Collapse of Dignity (40 page)

Gómez Mont adamantly assured Marco that he had freed himself from his previous job as Grupo México's lawyer, and that his relationship with Larrea might actually help Los Mineros: He told Marco that he wanted to be a “communication bridge” between Grupo México and the Miners' Union. He claimed he wanted to help solve the ongoing strikes at Cananea, Taxco, and Sombrerete. Marco thanked him, the meeting ended, and the new interior secretary was whisked back to his helicopter.

Not being born yesterday, we had trouble believing Gómez Mont's claims. In fact, when Marco told me about the meeting, we agreed on his true motive: he simply wanted to get to us before we went to the media and publicized his direct connection with Grupo México. That explained the rush to meet, and his insistence that we would see a new, fairer Gómez Mont in office. He didn't want to help. He just didn't want us pointing out in public how outrageous Calderón's appointment was.

Gómez Mont immediately validated our doubts. In the following weeks, he called several union leaders from the Cananea copper mine to his office to discuss the continuing strike, but each time, he made them enter through a secret door, saying he wanted to “avoid creating false expectations.” He knew full well he wasn't about to negotiate fairly with us. Nevertheless, our colleagues attended the meetings in the spirit of wanting to give him a chance. Gómez Mont also pointedly excluded members of the national union's executive committee from these meetings—a gesture meant to show his solidarity with Lozano's recent denial of
toma de nota
and with the calls for me and for the rest of the committee to resign. Meeting with any member of the executive committee would be a tacit acknowledgment of my leadership, and Gómez Mont refused to cross that line.

But the new interior secretary's antiunion actions weren't limited to ignoring the democratically elected leadership. In fact, he was about to perpetrate some of the worst direct aggression we had seen from the government in a while.

In the Federal District courts where our defense lawyers had consolidated the state-level banking charges against us, Elías Morales's accusations were beginning to fail. Though the PGR always appealed rulings in our favor, it was becoming clear that, ultimately, the nearly three-year-old charges wouldn't stick. This was infuriating for our enemies.

So, Grupo México's mastermind group got together once again and came up with a new offensive. They would start back at the original banking-fraud investigation, they decided—the one that the Mexican banking commission (CNBV) had declared without basis. But, since the charges were exactly the same as they were in 2006, what would make the outcome different this time? In a country like Mexico, the answer was simple: They decided to simply skip the CNBV, even though the commission's review is required by law. In late 2008, the PGR sent the old criminal file straight back to federal court. The plaintiffs were the same—Grupo México lackeys Elías Morales, Martín Perales, and Miguel Castilleja. The three spuriously claimed to be representing “thousands” of workers. The defendants were also the same: me, Héctor Félix, José Angel, and Juan Linares (although this time they left out Gregorio Pérez, the courier who had been charged in the first case, and who had already ended up spending a good deal of time in jail). The CNBV report from 2006, which stated that the case could not proceed because no crime had been committed, was left out. The judge at the First District Court in Criminal Procedures, unaware of the CNBV report, issued all four warrants without hesitation.

Now it was time for our “communication bridge” to get involved. Mere weeks after his appointment, Gómez Mont ordered that all the union's bank accounts and all my family's accounts be re-seized based on the new charges. Our defense team had fought long and hard after the 2006 bank account sequestrations and had recently regained control of most of our assets, but now we were back at square one. Obeying Gómez Mont, SIEDO, the PGR's organized-crime division, again froze my personal account as well as those of my wife, my three sons, and my sister in Monterrey. Once again, we were relying fully on the solidarity and support of Los Mineros and the USW. The accounts of all twelve
members of the executive committee were also refrozen, along with all the national union's accounts and those of all union sections in the country. We immediately filed an amparo against all of the freezes, but we knew it would be just the beginning of a long fight. Once again, they were out to financially asphyxiate us and reduce our ability to fight back, especially at Cananea, Taxco, and Sombrerete, which were by now in their sixteenth month of striking.

