Collapse of Dignity (36 page)

The workers of Cananea showed the bold resistance of their forefathers, repelling the government forces and hanging on to the facility as best they could. A group of strikers also gathered in front of the mayor's office, calling for Bours to order the attackers off the work site. The miners called a special assembly the following day, and I spoke to them via videoconference—as I had done about once a month since the strike began. I heard their stories and felt their anger, and then gave a speech encouraging them to take back the facility, to fight hard, out of pride and dignity. Though they were furious at the company's acts of repression, I ensured them that I, personally, as well as all the members of the executive committee, was with them to the end. That same day, in response to an amparo filed by the union's defense team, the court changed its ruling and again recognized the strike, forcing Grupo México to withdraw its forces.

A month later, Grupo México and the PGR filed an appeal against the court's decision to recognize the strike, but the following month a judge confirmed the constitutional protection granted to the union. Then, on April 23, 2008, the JFCA issued a third decision, fully overruling its earlier
position and declaring the strike legal, probably in order to avoid responsibility for violating the previous amparo granted in favor of the union. But our struggle continued: On May 19, 2008, Grupo México filed yet another amparo against the JFCA's decision. On July 3, 2008, the Fourth District Court in Labor Matters of Mexico City denied the company's amparo, meaning that the strike would continue with the approval of the courts.

We had won a battle at Cananea, but there were many more coming.
This mine had become the centerpiece in our battle against Grupo México. It was the company's most important Mexican asset, but it was also a holy ground for union members—in declaring and defending their strike, the Cananea miners were upholding the legacy of their ancestors. Over a century before, in 1906, workers at the very same mine had sacrificed greatly for worker's rights. During the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, conditions in the mine were terrible, and the Mexican workers there were making three and a half pesos per day, while the American workers at the same mine were making five pesos. The Cananea miners went on strike, demanding an end to discrimination against Mexican workers in addition to an eight-hour workday, minimum wage, prohibition of child labor, and several other demands. President Díaz called in the Arizona Rangers and local Sonora forces to crush the uprising, leaving twenty-two miners dead, twenty-seven injured, and fifty arrested. The strike ended with this violence, but with the triumph of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the Cananea strikers' demands were incorporated into the 1917 Constitution as fundamental rights of all workers. It is that heritage that the strikers in modern-day Cananea hoped to uphold as they fought the ongoing aggression of Grupo México.

*
mhssn.igc.org/CananeaOHSReport.PDF

To fall is allowed, to get up is required!

—
RUSSIAN PROVERB

Since the beginning of the conflict, the union and its executive
committee had relied heavily on the aid of our legal advisors. In Mexico, a complicated situation like ours can involve the filing of amparo after amparo: by 2008, in the more than two years that had passed since the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, the courts had gone back and forth on the legality of the Cananea strike, the recognition of me as union leader, and the legitimacy of the fraud charges against me and my colleagues. Although we had received favorable rulings on all these state-level fraud charges, the legal situation remained complicated and painfully sluggish, with the PGR appealing every decision the courts made in our favor.

Fortunately, since 2006, we'd had the aid of our incredible defense lawyer, Marco del Toro, who to this day is a crucial ally to me and Los Mineros. But del Toro's partner, Juan Rivero Legarreta, proved himself less of an asset to the union.

I'd first been put in touch with Rivero by Alonso Ancira of Altos Hornos de Mexico, soon after the conflict began. At the time I was still on fairly good terms with Ancira, and I took his recommendation. In the first stages of the partnership between Rivero and the union, it didn't seem like a bad decision; with Rivero came his partner, Marco del Toro, and the two won some important victories for the workers and the
members of the executive committee. The Supreme Court had forced the labor department to grant me recognition, and, though the state-level banking charges were still in play, they had gotten them consolidated in three courts in Mexico City. Rivero and del Toro had also helped us win amparo trials to keep the Cananea strike legal and ongoing.

From the start, Rivero had been something of a character. A tall, loud, flashy guy, he came across as someone in love with the high life. When he came to Vancouver, he was always dressed in the most fashionable clothes, and he would stay in the most upscale hotels he could find. Most of these expenses he paid with a corporate credit card given to him by Alonso Ancira. He loved the spotlight, too. Whenever Rivero got a chance to appear on radio or television, he took it. Interviewers usually found it difficult to wrest the microphone from his grip.

But this somewhat ostentatious demeanor was coupled with increasingly unsettling actions on Rivero's part. The union's relationship with Ancira had deteriorated rapidly—the steel magnate had become increasingly close to the business coalition aligned against the union—and Rivero's close relationship with him was troublesome. Several of the union's executive committee members complained about Rivero's manner, as did a few of the Steelworkers who had worked with him. Once, my wife asked him what he thought the time frame would be for our family's return to Mexico. “I'm not a magician!” he responded, telling her rudely that he didn't know how much longer it would take before he could straighten out the criminal charges. (Since that incident, all of us in Canada called him “the Magician.”) Another time, he told Oralia that she should just divorce me, because the persecution would never end. A few months later, he told her it was a shame she would never leave me. But despite these unseemly actions, we kept Rivero on, mainly because he was willing to work without much up-front pay. He always told us not to worry about the fees, that his price would be determined by the results he obtained. The union's accounts still being frozen, we had little choice but to continue using his services.

Eventually, though, we were pushed to a breaking point. All through 2007, I talked to him nearly every day on the phone, and he visited
Vancouver every month, but he was becoming very tight-lipped. He would gloss over important points in our discussions. It almost seemed like he wasn't trying anymore. At one point he assured me that he had been able to secure my home in Mexico City, but we later found out that he had done no such thing—it was still seized by the government.

