an opportunistic flip, switching on June 30, 2007, from PRI member to PAN member. Dizzy with lust for power, he held out naive hopes of being a PAN candidate for the presidency all throughout Calderón's term. It would have been the peak of his miserable, unscrupulous life.

An intelligent journalist named José Sobrevilla has done extensive research on Lozano. After digging into the labor secretary's life and gaining access to many of Lozano's personal files, Sobrevilla reveals the following:

As labor secretary, Lozano was consistently incendiary and insensitive to nearly everyone around him. Marcelo Ebrard, elected governor of Mexico City in 2006, has been one of the prime targets of his hatred. Lozano publicly decried Ebrard's solidarity with protesters marching in the Federal District—to which Ebrard responded by suggesting that Lozano read the city's laws (
La Jornada
, June 15, 2007). And Lozano has also attacked the governor for arranging governmental aid to the state of Tabasco during a devastating flood.

Lozano was also notably aggressive toward magnate Carlos Slim, director and majority shareholder of Telmex, Mexico's massive, monopolistic telecommunications company. During his time in COFETEL, Lozano tried to open the telecommunications market to his friends at Televisa and TV Azteca—in other words, he wanted to break Telmex's monopoly by giving power to two companies that hold a monopoly over another sector: the media. Why? Purely because Lozano was friendly with a few businessmen at Televisa and TV Azteca. Later, in the run up to Calderón's presidency, Lozano expressed interest in serving as head of the Department of Communication and Transportation. But Slim—who was ranked by
Forbes
as the richest man in the world in 2010, 2011, and 2012—remembered Lozano's actions at COFETEL and his private interests in Televisa and TV Azteca. Exerting his significant power, Slim pressured Calderón to deny Lozano that position. But Calderón caved, and Lozano was appointed labor secretary instead.

Lozano would later help engineer the 2009 shutdown of Mexico's Central Light and Power company, a maneuver that resulted in the loss of 44,000 jobs in one day and was meant to destroy the Mexican Electricians' Union, one of the few democratic and independent Mexican unions like ours. And he also raised public suspicion due to his public defense of Jorge Mier y de la Barrera—a top official at the Department of Labor and an old colleague of Lozano's at COFETEL—when Mier was dismissed by the Judiciary Council for fraud and bribery.