Collapse of Dignity (20 page)

In Vancouver, on April 20, I was having a coffee at dawn with Oralia
when one of my cell phones rang (at the time I had five to help me keep up with everyone—two Canadian, two U.S., and one Mexican). It was Mario García, the executive committee's delegate for Lázaro Cárdenas. With grief and anger in his voice, he told me that at about 6:00 a.m., federal and state police forces began arriving at the plant, completely unannounced. Huge navy ships carrying about one thousand heavily armed men pulled into the port where the steel mill was located. Each man looked like an individual Robocop—complete with shield, helmet, and R-15 rifle. The strikers, still at their posts, were bewildered but unwilling to cave. García told me that the unarmed workers were currently trying to hold their ground as best they could, but the scene was escalating rapidly.

I hung up with García and immediately began calling all the other members of the executive committee to request their support in Lázaro
Cárdenas. I called Leo Gerard and Ken Neumann to alert them to the attack. Committee members Juan Linares, José Angel Hernández, and José Barajas were in Vancouver at the time, and I called them too; they quickly showed up at the USW offices to help in any way they could. After his first call, I suggested that García keep in touch every fifteen minutes to give us updates.

The attack that day turned out to be one of the most violent repressions in recent memory. They took incredible measures against peaceful strikers and their families: the thousand men, primarily from the Federal Preventive Police and their tactical Special Operations Groups, carried rifles and high-powered machine guns, and they even sent in tanks with artillery. Several helicopters with snipers on board flew threateningly overhead. Worst of all, the armed forces descended on the strikers without any previous notification. Labor Secretary Salazar had declared the strike illegal only hours before the attack; there was no way the workers could have prepared themselves, and we had no time to fight Salazar's ruling legally.

The assault was bloody. Television cameras captured some of the violence of the security forces, who aggressively attacked the steelworkers despite initially saying it would be a “peaceful” eviction. Bullets rained down from the helicopters, hitting the union members and other people from the community. Though I was getting a steady stream of updates from Mario and other union colleagues in Michoacán, I felt outraged and impotent, being so far away and unable to defend the workers in person. Our strike was 100 percent legal, given the violation of our collective bargaining agreement. How was it possible that the government could resort to violence against workers in a completely legal strike?

The workers used the front blades of bulldozers to block the bullets being shot at them. Besides the tools they had around them, the striking steelworkers were defenseless. To help in the only way they could, the workers' family members and neighbors rallied around the strikers and began collecting rocks and even pieces of roofing for the men to hurl at their attackers. They were no match for their attackers, who shot into the crowd with no regard for women or children. The scene
was chaos. Fires burned as the strikers tended to their wounded and bleeding friends.

Later that morning, García called with devastating news. Two of the striking workers had been killed—our colleagues Mario Alberto Castillo and Héctor Alvarez Gómez—and more than one hundred workers sustained gunfire injuries. García was distraught. I immediately asked him to go to each of the men's families at home to inform them of what had happened and console them as best as he could. Héctor Alvarez was married and had a young daughter, and Mario Alberto had lived with his parents. I asked Mario to call me from each of the residences so I could personally speak with the families.

I have never forgotten the conversations I had on the morning of April 20, 2006, two hours after the violent event, with the parents and the wife, respectively, of our colleagues Mario Alberto Castillo and Héctor Alvarez Gómez, who had been killed by the murderous bullets of the armed men sent to the Sicartsa mill by Morales and the Villarreal Guajardo brothers. Oralia and my son Ernesto were by my side, full of grief. Oralia was in tears.

The voice of the father of Mario Alberto Castillo was weighted with indescribable sadness. Indeed, I do not believe there is anything worse than losing a child, and the tragedy was even greater, since his son was murdered at the hands of politicians and businessmen. I called him from Canada and expressed my solidarity with him and his entire family on behalf of myself and all my colleagues. Mr. Castillo told me that his son struggled to defend his leaders and his colleagues against abuse and that he hoped that his death would not have been in vain.

I answered that his sacrifice for us, together with that of Héctor and the others, made him one of the true heroes of unionism, and that he would always be an example for us and an inspiration.

To speak with the widow of Héctor Alvarez Gómez, who also had a small daughter, was a terrible experience—heartrending beyond description. I almost could not bear to hear what had happened as, with an enormous sadness and with weeping that still rings in my ears, she thanked me for calling. Gaining a measure of emotional control,
she told me she was very sad to know that her daughter would never see or live with her father. She said they were in a very bad financial situation, because they had just begun their married life and that she felt terribly alone in assuming the responsibility for guiding her daughter in her growth and moving forward. I expressed my admiration of Héctor for his heroism and said that we would always hold the image of the commitment of her husband. I promised that her daughter would know the story of her exemplary father and that we would not leave her or her daughter alone: that we would do everything to help them, as we have done and continue to do.

That night, my family, colleagues, and I watched the news reports from Lázaro Cárdenas with great sadness. Though more than one hundred strikers had been shot, many reports showed the default bias of the Mexican media and, unthinkably, portrayed the violence as the fault of the unarmed workers. “TV Azteca hasn't shown the workers' version,” one Sicartsa worker would later say. “They only aired footage of the bad things. It isn't the truth.”

In the end, the government's aggressive tactics at the Sicartsa steel
mill on April 20, 2006, did not enable them to take control of the work center. They were repelled by the workers and their families. Faced with the prospect of having to murder more than a thousand men, women, and children to take control of the mill, they finally retreated.