Though he'd been brought on as a criminal defense lawyer, Rivero had also begun inserting himself in the labor side of the union's business. While he should have been working with Marco del Toro on having arrest warrants struck down, he was busy trying to gently talk me into stepping down as general secretary. At one point, he even advised me that if I didn't relent and give up my leadership, the government would frontally attack the union and harm my family. I was stunned to hear him saying such things after we had placed so much confidence in him. I had trusted him greatly, but now he was acting suspiciously like a double agent. Sometime later, Rivero came to me and proposed a solution that he claimed would end the conflict once and for all. He said he had set up a meeting between himself, a representative of Grupo México, and Labor Secretary Lozano—to take place in Lozano's office. The three of them, Rivero assured me, would resolve the conflict “freely and without interference”—and without the presence of members of the union. I'm not sure how naïve he thought we were, but with this suggestion it was now fully evident that our own defense lawyer was acting in the service of the union's prime enemies, Germán Larrea and Javier Lozano. Our response to this “solution” was that we would gladly accept a meeting in Lozano's office about a resolution to the conflict, but that there would need to be three representatives present from the union's executive committee, plus our labor lawyer, Nestor de Buen. Naturally, our suggestion was answered with silence.

The final straw came when several members of the executive committee came to me absolutely enraged over a series of meetings they had had with Rivero over the previous months. In the presence of Labor Secretary Lozano, Rivero had repeatedly tried to convince them to be more acquiescent to the demands of Grupo México and
told them that they should stop pushing so hard for wage and benefit increases and accept more of the company's terms. He had told my colleagues that they needed to be more flexible, and that they should accept that I wasn't present and feel comfortable making decisions in my absence. Rivero, my colleagues told me, had also adopted a completely submissive attitude to the labor secretary—and none of them liked that dynamic one bit. In fact, he was acting as if he were me. He called the members of Los Mineros
his
colleagues,
his
workers, acting as if he had taken on the responsibility of being my personal spokesperson. From the things Rivero had been saying, several leaders within the union were convinced that his goal was to take over control of the union from me and become general secretary himself.

It was a troubling report, but it fit with my growing doubts about Rivero. I now suspected that his true clients were not the union but Alonso Ancira, Germán Larrea, and Javier Lozano. No doubt someone, most likely Lozano, made Rivero believe that if he could get me to step down, he would be appointed as head of Los Mineros—as long as he kept the workers subjugated, of course. The thought of this lawyer as leader of a union is absurd: first of all, the workers would never accept him (he was not even a member of the union) and second, Rivero was absolutely ignorant of our organization's procedures, its bylaws, its internal regulations, and the practice of true union democracy. He took Lozano's bait but fell in the trap of his own unbridled ambition.

Now that we'd seen through Rivero's game, we knew we couldn't let him do any more damage to the organization. Already, he was trying to win the loyalty of some executive committee members, and his actions were provoking internal confrontations. In February of 2008, Rivero made a trip to Vancouver, and I told him bluntly that I didn't like the way he was acting and that he was in no way authorized to make decisions on my behalf or on the behalf of anyone in the union. I told him it was not his job to be involved with the labor negotiations; he had been hired as a criminal defense lawyer, and his job was to vigorously fight to clear the names of those falsely accused. He thanked me for relieving him of
involvement in those meetings and said he would start concentrating more on the criminal side. We said good-bye without event.

I suspect that he left that meeting and immediately called up Lozano and Ancira to tell them what had happened. With no involvement in the labor negotiations, Rivero would be useless to them. When the lawyer got back to Mexico City, and without speaking to me, he made a public announcement claiming that I had fired him as defense lawyer, and he complained that the union and I had treated him unfairly. The media, being sponsored by Larrea, Lozano, and Ancira, picked up the story, portraying Rivero in a sympathetic light.

It was absolutely infuriating, but at least we had expelled an internal enemy. Unfortunately, it wasn't the last we would see of Rivero.

In May of 2008, the union held its biannual convention in Mexico
City, in the union's 11 de Julio hall. Once again, I opened the ceremony via videoconference, giving the more than one thousand assembled members of Los Mineros an overview of the past two years and entreating them to hold fast. Miners at Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea were now in their tenth month of striking; the banking fraud charges against me and the others were still on their seemingly endless journey through the Mexican legal system; and we had lost several union sections to the threats and harassment of Lozano and Grupo México in the last year. Yet the vast majority of the union's rank and file remained energized and steadfast in their belief in the union's purpose. Over the course of that convention, I was once again reelected unanimously as general secretary of Los Mineros. It was the third time I'd been unanimously elected to lead the union, and I had now been in Canada for over two years. There was no end to my exile in sight.

It was at this 2008 convention that Francisco Hernández Juárez, head of the Telephone Workers' Union and president of the National Workers' Union, repeated his claim about the long-brewing conspiracy against the union, stating that Carlos María Abascal had told him back in 2005 that “they were coming to get” me. The 2008 convention also marked our final
decision to officially leave Mexico's Labor Congress—the umbrella organization made up of mainly PRI-associated unions. In the two years since Pasta de Conchos, it had become clear that our dire struggle for democracy and the rights of workers threatened the Congress's comfortable relationship with the administrations of Fox and then Calderón. Though we'd received enthusiastic support from around the globe, the Labor Congress never once expressed a single word of solidarity or encouragement. We knew why: the Labor Congress depended on the existing power structure for its own power, and thus it did not matter to them that the Miners' Union was one of its founding members, nor that I had served as president of different commissions of the Congress in the past—it had to preserve the status quo at all costs. The Congress had shown clearly that its loyalty lay with the government, whatever its ideology was, not with the workers whose rights it was established to protect.