As
everyone knows, on 11 April nine workers who had been trapped for a week by a
collapse in the Cabeza de Negro mine, in the Ica region of Peru, were rescued
with full participation from the government. The effort was led by the
president himself, Ollanta Humala, followed by his colleagues as well as the
union and the mining population.
In my
article of 12 April 2012 I wrote: ‘A rescue in Peru, another embarrassment for
the Mexican government. I am in no doubt that when the will and a sense of
responsibility exist, objectives can be reached. This successful effort in
Peru, similarly to that in San José de Copiapó,
Chile, make patently clear the full extent of the human misery caused by
Grupo México in Pasta de Conchos when it abandoned 65 of its workers in that
‘industrial homicide’ which will always be associated with Germán Larrea,
Vicente Fox, Francisco Javier Salazar, Felipe Calderón, Javier Lozano Alarcón,
Fernando Gómez Mont and other collaborators, accomplices, directors and
shareholders of this company who have no ethical standards or respect for human
life.’
Two weeks
later, I stand by what I said, and I wish to expand upon it. Those who are
responsible and who I named acted not only without any moral or ethical
standards, they also showed how little human life means to them, even the lives
of those workers whose hard work and sacrifice make those businessmen richer,
especially Germán Feliciano Larrea Mota Velasco who Mexican miners, and workers
the world over, rightfully call an unpunished murderer of miners. This man
continues to rely on the despicable complicity of Vicente Fox and Felipe
Calderón as well as the aforementioned ministers in their governments, in order
to hide the true causes of this tragedy which according to all the evidence is
the result of Grupo México’s criminal negligence and irresponsibility in not
installing adequate industrial health, safety and hygiene measures to preserve
the wellbeing and lives of miners.
This is a
matter which cannot be forgotten nor left to go unpunished. Above all because
Grupo México not only left those men to die when they closed the mine only five
days after the Pasta de Conchos collapse, but also because since then they have
offered only the meanest compensation to the families and relatives of the 65
miners who lost their lives on 19 February 2006. Furthermore, the company has
used repressive state and federal forces to persecute, as if they were common
criminals, the widows and families who are clamouring for their rights to be
respected and for the bodies of their husbands, brothers or sons to be
recovered in order to give them a decent burial.
Larrea’s
Grupo México and Fox and Calderón’s governments have played leading roles in a
story of horror, disgrace and injustice. It is not enough that the second of
these leaders is soon to relinquish his presidential power, the legitimacy of
which has been questioned during this term, nor that the first has already left
office. If all these guilty parties remain unpunished, particularly Francisco
Javier Salazar and Javier Lozano Alarcón, Ministers of Labour in the two
respective governments, Mexican society
will be left with the open wound of this great injustice, which should be
punished by law and thus serve as an example.
Criminal
negligence should never again be permitted in any company, mining or otherwise,
in Mexico. For this reason I have called for legislation that punishes the
people who are guilty of these corporate murders, as they are called the world
over, and puts them behind bars. It is not acceptable that the perpetrators of
such tragedies are left in perfect freedom while grief swamps the families of
the dead miners, families who have lost their main breadwinner and who, on top
of that, have been crushed and treated as delinquents.
In
contrast, on 5 April 2010 when there was an accident at the Upper Big Branch
coal mine in West Virginia, United States, President Barack Obama himself
visited the area on two occasions to be with the families of 29 workers who
were killed. After those visits, Obama spearheaded the effort to legislate
against irresponsibility in his country so that such a tragedy would never
happen again. Additionally, this pressure served to ensure that the families of
those who died received compensation of 3 million dollars each, as opposed to
the miserable 7 thousand dollars which Grupo México, with government approval,
proposed to give to each family from Pasta de Conchos.
The lesson from the recent incident at the Cabeza de Negro mine in Ica, Peru, is to show the
shamelessness of Germán Larrea’s Grupo México: the company has continued its
immoral attacks on workers and their union at every available opportunity. This
is clearly shown by the exploitation of strike breakers at the mine at Cananea,
Sonora, which it turned into a true concentration camp, just as it intends to
do in Sombrerete, Zacatecas and Taxco, Guerrero, where workers are striking
heroically. Mexican society can no longer allow businessmen to arrogantly and
ignorantly disregard the lives of workers, with an utter lack of social
responsibility or human sensibility, nor to go through life as they truly are,
bodies without souls.