These seizures were the first actions of our new mediator, the supposed “communication bridge” between Grupo México and the Miners' Union. Next on his agenda was to follow Germán Larrea's request for the physical capture of the executive committee's most prominent members.

In Mexico, there are two types of offenses: “serious” and “not serious.”
The only difference between the two is that for a “serious” offense (a
delito grave
in Spanish), the accused person can be held without bail and is not eligible for a stay of legal punishment while the validity of an amparo filing is with a judge. Thus, many people accused of a “serious” crime are imprisoned with no bail regardless of an ongoing amparo proceeding—not because they are a flight risk or a danger to society, but because the crime they are charged with happens to be in a catalog of offenses the Mexican legal system has deemed “serious.” The arrangement creates a fertile climate for political persecution.

The banking fraud charges were categorized as serious, and that's a big part of why I had to leave the country; had they managed to apprehend me, they could have held me indefinitely without having to prove anything. From the beginning, Juan Linares, secretary of the union's Safety and Justice Council, had been named in the case brought by Elías Morales. Thanks to the amparos filed by our defense team, Juan had managed to stay out of jail while continuing to play an active role in Los Mineros. But when the PGR refiled the federal case in late 2008 and convinced judges to order new arrest warrants, Juan knew it was time to move.

In November, Juan left Mexico City for Michoacán, hoping to stay out of sight until the union's defense team could file for protection. The union's enemies knew, as did I, that Juan was one of the most valuable members of the executive committee. I'd known him for over twenty years at this point. He was a kind man with a white beard. Many years before, my father had designated him as the committee's delegate for the state of Sonora, a position he retained after I was elected. During my first four years as general secretary, I had made many trips to Sonora and seen Juan in action as delegate. On one occasion, we had organized a strike in La Caridad outside Nacozari, but some of the workers were more obedient to Grupo México than to their own interests, and the company was starting to make threats about calling in the army to evict the strikers. In this highly tense situation, I saw Juan's ability to lead firsthand; he spoke to the workers and to company officials with equal amounts of conviction and without any fear. He refused to let anyone intimidate him or corrupt him, though many tried. Juan called for solidarity from every worker at La Caridad, asking in strong, eloquent language for their commitment to the cause of Los Mineros. In short, Juan was one of the pillars of the union's executive committee, and that made him a prime target of the PGR.

It didn't take long for federal forces to find him in Michoacán, as they'd been ordered to do by Gómez Mont. On the afternoon of December 3, Juan was playing soccer with some union colleagues near his home. Suddenly a group of policemen interrupted the game and seized him on the field. He'd been easy to spot: large letters on his jersey read “LOS MINEROS.” Though he was innocent of any crime, it would be Juan's last day of freedom for two years, two months, and twenty days. He was promptly taken to Mexico City's North Prison and locked up with no bail set. He was now officially a political prisoner of Felipe Calderón.

The very next day, they nabbed another union member who was key to us at that time. This time it was Carlos Pavón, executive committee member and the union's secretary of political affairs. Pavón hadn't been named in Morales's case, but Alonso Ancira had stepped in with a completely new charge intended to further confuse the situation and create
more internal divisions in Los Mineros. Weeks before Pavón's arrest, Ancira had filed a complaint against him, Juan Linares, and executive committee member José Barajas, who had served as secretary treasurer since May 2006 and was also charged along with Juan and me in the federal fraud case. Ancira's charges were filed in the state of Coahuila, and a judge in the town of Monclova—who happened to be a friend of Ancira's—issued an arrest warrant for the three men.