The brutal attack occurred almost precisely one hundred years after the massacre and assassination of the striking copper miners at Cananea in 1906, an event that for many symbolizes the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and the labor movement in Mexico. Particularly disheartening was the involvement of the governor of Michoacán, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, who bowed to the interests of President Fox and Grupo Villacero. A supposed leftist and member of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), he is the grandson of one of the greatest presidents in Mexican history, with whom he shares his name. His grandfather was president
from 1934 to 1940 and had won the admiration of the Mexican people for promoting the creation of trade unions, supporting workers' strikes, distributing land to
campesinos
, and, as never before in history, developing a large-scale social policy that favored the workers. He also expropriated the oil industry in 1938, which up until then was in the hands of large international companies from Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States and which had rebelled against the government because they did not want to satisfy the fair union demands of petroleum workers. Regardless of this legacy, the younger Cárdenas was more than willing to send in troops to maim and kill the strikers of the town named for his grandfather.

I personally spoke from abroad to the governor of Michoacán, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel. In no uncertain terms, I protested these killings and the use of force to repress a legitimate strike, and I assigned blame to him and the Fox administration. I told him that he was shaming the PRD—the leftist party to which he belonged—and staining the image of his grandfather and his father, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a man who had also governed Michoacán and who had headed the struggle to democratize the PRI party. Cárdenas Batel begged my pardon, saying that Fox's government had deceived him. He claimed they told him there would be no violence during the eviction, but I didn't buy it. I knew he was submissive to Fox, and, like most politicians, opportunistic when it came to using circumstances to win favors from the powerful. He seemed frightened and actually asked me for help. I told him, full of anger, that the only advice I could give him was to demand that those responsible for this repression be punished.

I also demanded that Cárdenas Batel immediately compensate the families of the slain men and the more than one hundred injured workers. In addition, I requested that any remaining law enforcement personnel withdraw immediately from the area around the port of Lázaro Cárdenas and the total suspension of any other act of aggression against the workers and called for the investigation of the events and criminal punishment for the people who had made the decisions to use force and for all those responsible for the decision's implementation.

Sadly, Grupo Villacero had easily convinced Fox to send in troops—Villacero was a generous contributor to his wife's foundation, Vamos Mexico. Following the attack, Governor Cárdenas Batel, having already capitulated to the demands of the federal government and the corporate owners in the attack on the steelworkers, proved unwilling to conduct a full investigation. How could he have, when he was one of the responsible parties? Not even the legacy of his respected father and grandfather could persuade him to recognize the obvious: that the striking workers were legally defending their freedom, their union's autonomy, and their right to safe working conditions.

About a week after the attack, I found out that several days prior to the
invasion of the Lázaro Cárdenas complex, there had been a meeting of Fox's security cabinet, with the president in attendance, and the group had discussed whether to attack the facility with military force. A politician who was present at the meeting told me about it, and I later confirmed this report by looking at the president's published agenda. On that day, it showed that Fox had attended a meeting of the national security team. Fox and the other attendees were frustrated that they hadn't destroyed us in February and March of 2006 with their false accusations, and the Lázaro Cárdenas strike gave them a pretext to attack once again. Some of those present at this meeting expressed doubt about the effectiveness of sending armed forces in, questioning who would take responsibility if things turned out badly.

Supposedly, Labor Secretary Salazar spoke up to address the concern. “When the miners see that our men are about to move against them, they'll run like cowards,” he said. Fox, along with the rest of his security cabinet, believed the Yunquista Salazar's outrageous assertion, and it was decided that they would invade the port. Had they known that the miners would stand firm and repel the aggression with such courage and dignity, I'm sure they would have made a different decision.

On April 17, three days before the attack, President Fox was on a tour with Governor Cárdenas Batel in the city of Uruapan, about 125 miles from
Lázaro Cárdenas port. During a rally there, about twenty members of Los Mineros spoke up from the crowd and demanded to Fox's face that he immediately end the smear campaign against us and recognize me as the true leader of the union. They told him that they had expressed their desires in a free, democratic election, and that he was obligated to respect that.

Fox listened to their statement and, in front of Governor Batel, told them they should stop worrying—the whole conflict, he said, would be over in a few days. It was a perverted statement, and that was all he said. The steelworkers traveled back to Lázaro Cárdenas to prepare for the strike, and three days later found out exactly what Fox had meant with this cynical pronouncement. The president's intention was to end the conflict not through negotiation but through violent repression.

The workers at Sicartsa managed to keep control of the mine and plants for five months. The strike at Lázaro Cárdenas continued until September 15, 2006, nearly five more months, when there was a favorable agreement with the workers in which they received no less than a 42 percent increase in their wages, an unheard-of increase in Mexico and perhaps in the world. They also received 100 percent of the wages lost during the five and a half months the strike lasted. As part of the negotiations, in 2007, workers, some of whom had been with the company more than two decades, received a significant share of profits from the company.

This successful strike, conducted to defend the authentic election of its national leader, was the first of its kind. “Why would we want a government like this?” asked Olga Ospina P., a relative of one of the Sicartsa workers, after the attack. “Fox promised a change. Is this it? We are tired of the aggression against the workers. Why is it happening? Because they are fighting for their leader? What would Fox think if we took his wife—who is a rat—and gave him another one? He wouldn't like it. Let the workers choose who will be the one who speaks for them.”

The ultimate victory of the Lázaro Cárdenas workers was a resounding defeat for the government, though it was paid for with the blood of two of our colleagues. The strike of our Section 271 colleagues was totally legal and there was no reason to use the armed forces against workers who were struggling for their labor rights and human rights, as
firmly established in law. The terror and violence of the government had failed to end the strikes and work stoppages across Mexico.