Collapse of Dignity (34 page)

Now, some seventeen years later, the 1,200 workers of Cananea were once again demanding their rights as employees and as humans, only to be met with threats and repression. Grupo México vigorously denounced the strike in the courts—as it did with the strikes in Taxco and Sombrerete. It's no wonder keeping Cananea open became Grupo México's number one priority: according to
La Jornada
, this one mine accounts for 64 percent of Grupo México's potential earnings, and if copper is excavated at the same rate it has been in previous years, experts predict that the deposits will last from thirty to eighty-two years.

Rather than negotiate a just solution to the Cananea strike, the company simply tried, with the support of Labor Secretary Lozano, to have the strikes declared illegal. On July 31, 2007, one day after the union initiated the strike, the Mexico's labor board, the JFCA, declared the work stoppage unlawful. With the strike officially seen as illegal by the government, workers could be compelled to return to work at the risk of losing their jobs. But the union immediately appealed for a writ of amparo that would grant constitutional protection against the JFCA's resolution; in the meantime, the strike could be legally continued. In October, we were granted protection by the courts. An ensuing appeal from Grupo México was denied, meaning that the miners of Cananea could continue their strike with full legal approval.

In the years leading up to the July 30 strike, conditions at the Cananea
copper mine were notoriously poor. A joint inspection in 2005 between the company, the union, and the labor department had resulted in forty-eight complaints of negligence in working conditions, of which only nine were partially and incompletely remedied. In April of 2007, three months before the strike began, the labor department completed another inspection, finding seventy-two distinct issues in need of correction, many centered around faulty electrical systems and hazardous buildups of silica dust. Yet, by July, when the strike was declared, nothing had been done.

In October of 2007, with the strike in full swing, Cananea's Union Section 65 requested that the Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network (MHSSN,
mhssn.igc.org
) undertake a study of the mine. The MHSSN is a volunteer network of four hundred occupational health and safety professionals who provide information and assistance on workplace hazards in the
maquiladoras
—foreign-owned factories where workers are traditionally paid very low wages—along the U.S.–Mexico border. The organization agreed to inspect the mine and subsequently found a mind-boggling level of negligence. The binational team working on the Cananea study was made up of occupational health professionals including three physicians, three industrial hygienists, a pulmonary technician, and a registered nurse. They inspected the facilities, interviewed workers, and administered lung-function tests to sixty-eight of the miners working in the copper mine and its related processing plants.

The resulting seventy-four-page report is an unconditional and extensively documented condemnation of Grupo México's handling of the facility, pointing to more than 220 serious health and safety problems at the Cananea facility. These were the first two bullet points in the MHSSN's list of major findings at the front of the report:

    
•
  
“The conditions observed inside the mine and processing plants, and the work practices reported by the interviewed workers, paint a clear picture of a workplace being “deliberately run into the ground.” A serious lack of preventive maintenance, failure to repair equipment and correct visible safety hazards, and a
conspicuous lack of basic housekeeping have created a work site where workers have been exposed to high levels of toxic dusts and acid mists, operate malfunctioning and poorly maintained equipment, and work in simply dangerous surroundings.”

    
•
  
“The deliberate dismantling of dust collectors in the Concentrator area processing plants by Grupo México approximately two years ago means that workers in these areas have been subjected to high concentrations of dust containing 23 percent quartz silica, with 51 percent of sampled dust in the respirable particle size range, protected only by completely inadequate personal respirators. Occupational exposures to silica can lead to debilitating, fatal respiratory diseases including silicosis and lung cancer.”

The MHSSN also reported that the Cananea mine operates under conditions that could lead to collapse due to high levels of toxic dust and acid gases, adding that it is not just the workers who are exposed to these risky contaminants but also their families and the residents of the town. The silicone content detected in workers' blood tests was at levels that lead to fatal respiratory illnesses like silicosis, whose symptoms appear only after years of exposure. In the enclosed processing buildings that are part of the complex, mine workers had exposures to very fine silica dust that registered at least ten times the government's legal limit.

Perhaps the most affecting part of the report is the collection of pictures the MHSSN used to back up its descriptions of the mine's deplorable condition. They show clear, full-color photos of silica dust mounded on top of machinery, pieces of disconnected ductwork that should be collecting the dust, and open holes in the floor surrounded by yet more piles of the dangerous silica powder. There are also photos of unguarded engine belts, steel corroded from acid mists, and open control panels where energized wires are coated in dust.

In addition to its report, on November 13, the MHSSN sent a message to Labor Secretary Lozano stating that “the industrial safety and hygiene conditions are deplorable in the mine at Cananea, Sonora, and
that the same is true at the mines of Sombrerete, Zacatecas, and Taxco, Guerrero, all of which belong to Grupo México.” They informed the labor secretary that they were conducting similar studies in Sombrerete and Taxco, free of charge. Based on their preliminary findings and on the union complaints dating back to 2005, they were confident they would find a level of danger in both mines similar to Cananea. In the letter, they invite Lozano “to visit the mines in question to personally corroborate the poor safety conditions,” in order to “avoid continued risk to the lives of workers” of Union Sections 65, 201, and 17. They respectfully ask him to form a commission to check into the study's findings, with the participation of the Department of Health, the governments of the states of Sonora, Zacatecas, and Guerrero, the Miners' Union, the United Steelworkers, and the IMF.

