Blood Mines

Traditionally, the development of mining and the metal transformation industry has been linked in Mexico to the uncontrolled exploitation of mineral resources and the workforce. This situation, however, has intensified during the last 12 years due to the lack of a rational policy of respect for human rights, from which our country is straying further and further.

The unchecked ambition of some businesspeople and the complicity of municipal, state and federal governments has brought on this terrible progression. There are more work accidents in mines and processing plants than there were twelve years ago. Inhuman conditions are increasingly prevalent, to the point that they are turning the industrial activity of this important sector into frequent acts of corporate terrorism against the labour and human rights of both workers and the population at large.

There are clear cases of covering up and official protection of certain companies, which given the government’s servility is deplorable as well as dishonest. This miserable, shameless role has been played by the Ministers for Work, Francisco Javier Salazar under Vicente Fox, and Javier Lozano Alarcón under Felipe Calderón. This breed of bureaucrat have corrupted this ministry’s responsibility, they have turned it into a booty to be plundered by a few while most of the country’s workers and democratic independent unions are suppressed. Today both men, supported by the PAN (National Action Party) and by the businesspeople who have abjectly served it, are attempting to take up positions in the Senate, from where, if they get there, they will continue to betray and harm the country, drawing up and changing laws so as to cynically serve their bosses better.

Meanwhile, workers continue to be exploited. Grupo Peñoles has had, over the last two years, over 20 deaths and 40 serious injuries in its mines and processing plants. It has also used groups of paramilitaries, traitors and thugs when workers have protested, as was the case when the mine worker Juventino Flores Salas was beaten to death with pipes and spades Fresnillo, Zacatecas on the 10^th June 2009. Others were also seriously injured and vehicles were destroyed, and no authority has stepped in when these crimes are officially investigated.

Peñoles has also spent many years contaminating the environment and water supplies with lead, zinc and other metals which do irreversible damage to the health of hundreds of children, whole communities and the workers themselves in plants in Torreón, Coahuila and other regions of Mexico.

Grupo Acerero del Norte, GAN, has committed similar or worse crimes in Monclova and in the coal mining region of Coahuila, without any state or federal government investigating or sanctioning it with the full weight of the law. As well as repressing and using thugs to control and humiliate workers and to impose protection contracts, GAN directors have devoted themselves to corrupting a clique of traitors to disassociate workers from their union organisation, to mutilate collective contracts and to hand over the rights and victories accumulated over 60 years to sham unions, in blatant complicity with the CTM (the Confederation of Mexican Workers) and Coahuila state governments. Without a doubt they are preparing the ground to hand over the company to their Korean associates in the Pohang Iron and Steel Company, at the expense of their own workers and the blood they spill.

Of course the pinnacle of corruption and cynicism is Grupo México, which is counted among the world’s 10 least ethical companies because it never protects people’s lives or their health. Wherever it operates, it always carries destruction and death, as in the case of its subsidiary the Southern Peru Copper Corporation, based in Peru, or its ex-parent company the American Smelting and Refining Company, Asarco, based in the United States. It has also demonstrated its cynical attitude at Pasta de Conchos and the other mines and units which it exploits in Mexico and abroad.

From 2006 until the date on which the shareholders and the board of directors of Grupo México decided to attack the miners’ union, they have had over 100 deaths and 200 injuries among miners. In Cananea alone, since the 6^th June 2010, when they illegally occupied the mine after an obvious legal pretence with the  full backing of the government and over 4 thousand members of the PFP (the Federal Preventive Police), the state police and even the Army, over 20 untrained contractors have died and there have been over 100 injuries, not only among the strikebreakers who are recruited from as far away as Central America but also among members of the police forces themselves.

Grupo México, alongside Peñoles and GAN, have turned their mines and plants into true concentration camps where they systematically repress, torture and humiliate workers; it is a form of disguised modern slavery. Elsewhere, they dazzle the PAN government with new sums of additional investments. Through this over-exploitation of human labour and an unprecedented growth of the mining sector, Germán Larrea, of Grupo México and Alberto Bailleres, of Peñoles, have become the second and third richest men in Mexico, according to Forbes.

We must put a stop to the brutal exploitation in these blood mines, as they are known the world over. The next government has the moral, social and legal obligation to stop and to put right this absurd policy of the irrational exploitation of the workforce and of human beings. It must also put in place a law, as I have been suggesting, that punishes companies’ irresponsibility and criminal negligence. 

