Collapse of Dignity (16 page)

Most of these miners were probably working in the vault at the far end of the mine when the explosion occurred, and it is where any survivors were probably trapped. This is true despite the fact that, in a correctly overseen operation, the workers would have been spaced out and distributed throughout the length of the mine, some producing coal, some providing maintenance, and some monitoring production. But General de Hulla ordered all its non-union contractors to the back of the mine, where they were told to weld with a blowtorch, putting the workers at incredible risk. (It was routine for the company to give nonunion workers the most dangerous jobs. It clearly felt not the slightest responsibility for their lives.) A single spark from an electrical failure or friction would immediately ignite the explosive methane gas and spread quickly to the coal dust piled along the mine's floor, which is precisely what happened at 2:20 a.m. on February 19, 2006.

There's no doubt that the explosion was large. In a fraction of a second, it raged through the mile and a half of the mine and burned like an
underground wildfire. “I imagine it was like lighting a firework in a bottle,” said Elias Aguilera, an employee of General de Hulla who survived that day. The explosion consumed all the air in the mine and weakened the tunnel's already weak construction. The impact of the blast reached the outside concentration plant and the coking ovens, quickly spreading from the four-hundred-foot depth to the surface. The large receiving hopper, which received the extracted coal, and the transporter belts were totally destroyed. A few men were saved by their close proximity to the inclined tunnel that led to the surface, though these survivors suffered serious burns.

In my visits with the nine hospitalized workers who survived the explosion, they told me that at 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 18, the workers were proceeding toward the bottom of the mine. It was the third shift (miners at Pasta de Conchos worked twenty-four hours a day in three shifts). As some of the survivors explained, each noise heard in the bottom of the mine as the workers advanced slowly, extracting the coal, filled some of them with fear, imagining that something very serious could happen that workday. The heat was increasingly intense inside the deeper they got.

According to what some of the survivors told me, the workers were walking slowly toward the mine's interior, worried the whole time by presentiments of danger for them and other colleagues. From here the descent toward the work areas at the bottom of the mine occurred slowly, in silence, as if they knew that they were walking to the last workday of their lives.

Of course, their concerns were well founded. To this day, no one knows exactly what befell the sixty-three unrecovered men in their final hours, and we don't know whether those final hours took place immediately after or days after the explosion itself. Rather than take responsibility for the tragedy and do their best to recover the men, Grupo México botched the recovery efforts and claimed its mines were safe. Indeed, the company and Labor Secretary Salazar blamed the victims themselves, claiming that they drank and did drugs before entering the mine, because they were scared to go inside.

This slander infuriated the families of the lost men and all their colleagues in the Miners' Union. Ignoring the litany of safety violations and the absurd lack of oversight from his own department, Labor Secretary Salazar insisted that the tragedy was due to the miners at Pasta de Conchos “screwing up” by taking drugs, smoking marijuana, or drinking alcohol before they entered the mine, to give themselves courage. All of this was filmed in a documentary called
The Fallen
that the union produced together with an independent filmmaker.

There's not a shred of proof that any of the miners were compromised in any way on the night of the explosion, and if they were scared, they certainly had a right to be. Germán Larrea himself refuses to enter his own mines, since, according to a comment he made in the mining industry press, he suffers from claustrophobia. The fault was with the owner and shareholders of Grupo México, who pressured public officials to ignore the blatant safety violations to satisfy their inordinate desire for profit—regardless of the cost to the miners.

It was based on this irrefutable negligence that I had accused Grupo
México and the principal officials of the Department of Labor with industrial homicide, loudly pointing out their misdeeds to the families, volunteers, and reporters gathered at Pasta de Conchos. Grupo México did not respect standards or laws regarding safety. It violated the Collective Bargaining Agreement it had signed in 2005 with the Miners' Union, which in article 68, section 13, states the following: “The Company shall maintain the mines in a state that guarantees the highest degree of protection for the workers' life and health. For this purpose, all shafts shall have their corresponding returns, which must be wide enough to guarantee optimum ventilation of the mine and transit of the miners.”

It also violated the Federal Labor Law, which in its article 132, Section XVII, requires that all companies, not just mining companies, “comply with the safety and hygiene provisions in laws and regulations to prevent accidents and illness in the work centers and generally in the places where the work must be performed, and make available at
all times the medications and first-aid materials that are indispensible according to the instructions issued for the timely and efficient application of first aid; and the responsibility to notify the competent authority of each accident that occurs.”

The corporation also violated Article 123 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, which states in Section XIV that “companies shall be responsible for work accidents and workers' job-related illnesses, suffered because of or in the exercise of their profession or work; therefore, owners must make the corresponding payments as a consequence of the death or temporary or permanent disability of the workers, as determined by law. This responsibility shall apply even if the owner hires the worker through an intermediary.”

It also violated Section XV of Constitutional Article 123, which states that “the owner must observe, according to the nature of the negotiation, legal precepts regarding hygiene and security in the facilities of his establishment, and adopt appropriate measures to prevent accidents in the use of machines, instruments, and work materials, as well as organize such that it provides the highest degree of protection for the health and life of the workers, and the unborn baby in the case of pregnant women. The laws shall contain the applicable penalties in each case.”

The labor department has never, previously or now, even though informed and bound by this regulation, enforced the correction of Pasta de Conchos's safety deficiencies or punished Grupo México for the above violations. In fact, they rose to the company's defense, laying blame squarely on the shoulders of the very men who lost their lives deep in the Pasta de Conchos mine. But a special committee of the International Labor Organization (ILO), set up to investigate the explosion, concluded that “the Government of Mexico did not do all that was reasonably expected of it to avoid or minimize the effects of the Accident which had such devastating effects with the loss of life of as many as 65 miners.”

