Unethical Companies

It is regrettable, shameful and contemptible that the Mexican companies which act without any kind of social responsibility, and are among the least ethical in the world, now claim to be exemplary companies which most strictly comply with legal and moral standards. In flagrant attacks on the information gathered in Mexico and across the world about their social irresponsibility, which only the current conservative government fails to notice, and even rewards, these companies have been publicly patting themselves on the back and thus confirming their evident lack of ethics by boasting about morals they do not possess.

These companies are Grupo México, owned by Germán Feliciano Larrea Mota Velasco, and Grupo Villacero, which belongs to the brothers Julio, Sergio y Pablo Villarreal Guajardo who hail from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Both companies have been advertising, in the press and other media, the fact that they have received awards, one from Concamin (the Confederation of Industrial Chambers), on the 28 of February, and the other from an association in London, on the 29 of February. The Concamin award is named ‘Ethics and values in industry’.

Worst of all is that in the case of Grupo México, the president himself Felipe Calderón rushed to Guadalajara to present the company with the Concamin award, making it clear, once more, that there is an unlawful complicity between them.

On this matter, the Geneva-based Covalence, an independent consulting firm which analyses the ethical indices of companies, published a report on 26 January which placed Grupo México among the least ethical in the world. It was ranked 573^rd out of a total of 586 corporations that were assessed, and in the natural resources sector, it was ranked 31^st out of 32.

Larrea Mota Velasco’s Grupo México stands out because of its insulting profit margins in recent years which are due, among other things, to the company’s cruel repression of employees and their fair labour demands as well as its criminal insensitivity towards the lives and security of its workers: this was demonstrated by the industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos, Coahuila, on the 19 February 2006.  The bodies of 63 of the 65 miners who died there have still not been recovered. This is national disgrace and its perpetrators, the company’s owner, partners and directors, have still not received the punishment they deserve. The widows and families of the miners who were killed have received nothing but contempt and persecution from Larrea, in an eloquent expression of the ethics that he uses in his company. But thanks to all this, Larrea is the second richest man in the world according to Forbes.

This corporation also stands out due to its lack of ethics and its inhuman refusal to resolve, through legal channels, the three legitimate strikes in Cananea, Sonora; Sombrerete, Zacatecas, and Taxco, Guerrero, which have now been running for around five years. To this we must add the complicity of Felipe Calderón’s government which sent over four thousand members of federal and state police forces into Cananea on 6 June 2010. This came after the illegal attempt to terminate labour relations at that mine, but where they have resumed rehabilitation work, violating the legal norm which states that in a legitimate strike, as is the case there, the contracting of new workers or resuming of any kind of productive activity is not permitted.

In this case, Grupo México has contracted several thousand third parties or strikebreakers since that police offensive, without having offered them any training. Those people are kept in conditions of inhumane slavery, working in virtual concentration camps, threatened and humiliated every day by armed men who guard their every movement. 20 people have been killed and over 100 injured at this mine due to the company’s negligence, which is always concealed. The third party workers live like slaves under the control of a charro leader, Javier Villarreal, and the local CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) is complicit in this.

Another serious case of murder by Grupo México’s paramilitaries took place in Nacozari, Sonora, on 11 August 2007. A worker named Reynaldo Hernández González was shot to death by these guards, and 20 of his co-workers were tortured; they were on their way back to work after an award was rendered in their favour. Those who orchestrated and carried out the attack remain unpunished, protected by all the ethics that Larrea and his partners can muster, which is rewarded by Calderón and Concamin.

As for the Villarreal Guajardo brothers’ Grupo Villacero, on 20 April 2006 this company sparked the repression by federal and state forces of the legal strike led by workers at the industrial port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. On that day Mario Alberto Castillo and Héctor Álvarez Gómez were murdered, and more than 100 workers where seriously injured. It is also public knowledge that the Villarreal Guajardo brothers previously admitted that they were the main cause of the bankruptcy of Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey, declared on 10 May 1986.

These are the two cases of businessmen, Larrea Mota Velasco and the Villarreal Guajardo brothers, who are desperately buying, at any cost, the pedigree that they altogether lack, in order to boast that they are the most ethical and socially responsible. And Calderón gives them all the recognition that they do not deserve, ignoring international condemnation, instead of making them pay for their disgraceful crimes.