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.