Collapse of Dignity (10 page)

Once again, Fox and Abascal displayed their double-talk and double standards. On the one hand, in their remarks they spoke of their respect for the autonomy of the unions, democracy, and freedom, and on the other they sent a crowd of thugs to ransack the Miners' Union. Theirs is a reactionary antiunion government that claims to champion the Christian faith and the Catholic Church, but which at the same time oppresses the disadvantaged.

That afternoon, I gave several interviews to the press in which I denounced the cowardly attack and pointed to Morales, the Fox government, and Grupo México as the responsible parties. Meanwhile, around 8:00 p.m., a group of union members, including part of our legal team, took the four men arrested for the assault on the union headquarters to the Eighth Delegation police headquarters to file a complaint and have them interrogated about who precisely had planned the assault. At the
station, the police took the complaint but didn't seem particularly interested in the case. When our members complained that the police had left the scene of the attack after being called to the scene, they claimed to have not been notified—even though union members had seen them there. Once their statements had been taken, my colleagues and our lawyers withdrew after midnight and left the four detainees in police custody, expecting that the preliminary investigation would continue.

That night, after a long string of press interviews and one of the worst afternoons since I took leadership of the union, I found it impossible to rest, much less get any sleep. I was overwhelmed with anger and a feeling of impotence.

On Saturday morning, I got a call from one of the union's lawyers. The police had released the four attackers, because Morales had shown up at 6:30 a.m. Saturday and presented a
toma de nota
designating him as the leader of the Miners' Union. I knew it had to be forged—he would have had to get the signatures of some members of the executive committee in order to get a legitimate approval as general secretary. Morales had withdrawn all charges against the four suspects and revoked the criminal complaint filed by the union, arguing that he was now general secretary. Shockingly, the district attorney's office acknowledged the withdrawal of the complaint and left the gang's atrocious deeds unpunished, no doubt because Morales had high-ranking men like Salazar and Abascal at his back. By the time we heard what had happened, the attackers had already been released. We filed another complaint against the four men, with little hope that the police would proceed with a real investigation.

This attempted imposition was “black Mexico” in action—a land where government and corporations work in tandem to achieve their mutual goals. It's not a world we wanted to be part of. All I could do in the moment was once again denounce this violation of the law in statements to the press. Morales had never cared about the union, nor had he any conviction about defending the rights of workers.

From the moment I heard about the attack, I had little doubt that it was a premeditated action, planned with the involvement of Fox's labor department. The imposition of Morales and the freeing of the prisoners
confirmed my beliefs. Abascal's warning had come to fruition: in the darkness of the underground a major offensive had been brewing against the National Mineworkers Union.

Los Mineros had become the strongest democratic union opposing Fox's proposed changes in the labor laws, changes that would cripple the workers' freedom and human rights. They had come for me, precisely because I was making our union too strong. We were doing too good a job of making sure our miners were paid and treated fairly. The mining companies of Mexico, exasperated by having to spend a tiny fraction of their burgeoning profits on safety and compensation for the very laborers who'd made them rich, had decided to take the matter into their own hands. They felt so threatened by us that they had first openly lied and supposedly organized a sham election to unseat me and to set in my place this dark character who had been expelled by the Miners' Union when we discovered that he was privately negotiating with Grupo México, to the detriment of the mining workers. The express
toma de nota
, which Morales had secured on Friday morning, instituted an entirely new executive committee to lead the union. It was an infuriating development, but it would pale in comparison to the difficulties that were about to befall the union.

Undersecretary Emilio Gómez Vives and the general director of the Registry of Associations of the Labor Ministry, José Cervantes Calderón, put forth five documents with forged signatures in which they allegedly unseated me and the other members of the executive committee, sanctioning us for an alleged mishandling of the Mining Trust. These documents appointed in our place, with no election and no respect for the union's bylaws, Morales and a group of people under the direct control and financing of Grupo México—not one of them a current member of the union.

Morales, far from being a representative of Los Mineros, was simply a tool, of both the companies and the government. He was driven solely by personal resentment over his dismissal six years before. Even though he had never been a true unionist, he was ready to take this opportunity to have his revenge on the organization that had rightfully expelled him.

As this situation reveals, the
toma de nota
is an easily abused relic of
fascist control of the people. The
toma de nota
is an instrument of political control invented and used by the fascist regimes of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Francisco Franco in Spain. The labor department of Mexico picked it up from them, and to this day uses the
toma de nota
as a means to exert political control over the labor unions at the behest of their corporate supporters. Since final recognition of all union leaders rests with the labor department, government officials can recognize the leaders they like—typically, the ones who they think will cause the least trouble—and reject or ignore those who are democratically elected. Acting as true authoritarians, they undermine the workers' ability to elect their own leaders, all the while claiming that the
toma de nota
is merely a tool for the government to validate the free and democratic election of labor leaders. Of course, little stands in their way if they decide to forge or falsify the document.