But despite the findings of the MHSSN, Lozano and his labor department displayed their characteristic insensitivity and deceit. He sent a letter to the MHSSN and, through Labor Undersecretary Alvaro Castro, made public statements to the media containing the absurd statement that the study was not legally valid because it was not directed by the labor department itself and because it was completed while the mine was subjected to a strike. Unbelievably, the letter also described conditions in the mine as “optimal” and stated that the majority of problems found by the MHSSN were minor issues that the company had resolved, when in fact nothing had been done to correct them. Eduardo Bours, Sonora's governor, never made an inspection, but he defended Grupo México and the mine operation, and questioned the legality of the study.

Garret Brown, a certified industrial hygienist from California and the coordinator of the MHSSN study,
*
was pointed in his reply:

Brown's statement echoed the union's own press release, which we had put out the day before, on November 14, 2007, and a series of ads we placed in newspapers in Sonora and Mexico City. In them, we restated the conclusions of the MHSSN and said that these “indicate that there are serious health and safety hazards in the Cananea mine that require immediate long-term correction in order to protect workers from accidents and chronic exposures leading to occupational illnesses.” We detailed the steps that Grupo México and the labor department needed to take to correct the disastrous course Cananea was on. Predictably, we received no response.

In August 2007, labor-related violence broke out once again, this time
at La Caridad copper mine in Nacozari, Sonora—another one of the mines whose privatization had contributed to the 1990 creation of the Mining Trust. At La Caridad, the government had allowed Grupo México to unlawfully fire its whole workforce of nine hundred union members. The company then handpicked about seven hundred of those members to return to their jobs (they had to be intimidated and threatened before they agreed) and then brought in 1,200 additional workers from southern Mexico. To
combat this arbitrary firing, we won a legal injunction that compelled Grupo México to allow the dismissed workers to return to their jobs.

On August 11, 2007, the dismissed workers drove to the Nacozari facility to demand their reinstatement, in accordance with the judge's ruling. At 8:30 p.m., several buses belonging to Grupo México pulled up to the site and unloaded men who began attacking the assembled workers. Shots were fired, and the attackers began throwing union members forcefully into the buses. One group of three workers hid and subsequently got word that they should head to the foundry, close to the only exit of the Nacozari facility. They found the exit blocked by guards, and as the driver put the car in reverse, a bullet pierced the rear window, hitting the backseat passenger, miner Reynaldo Hernández González, in the head. The driver sped away, calling to Reynaldo from the front seat but receiving no answer. He stopped the car and, by the flame of his lighter, saw that his colleague was dead from the bullet wound.

That same night, company men seized, beat, and tortured the twenty union members who had been thrown into buses. Eventually, to stop the beatings, the workers falsely admitted that they had been the aggressors and had intended to forcibly seize the facility from Grupo México, when in reality all they had been doing was peacefully demanding their court-ordered reinstatement. The company also tried to get these workers to accuse the executive committee of the Miners' Union of having incited acts of violence. The men were then driven to the local jail, where they were detained for over a day. None of the armed attackers were questioned or taken into custody. An investigation by the Workers' Study and Action Center later found that relatives of the La Caridad miners called the police and begged them to come stop the violence but that the authorities refused to send patrols. One worker's wife actually went to the police station but was met with the same refusal. She said she overheard an officer say that there were company orders not to send patrols to the Nacozari mine, no matter what happened.

In the aftermath of Reynaldo Hernández's death at the La Caridad mine, Grupo México and the Sonoran government tried to cover up the true facts of what had happened. Hernández's body was never taken to
the hospital but was instead driven to a morgue in Hermosillo, five hours away. The family was not permitted access to the body for four full days, and they received no reason for this delay. The most blatant attempt at concealment, though, came in the autopsy, which claimed that Reynaldo's death had come as the result of a blunt force trauma to the head, not a bullet wound. A blow to the head seemed much less calculated than a gunshot, Grupo México must have reasoned.

The company and Sonora governor Eduardo Bours Castelo both put forth the invented claim that the workers were going to take over the company's Nacozari facility by force and that the armed forces had been sent in to protect the workers while the company defended the facility. But in no way did the plotters of this carnage send armed public personnel to protect miners. The security forces were present, but they stood idly by, never once offering help while workers were beaten and shot. They were there only to make sure that the thugs hired by Grupo México carried out their violent repression.

Governor Bours lied constantly, saying that his government was going to conduct investigations to find the cause of Reynaldo Hernández's death. There was no investigation, nor have any of the authors of this violent repression been punished. Bours has never apologized to Hernández's family or any of the tortured workers. All his actions were meant to protect Grupo México. He proved himself to be one of the most “PAN-like” PRI members (we call these rightist PRI members “
emPANizado
”—“breaded”). A look at Bours's background reveals why he would act in such a way: He has a great personal stake in protecting business interests in Mexico. He is heir to Bachoco, an agro-industrial company created by his father, which primarily sells poultry and pork products. Although he has participated in numerous national and transnational businesses, Bachoco is his biggest endeavor, holding as it does a virtual monopoly over poultry products. Bours was also once a director of the Business Coordinating Council, a group of the richest businessmen in Mexico, and as governor he dedicated his time to defending these obscenely wealthy entrepreneurs. He entered politics not to serve the public interest but to serve businessmen, to build his own companies, and to satisfy
his ambition. He is dedicated to covering for individuals such as Germán Feliciano Larrea. As governor of Sonora from 2003 to 2009, he ignored and disavowed the aggressions against mineworkers by Larrea's company, proving that all these business groups act as one large criminal organization. They are like a brotherhood or secret society, all protecting one another from the consequences of their criminal acts.