Collapse of Dignity (22 page)

A matter of days after the explosion at Pasta de Conchos, a lawyer from Monterrey named Bernardo Canales had been referred to me by Celso Nájera. Canales offered me his professional services, and I was grateful for the potential help. Canales made a good first impression. He seemed like a hard worker, and I trusted that he had the union's best interests at heart, even though he was the cousin of Fernando Canales Clariond, a PAN member from Monterrey who had served as secretary of economy under President Fox. Throughout March of 2006, Canales provided legal defense services to the five of us who were charged, but at the beginning of April, he told me that his close friend, Guillermo Salinas Pliego, had invited him along on a motorcycle tour of Europe in the middle of the month to celebrate Holy Week. He told us he would call every day while he was gone and that he would have his cell phone by his side, day and night, in case of emergencies.

Canales's overly fervent assurances worried me slightly, as did the fact that Salinas Pliego, his traveling partner, was the brother of the president of TV Azteca—the multimedia conglomerate that had been particularly unfair toward Los Mineros since the conflict had begun. Salinas Pliego was a major TV Azteca shareholder himself. The two of them left Mexico in mid-April of 2006 and spent Holy Week motoring around Europe. The first few days he was gone, we didn't get the promised phone calls. Then emergency struck: the government authorized full searches of the union headquarters, the homes of my union colleagues Juan Linares and Félix Estrella, my home in Mexico City, and my home in Monterrey. In need of help to block these intrusions, we called Canales's phone over and over with no effect. At last he sent some colleagues from his firm to help us, but never once did he himself speak to one of us. He had been receiving our messages but simply refused to speak to us. We were left without defense in a moment of great aggression from the government.

When Canales got back, he ceased all communication with me or anyone from the union. Finally, a secretary from his legal firm called my office in Mexico City, saying that Mr. Canales was not going to continue with this case and that we should send someone to collect all the files from his office in Monterrey. A colleague called me at my Vancouver office with the news. That was it. Canales had collected more than $300,000 for doing absolutely nothing besides a few weeks of defense work. Like a coward, he made off with the workers' hard-earned money without personally calling me or any of my colleagues to say he was leaving the case.

When he took on the case, Canales never intimated that he was not able to carry out his work, that he was afraid, or that there was any other problem that would cause him to stop representing us. He took on our case without appreciating the magnitude of the aggression against the union, and then profited from the union's resources—heavily depleted from the government's arbitrary seizures—before realizing the enemy he was up against. We had trusted Canales and put all our confidence, and all our legal files, in his hands. The betrayal stung.

As we did our best to fend off searches, seizures, and threats, our
efforts to prosecute Salazar and Morales for forgery was encountering frustrating setbacks. In order for the labor department to fast-track the approval of Morales as leader of the union in the days before Pasta de Conchos, Morales was required to submit certain documents to the labor department, and it was in these papers that they had forged the signature of union executive committee member Juan Luis Zúñiga Velázquez, who subsequently in 2010 betrayed the union. The false signature appeared on four different documents, all dated February 16, 2006. The first forged document was a union resolution sanctioning the five of us for the supposed banking fraud involving the $55 million. The second document informed Labor Secretary Salazar of the sanctioning. The third, which is addressed to both the union and the labor department, states that I have been removed as general secretary and expelled from the union. The fourth forged document is Zuñiga's supposed resignation from the union—as if he had coincidentally signed all these documents and resigned on the very same day.

These documents formed the cornerstone of our legal case against the labor department and the traitors headed up by Morales. As soon as he learned of the forgery, Zuñiga filed a criminal complaint. On February 28—the same day Salazar made the official declaration of the government's support of Morales—Zuñiga had personally alerted the labor secretary of the forgery and the fact that the false documents were being used to illicitly achieve the aims of Grupo México. Salazar was then obligated by law to inform the PGR of this crime, but of course he didn't; he was in on it.

Nevertheless, based on Zuñiga's criminal complaint, an investigation into the forgery moved forward. In late March, our conviction that the signatures had been forged was confirmed by a report from graphoscopy experts at the PGR. Though the attorney general's office had been instructed to press the campaign against us in every way possible, no one had been paying attention to the graphoscopy department—a technical team that was uninvolved in the PGR's overarching political machinations. The report, for us, was an exciting development. It was only after we went public with it that the PGR realized it had a problem.

Unbelievably, the attorney general's office announced in a brief public statement in mid-April that the false documents, along with the reports declaring their falsity, had been stolen from the PGR's Mexico City offices. Suddenly the most compelling hard evidence we had against Grupo México and the labor department was gone, without a trace. The PGR insisted on blaming low-level officers for the theft, failing to state why such officers would be motivated to take the documents.
La Jornada
—a daily paper that has done a better job than most at reporting honestly on the conflict—ran a story on the highly suspicious theft, along with several other major media outlets.

Once again, the economic power of Germán Feliciano Larrea had gotten him what he wanted. He'd managed to have evidence stolen while it was in the custody of the PGR itself. More than likely, he'd simply paid off someone in the attorney general's office to make the papers disappear.

As a result of this supposed theft, the falsification of the signatures remained unpunished, as it does to this day. In the coming years, we would continue to hold labor department officials responsible for the forgery. Marco del Toro, the criminal lawyer who would do so much for Los Mineros, presented several complaints on Zuñiga'a behalf. Incredibly, in 2010, Zuñiga would leave the union and publicly withdraw his complaint regarding the forgery, declaring that he no longer claimed any crime had been committed. He'd finally given in and been bought off by Grupo México, joining the side of the enemies of the union.

