Corporate Impunity

Irresponsibility has taken hold of Mexico as the most wealthy and powerful increasingly decide the country’s future and leave those who sell their labour defenceless and without opportunities. This is supposedly a democratic, representative and federal Republic, but in practice and in many aspects it does not function as such. It operates more than ever according to an unjust model of wealth concentration, which makes poverty more acute and increases social inequality between those who live in our country.

The true extent of this is shown by labour relations between employers and employees. Much of the time, the private interests of powerful individuals are imposed on workers, because workers have been abandoned by the State and by a corporate, traditional and antidemocratic unionism which betrayed its original function and has let itself be defeated by the complicity between businessmen and government.

Recent events in the state of Coahuila, both in the coalmining region and the industrial city of Monclova, as well as in Zacatecas and Durango states, reveals that the abusive behaviour of those unscrupulous businessmen has spread wide, in conjunction with the respective state and municipal governments. In Coahuila, spurious charro leaders act unrestrainedly and enjoy the backing of the company Grupo Acerero del Norte (GAN) whose director, Alonso Ancira Elizondo, is among most arrogant businessmen and has become one of the greatest enemies of workers’ rights and interests. This shady and ungrateful character is on the same level as the predatory Germán Larrea Mota Velasco, owner of Grupo México, who remains unpunished following his industrial homicide at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in 2006, also in Coahuila. Germán Larrea performs financial manoeuvres with which he has betrayed and committed fraud even against his own partners in Grupo México, using his other firm, the Southern Perú Copper Corporation. He intended to do the same with Asarco (American Smelting and Refining Company). In other words, corruption and cynicism in all their glory.

The Coahuila government – with the Moreira Valdés brothers at the helm – and that type of businessmen have developed a complicit allegiance with which they mean to dominate and control the lives of the people of Coahuila. The accident that took place of 3 August 2012 at mine 7 belonging to the company Minerales del Norte, SA (Minosa), which is part of de Alonso Ancira Elizondo’s GAN, where six workers died as a result of extreme corporate negligence, crushed by tons of rock, shows how utterly damaging this complicity is. Today, the Moreiras and Ancira feel and act like caciques in a revival of Porfirio Diaz’s regime in Coahuila.

Alonso Acira’s GAN, instead of protecting its workers as the Constitution, the Federal Labour Law and collective labour contracts require, has used all sorts of manoeuvres so that miners cannot make their protests or their industrial safety demands be heard. They also mean to force the members of union section 303 at that plant forsake their rightful decision to rejoin the national miners’ union, from which they were removed by that political-corporate mafia with all manner of threats that amounted to corporate terrorism.

Ancira’s irrational attitude reached such a degree that, even though the national miners’ union managed to get the Ministry for Labour and Social Welfare (STPS) to close the mine from 7 August, to force them to correct the 107 serious faults identified by that dependency, and to decree that work should not recommence until the correct, secure conditions had been established, they refused to pay the poverty-line salaries of 96 pesos per day for which the miners risk their lives and their health in subhuman conditions. In sum, his attitude is an open defiance of the federal government that places him outside the law and weakens the national public administration itself in the face of the violent, defiant arrogance of this individual.

In fact, violence was Alonso Ancira’s answer to the order from STPS to pay the workers’ salaries, given that the closure of the mine is not attributable to them. Ancira decided to use force to take the mine into his own hands, with the backing of the Moreira brothers, so as not to comply with the order from STPS. He used over 600 delinquents and paid thugs to remove the authentic miners who were protesting at mine 7, leaving 10 of them seriously injured, all this under the indifferent gaze of governor Rubén Moreira. And the question is evident: how many more will have to die for things to change in this country?

This man has benefited from the open complicity of religious groups who pressured the workers from mine 7 to obey the dishonourable businessman, who has said: I prefer to close the mine than have the genuine mine workers return, to the areas that he has turned into true concentration camps.

Ancira Elizondo is an unethical, unscrupulous businessman who obtained from the privatisations that took place three six-year terms ago a mining-industrial empire, including over 35 mines and plants in Coahuila and the rest of the country, including Altos Hornos de México which is valued on paper at 20 billion dollars. He bought that empire for only 105 million dollars, and it is not even known if that amount has been paid to the government. That is quite apart from the fact that his payments have been suspended for 10 years.

There is no doubt that this complicit alliance between those in government and this type of businessmen has stimulated the increase in irresponsibility and corporate impunity in Mexico. For the good of our society, we must put an end to this moral deterioration and fulfil the major commitments that the next government will have to take on.