Industrial Homicide

On 19 February 2012 it will be six years since the tragedy which plunged the families of 65 miners into mourning, following a terrible explosion at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in the municipality of San Juan de Sabinas, Coahuila. Six years since the industrial homicide, as I called it at the time, committed by the company Grupo México and its president Germán Larrea, its board of directors led by Xavier García de Quevedo, and its administrative council. They forced miners to work in utterly unsafe and inhumane conditions, despite all the complaints filed, and the protests and strikes instigated by the national miners’ union that it is my honour to lead, which aimed to pressure Larrea y García de Quevedo into complying with their obligations as established in the collective labour contract (article 68); in the Federal Labour Law (article 132, section 17) and in the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States (article 123, section 14).

These have been six years of impunity, complicity and protection for Larrea and Grupo México on the part of Vicente Fox’s and Felipe Calderón’s governments. None of the three - Larrea, Fox or Calderón – visited the mine to give their condolences to the families and much less to offer the technical, material and financial support that was required to rescue the miners, leaving their families helpless.

What is more, on the fifth day after the explosion, the chemical engineer and supplier of Grupo México in its private companies in San Luis Potosí, Francisco Javier Salazar, who Fox named Secretary of Labour, along with the Grupo México administrators led by the submissive García de Quevedo, hurriedly closed and sealed the mine, ordered the Army to stop their rescue efforts, and then like true cowards they all left the area.

Those people were totally insensitive and clearly, perversely irresponsible: they abandoned the miners without knowing whether they were still alive and without listening to the protests, the deep hurt and the anger of the families and the national miners’ union in the face of that heartless decision. The miners were left at a depth of only 120 metres, where the bodies of 63 of them still lie. They wanted to prevent anyone finding out the cause of the explosion and collapse in the mine or the awful safety conditions and the lack of health and hygiene that prevailed, products of the complicit irresponsibility which stems from the shared corruption of authorities and businessmen.

In order to put the miserable behaviour of Larrea and Grupo México into focus, we must return to Chile in 2010 where, under a conservative government like the one that is currently in power in Mexico, a successful operation ensured the rescue of 33 miners after they were buried alive following an explosion and collapse on 5 August at the San José de Atacama mine near San José de Copiapó. The area is mountainous and they miners were 700 metres down under hard rock, as opposed to the soft, flat terrain of Pasta de Conchos. The miners there were found alive on the 17^th day after rescue efforts began, as opposed to in Pasta de Conchos when the miners were abandoned on the fifth day after the tragedy and thus condemned to death. The political persecution of Mexican union leaders based on false accusations began immediately after this. Larrea’s Grupo México and Vicente Fox’s government conspired to create a smokescreen that would divert attention away from their serious criminal negligence, but the rescue in Chile exposed them to the world.

In Chile, the successful rescue mission lasted 69 days, but the same approach was not taken in Mexico. Another aspect further illustrates the meanness of Larrea and his partners: in Chile they negotiated compensation of almost one million dollars per worker, while in Pasta de Conchos each family was offered a miserable and humiliating 75 thousand pesos, equivalent to around 7 thousand dollars. In contrast, in the Upper Big Ranch coal mine in West Virginia, United States, where there was an explosion in April 2010 and 29 miners were killed, president Barack Obama visited the site of the tragedy several times and each family received 3 million dollars in compensation.

Germán Larrea and his partners and associates are like bodies without souls, they have no principles, no sense of guilt and much less any sense of personal, social, civil or legal responsibility for their actions. Human life has no value for them.

As a result of this national and international disgrace, powerful international union organisations have agreed to carry out, from 19 to 25 February this year, intense days of action that will be more forceful than those of 2011, to denounce Felipe Calderón’s government for its inaction, its repression and its violations of the International Agreements on respecting the Right to Organise, Autonomy and Freedom of Association. The arguments are self-evident: the situation of workers in Mexico has deteriorated, the abusive protection contracts systems have spread further, the physical and legal intimidation and the psychological torture of workers has intensified, with corporations and government acting in complicity with one another.