In those first days after the explosion, Salazar was totally focused on the financial interests of Grupo México. We recall that when Fox
assumed power he said that his government was “of businessmen, by businessmen, and for businessmen,” thereby betraying the citizens who voted for him in the hope of a change to propel the financial recovery into development, expansion of opportunity, and the building of a better future for the whole country.

I'm sometimes asked whether it was up to the Miners' Union to
prevent the tragedy of February 19, 2006. I believe the people who wonder whether we were partially to blame do not understand the reality of the irrational, irresponsible system we were up against. Disaster-prevention measures are part of our collective bargaining agreements, but if there is no government responsible for monitoring the fulfillment of these obligations, violations will continue, and more tragedies will take place.

To keep our workers safe in the Pasta de Conchos mine, we would have had to be on permanent strike, since despite Grupo México's high earnings—and the fact that their riches depended on the sacrifice and effort of the miners—the company invested hardly anything in the safety of its coal mines in Coahuila. Even though we faced a company that was firmly committed to not spending a penny on the safety of the mine and a right-wing government that gave its full support to businessmen of any kind, we did continually strike and raise concerns about the safety of many mines in Mexico. Each of our workers is instructed by the National Union, the National Executive Committee, and me personally that when the slightest risk is encountered in a mine, the worker should suspend activities until the defects are corrected or it is verified that the danger no longer exists. If the hazard persists, then the worker should demand the shutdown or closure of activity until the basic problem is corrected. But the miners of Mexico need work, and many are willing to risk their lives to support their families. “It's not safe,” said Adrián Cárdenas Limón, a subcontractor with General de Hulla, “but we need the jobs. There's no way out.”

The fault was not in our failure to call attention to the danger: Between 2002 and 2005, we called fourteen different strikes against Grupo México, primarily in protest of substandard working conditions in the mines they controlled. The honestly prepared reports written by the union's Joint Health and Safety Commission were going to be the basis for striking the Pasta de Conchos mine and charging Grupo México with violations of the collective bargaining agreement's provisions regarding health, safety, and hygiene, among other matters.

Because that strike happened too late, those documents now form the basis, along with the testimony of the rescuers, of the criminal complaint of industrial homicide that the Miners' Union has presented in Coahuila against Grupo México and its shareholders, in addition to Francisco Javier Salazar and the rest of the officials and inspectors from the department of labor. Sadly, our battle to hold the people responsible for the Pasta de Conchos tragedy still goes on, more than seven years since it occurred.

Of course, this unforeseen catastrophe presented a fresh opportunity for Fox's government and the mining companies to continue the attack on the Miners' Union that had begun in the days before the accident. Rather than face their own culpability, they decided to double their efforts to depose me as head of the Miners' Union. In their ignorance, they believed that their assault on the union and me personally would force us to come begging for peace or negotiation within a week or two. They were mistaken, and they will continue to be mistaken. We have never forgotten the bodies of sixty-three coworkers who have been abandoned some 370 feet below the earth's surface, still awaiting a proper burial, and we have never forgotten precisely who put them there.

_____________________

1
Data from the Mining Museum of Cumberland, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

—
STEFAN ZWEIG

Once the rescue efforts at Pasta de Conchos had been called off,
Salazar turned his back and fled Coahuila and the angry families of the miners, thereby issuing a death sentence for any men who may have been buried alive in the bottom of the mine. Of course he had no interest in identifying the true cause of the disaster, knowing full well it was the negligence and irresponsibility of himself and Grupo México. Xavier García de Quevedo, along with the other managers and operators of Grupo México, fled the scene as well.

A small volunteer rescue team remained behind, and I remained in Coahuila as well, along with several of my colleagues from the executive committee. Meanwhile, in union sections across the country, miners were holding assemblies in protest of Elías Morales's company-backed takeover attempt and Grupo México's appalling mishandling of Pasta de Conchos.

In the media, Grupo México and the Fox administration had launched an all-out smear campaign against me, rooted in Morales's baseless accusation that several members of the executive committee and I had made inappropriate use of the $55 million Mining Trust. Morales himself arranged many interviews in which he elaborated on this supposed fraud. Ruben Aguilar, President Fox's press secretary, appeared on
television calling us criminals, and saying that the government would investigate our misuse of the funds. Slanderous articles—undoubtedly paid for by Germán Larrea, who sits on the board of Televisa, the largest Spanish-language media company in the world—appeared in national newspapers and magazines with the intention of confusing the Mexican people and the workers of Los Mineros and convincing them that Morales was the “good guy” who would stand up for them. Every single day, some new piece of pro-Morales, anti-Napoleón propaganda appeared in the media.

Televisión Azteca, a company that previously belonged to the state under the name Instituto Mexicano de Televisión, Imevisión, and was privatized under Carlos Salinas, showed unequivocal aggression and perversity against the Miners' Union and me personally. During the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, Javier Alatorre, the news director of TV Azteca, interviewed me in the mine itself. We had a long and detailed interview in which I was able to explain openly the causes of the explosion. I mentioned the responsibility of Grupo México and its owner Germán Larrea: its criminal negligence and that of its board of directors, its management, and its shareholders. It was a wide-ranging interview that was never aired, not even a minute of it, neither on TV Azteca nor Televisa nor on any other communication linked to this company.