In May of 2006, a month after the PGR sent duplicated case files to
San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León, and Sonora, each of those states issued arrest warrants for me as well as for my union colleagues Juan Linares Montúfar, Héctor Félix Estrella, José Angel Rocha Pérez, and Gregorio Pérez Romo (a courier who wasn't even a union member). The judge overseeing the complaint in the state of Nuevo León handled the warrant differently from the other two judges. Being slightly more principled, this judge saw that he clearly had no jurisdiction over the matter and said so—although all he did was wash his hands of the
case, transferring it instead to the Court 32 of the Federal District in Mexico City.

Our defense had become triply difficult. Each one of those charged now had to fight off the same accusation in two different states and in Mexico City—a clear violation of double jeopardy. It was obvious to anyone who looked that the propagation of the rejected fraud charges to three separate states was an underhanded, unconstitutional move.

The plan was outrageous to begin with, but the carelessness with which Grupo México and the PGR tried to pull it off was truly astounding. While Marco del Toro was preparing our defense, he noticed that the warrants signed by the judges from Sonora and San Luis Potosí contained identical paragraphs—even to the point of repeating the same spelling mistakes. These officials simply approved the fully prepared warrants forwarded to them by the PGR, caving to pressure from Los Pinos and simultaneously staining their judicial careers. Rather than reviewing the case in good faith, these lackeys decided to move forward with their copy-paste version of justice.

We immediately went about preparing our defense with the lawyers Juan Rivero Legarreta and Marco del Toro, who had now officially taken over the case from our previous criminal defense lawyer, Maríano Albor. They began work on filing
amparos
²
to move the warrants issued in San Luis Potosí and Sonora to the Federal District, where they would be consolidated with the warrant already transferred there by the judge from Nuevo León.

Initially, my colleagues and I were not as successful in the courts as another defendant in the case of the $55 million. When the judge from Sonora issued arrest warrants for my colleagues and me, he also issued
a warrant for several Scotiabank executives who had acted on behalf of the Mining Trust. Their charges were identical to those made against us. The Scotiabank executives appealed for amparo against the warrant, and a federal court ruled on November 16, 2006, that the appeal was valid,
since the actions of which the trustees from Scotiabank were accused are not considered illegal
. The judge acquitted the Scotiabank employees of any wrongdoing, granting them the widest form of constitutional protection possible.

Two months later, the exact same Sonoran judge who oversaw the Scotiabank acquittal also ruled on the amparo presented on behalf of Juan Linares Montúfar, against the same warrant. Yet in that case, the judge decided that Linares would only receive limited protection. The warrant against him was valid, this judge said; it just contained a few formal errors made on the part of the prosecution. The case would move forward—quite a change from the day this same judge had declared that an identical warrant was completely invalid because no crime had been committed. Why the change? It can only be because the judge was biased against us, the individuals who so deeply threatened the entanglement of Mexican politicians and businessmen.

In the middle of these injustices, we learned that the PGR, through its
organized-crime division (Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada, or SIEDO), was charging me and the same four colleagues with a new crime at the federal level:
lavado de dinero
, or money laundering.

In Mexico, money laundering is defined as “operation with funds derived from illicit sources,” and this new charge was based on the exact same facts that had originated the first federal banking fraud charge. SIEDO's thinking went like this: Since we had allegedly illegally extinguished the Mining Trust (an act that resulted in the banking charge), any use of the resultant funds constituted an operation with funds from an illicit source. Therefore, despite the fact that no crime had been committed, the money-laundering case aimed to take us down for using
the money from the trust to compensate miners and their families and to cover union expenses. Because of the personal vendettas of a few immoral businessmen, SIEDO wasted its time and the taxpayers' money concocting these charges, when it could have devoted those resources to true criminals and real organized crime.

In the summer of 2006, we were relieved to hear that SIEDO's request for warrants on the money-laundering charges was denied—not once but twice. First, the Ninth District Court on Federal Criminal Procedures of the Federal District refused to issue the requested warrant, and then, on July 31, 2006, the Fifth Unitary Circuit Court in Criminal Matters of the First Circuit confirmed the refusal. In August, a federal judge confirmed the decision and revealed the fraudulent nature of the charges, saying, “Not only were there no indications of an illegal source of the assets, but there is clear proof of their legal origin,” and “In any case . . . we can affirm that from the documents that the assets belong to the Union of Miner, Steel and Related Workers of the Mexican Republic.” It was proof that even in a corruptible system, there were still some honest judges.

From Vancouver, I closely followed every step my defense team took
as they fought the arrest warrants issued against the others and me. It was an enormous legal undertaking. Marco del Toro was working tirelessly on our defense, and the tax lawyers José Contreras and José Juan Janeiro and civil law specialists Juan Carlos Hernández and Jesús Hernández persevered in their assistance under very difficult conditions. As the legal battle grew more complicated after 2006, we had to adopt a different strategy, supported by diversifying our sources of income, ensuring international solidarity, and developing extraordinary loyalty, unity, and unprecedented internal cooperation. We devised a coordinated resistance action over more than five years, despite frozen bank accounts, and we continue to progress in the battle with no pause and no opportunity to rest.

Following my departure to Canada, Grupo México and its allies also worked hand in hand with the Departments of Labor, Economy, and
the Interior in their efforts to destroy the leaders of Los Mineros. They even collaborated with the Department of Foreign Relations, exerting pressure on the Canadian ambassador to block the visa requests from our union leaders to travel to Vancouver. Fortunately, none of those attempts worked.

The PGR and the Department of Foreign Relations also worked together in the first months after my departure to have me either deported or extradited back to Mexico, where I would undoubtedly be imprisoned indefinitely. As Mexico tends to do, it pushed first on the migration side, hoping Canada would send me back the basis of purely on immigration law. No deportation was ever mentioned or attempted by Canadian officials.