The world is watching them and has condemned them. International union organisations are mobilising with acts of protest at Mexican embassies and consulates and they are writing letters to Felipe Calderón to pressure him to stop this aggression and to respect labour and human rights. If no change is made, the actions will escalate until abuses of power, corruption and constant violations of the rule of law are stopped. Those businessmen, the National Action Party and Calderón must immediately set right their actions against the Mexican people, before their time runs out and the condemnation of them is sustained permanently until it brings them to justice.

National Environmental Disaster

In addition to the massive exploitation of workers which so often goes hand in hand with the country’s mining activity, we must consider the ongoing environmental devastation in areas where minerals and metals are extracted or processed. This unregulated exploitation of natural resources is specifically due to the lack of government policies and regulations which should be in place to force mining and metalwork companies to comply with the conservation of water, soil, subsoil, forests, atmosphere, plantations, reedbeds, and pastures where biodiversity is being destroyed.

The activity of some mining and metalwork companies which act without social responsibility, especially the most powerful among them, is closely linked with the irremediable damage done to ecosystems in mining areas. And if the companies very often do not offer basic conditions of security, industrial hygiene and health to their own workers, they care even less about protecting the environment. The fact is that, according to INEGI, the National Institute for Statistics and Geography, environmental damage costs the country 8 per cent of its gross domestic product.

We don’t have to go very far to see who is the principal culprit of this enormous environmental destruction. It is the federal government, for whom this is another failure on the list that it has been visibly accumulating in the two six-year terms of PAN (National Action Party) politics. The pillaging of the environment in mines and nearby areas is yet another the product of short-sighted unilateral policymaking which only serves the interests of one sector: the mining companies. It is evident that the system is broken because the government never consults the people who live in villages surrounding the mining areas about the inevitable damage to the local environment when it is handing out mining concessions to either Mexican or foreign companies. Above all when water supplies are abused in production processes and the cleaning of extracted material, contaminating it with cyanide and other chemical products, leaving communities without this basic resource. The government is at best criminally absent in this sphere, at worst complicit with and submissive to mining companies, from the moment the Ministry of the Economy gives mining land to the companies, without defining their limits or ensuring that companies have previously put in place stringent, binding promises to respect and preserve the environment. The search for profits determines the actions of businesses and government. Once more, ignorance and greed are put at the service of personal interests.

Under the two conservative governments which have been in power since 2000, mining concessions have been freely handed out, to such an extent that the two PAN administrations have given 26 per cent of the national territory to Mexican and foreign-backed companies, and in recent years they have approved 757 foreign projects for mining extraction. This means that they have given mining groups approximately 56 million hectares of a total area of 200 million hectares over the whole country. The government gives a select few Mexican mining and metalwork companies concessions that are scandalously damaging to national interests, as in the case of Germán Larrea’s Grupo México, which was recently awarded over 400 concessions, each one with over 15 thousand hectares, as well as the unconstitutional gratuity of the ability to exploit the methane gas which is released from coal mines. This was happening at the time of the industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos in February 2006, which was this company’s direct responsibility. None of these concessions has involved any serious environmental protection commitment, much less any respect for labour and human rights; no environmental protection went any further than being a written intention that was difficult to verify or never evaluated.

This has led communities in mining areas to protest bravely against environmental devastation, for reasons of simple survival or with regard to indigenous peoples’ demand that their sacred areas be respected. The list of communities that have reacted against this situation is long, but the government gives them no way of voicing their concerns and no solution. As such we see how the mining company backed by Canadian capital, Minera San Xavier, which extracts gold and other minerals, has devastated San Pedro hill in San Luis Potosí, with the complicit support of federal and state governors, and where the participation of the ex-President Vicente Fox and his wife Martha Sahagún have been denounced as among the beneficiaries of this destruction, despite the protests of local people and a large sector of civil society. Similarly, faced with the endless stream of environmental violations, the federal government, as well as the governments of almost all the 26 states where there is mining activity, do no more than give vague promises and protracted explanations of the underlying problems. But then, instead of dealing with those problems, the use state security forces to crush community protests, just as they do with the labour demands of mine workers.

This is an incredibly serious emergency situation which should be placed at the top of the list of national priorities for the near future. The way mining concessions are managed is completely idiotic and suicidal, and ignores environmental protection and conservation. Mexico needs radical, firm policies against the squandering of non-renewable natural resources.