Linares, Pavón, and Barajas were targeted in this new case precisely because Ancira knew they were some of the most important figures in the executive committee. With me out of the country and these three out of commission, the union's day-to-day operations would be severely compromised. As justification for the arrests, Ancira claimed that these three were responsible for a multimillion-dollar fraud against Altos Hornos de México. The accusation was completely false and easily disproven and, at its core, resembled the federal charges against us. Ancira's complaint said that Altos Hornos had given the union one thousand pesos for every active worker in its operations but that the union's leadership had kept these funds for themselves. They twisted it to make it sound like the Pavón, Linares, and Barajas had hoarded the workers' money, which wasn't the case at all. The complaint failed to mention that the money was meant for the continuation of social programs for the miners, which is precisely what it had been used for. That purpose was clearly stated in the collective bargaining agreement signed by Ancira himself. His complaint was nothing but a malicious scheme to further slander these three men, imprison them if possible, and keep them locked up until they became traitors to Los Mineros.

On December 4, personnel from the federal Department of Public Security burst into Pavón's home in Mexico City to carry out the arrest warrant based on Ancira's charges. They dragged him away with ridiculously excessive security measures—it was as if he were a notorious drug lord. He was taken to the airport, where he would be flown back to Monclova, Coahuila. Even though the warrant had been issued by a state judge, a jet owned by the federal government was waiting to take him away.

From the PGR's hangar in the Mexico City airport, Pavón called Marco del Toro. (Curiously, the arresting agents hadn't yet taken his cell phone.) Pavón was distraught, and he begged Marco to send help. After that, he called me too, and he sounded absolutely paralyzed with fear. We assured him we would help him fight the arrest, and within the hour, Luis Chavez, a lawyer from Marco's firm, was on a flight to Coahuila to meet him. Marco had had to rent a plane to get Chavez there in time, but it was a necessity: if someone wasn't there to represent Pavón, he would likely be appointed a public defender instead.

The following morning, Pavón appeared in court to make a statement to the judge who had ordered his arrest. The courtroom was crawling with news reporters who had been sent by Alonso Ancira. Because of the way Mexican courts operated, there typically wouldn't be much to see: court cases are conducted mostly in writing, and judges typically sit in their offices for the majority of the day while clerks attend hearings and take notes for them. But in Pavón's case, Ancira wanted a show. Not only did the judge personally appear to listen to Pavón's statement, but she also agreed to take an interview with a group of reporters as soon as she left the courtroom, which was an unusual move. In this interview, she warned that if a provisional release were requested for Pavón, the bail amount would be close to ten million pesos. With our accounts freshly frozen by Gómez Mont, there was no way we could bail Pavón out at that price.

Later that day, Pavón was on the verge of a breakdown. He met again with Marco's associate Luis Chávez and was in tears. Luis told him not to worry—he and Marco had come up with an idea. Their plan was to request Pavón's provisional release not through the presiding judge but from an amparo judge. No one would expect the move, and they had a hunch that they could convince the amparo court to drastically lower the bail amount to something the union could afford. (For Ancira's charge, bail was possible; the supposed crime was not on the list of “serious” offenses.)

During the nine days Pavón was in jail, we began to see signs of great timorousness in him. In the telephone calls they allowed him, he tearfully
reported to Luis Chávez that the union's enemies—including business associates of Alonso Ancira—had been visiting him in jail. He said they had offered him freedom and a large sum of money, in exchange for a denouncement of the union's executive committee. He said he turned down the bribe, but he yelled and wept, in a cowardly and stupid manner, accusing us of having abandoned him. He said he was deathly sick, that jail was going to kill him. And he showed no appreciation for our strenuous efforts to raise the money needed to get him out of jail. By the end of Pavón's stay in jail, Luis was at his wits' end listening to the man's complaints.

Nevertheless, Marco's plan to request bail from an amparo judge ended up working. Pavón was granted provisional release with a lowered bail amount of about five and half million pesos. It was still a steep price, but we thought we could come up with it, and we were confident we would be reimbursed after we won the case in court. To make the payment, we had to pull from one of our last remaining assets—a striking fund that was used to support the workers at Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea, as well as the families of the men lost at Pasta de Conchos.