Toma de nota
was abused during the decades the PRI was in power, but the situation got even worse in the PAN era. Mario Suárez, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Confederation and cofounder of the Labor Congress, struggled for five years to get the government to grant him recognition as leader of that organization, just as many other union leaders have been forced to fight for official recognition. The fact that the government has final say in who leads the union is absurd, and removing this obsolete instrument of oppression from Mexican labor law has been and is one of my primary objectives.

The workers affiliated with the union did not at any time accept the governmental and corporate imposition of Morales, who was universally loathed by Los Mineros. The fact that the government recognized persons who were appointed on the basis of forged documents did not at any time annul my real leadership. My fellow union members understood that a simple document does not make a difference, and my companions continued giving me support as general secretary. They knew that Morales was an imaginary creation, dreamed up by Fox to confuse the Mexican people and weaken the country's labor movement at its core. The union members were not as gullible as their enemies thought
they would be: No one believed the lies. They immediately rejected Morales, condemning the government for slandering the true leaders of the union and attempting to replace them with a proven traitor.

On Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m., before the Labor Congress held its fortieth anniversary celebration, the union held an extraordinary meeting of the executive committee. We spent the whole morning discussing how we could strategically protect the union's headquarters from new attacks. Many of us felt the urge for revenge. It was tempting to look for ways to retaliate. But at that meeting I cautioned everyone that rash action could worsen the situation and expose the union to more risk. I told them that we had to act with more calm and intelligence than our criminal opponents had.

Later that day, two thousand workers assembled for the fortieth anniversary of the Labor Congress on Saturday. Given the events of the week, the atmosphere was charged, the crowd incensed by Flores's reelection and the attack on me and the Miners' Union. I was scheduled to speak at the event, and I condemned the previous day's events before the entire crowd. I publicly criticized our attackers and assured the assembled workers that we would not stand for these outrageous abuses of power. I wanted everyone who heard my words to understand that the actions of Fox's government and a cabal of cynical businessmen did not intimidate us but, instead, united us in a common defense of the rights of workers.

There is no gold mine, not even the most valuable in the world, that can pay for the life of one worker.

—
NAPOLEÓN GÓMEZ SADA

On Saturday night, I slept restlessly. I was exhausted from the
anniversary celebration and all the work we'd done that day to prevent Morales and his band of traitors from taking over the union. It seemed unimaginable that Salazar and the labor department would so brazenly collaborate against us, compromising the democratic elections of both the Labor Congress and the union my father had left in our hands, but I knew better than to be too surprised.

After a few hours of sleep, I was jolted awake by the ringing of my phone. It was 5:00 a.m., and the caller was José Angel Hernández, the executive committee's delegate for the state of Coahuila. His grave tone immediately indicated that something was wrong. In a tense, shaky voice, he informed me that there had been an explosion in Mine 8 of the Pasta de Conchos Unit, a site owned by Grupo México in the municipality of San Juan de Sabinas. The accident had occurred at 2:20 in the morning, and there were many miners missing. There were still no reports of the magnitude of the disaster or of the exact number of miners dead or trapped in the mine, and José didn't know whether the affected men were contract workers or union members.

As I listened to the horrific news, I was immediately sure that Grupo México's negligence was to blame. I had visited Pasta de Conchos and
knew it was a dangerous mine, poorly maintained by the company. I had demanded that Salazar conduct intensive inspections there, proposing that they stop work at the site altogether and pay the miners' salaries until it was decided whether the mine should continue to operate or be closed. There was no response, no action taken.

Now a catastrophe had actually happened.

“You tried to tell them,” José Angel said before he hung up. “We all tried to force them to prevent something like this. But with the government on their side, they didn't think they had to.”

Still trying to wrap my mind around the phone call, I woke Oralia to explain what had happened. Right away, she was up and ready to go. Her first thought was of the families of the miners; they would need comfort and support while they waited for news of the men. With total sincerity, she offered to go with me anywhere, anytime.

In the dead of night, I began calling the other members of the executive committee. I asked each of them to be at union headquarters on Sunday at 9:00 a.m. for a formal committee meeting and made arrangements for some of us to leave later that morning for Coahuila. It seemed unbelievable that this disaster would happen directly on the heels of the Labor Congress's sham election and Grupo México's attempt to place Elías Morales at the head of Los Mineros with the collusion of Vicente Fox's government. In the chaos of those early morning hours, I actually entertained the possibility that the Pasta de Conchos event had been a deliberate attack, a way for Grupo México and the labor department to divert public attention from the miners' widespread refusal to accept a puppet as their general secretary.

I made phone calls nonstop as the sun rose that Sunday morning, doing my best to stay calm as we arranged for a group of us to leave for San Juan de Sabinas. I also designated a few union men to stay and maintain surveillance of our headquarters in Mexico City, in case Morales and his gang of thugs decided to return for a second round.

My bags were already packed when I got a call from the union's secretary treasurer, Héctor Félix Estrella, and the secretary of the union's Security and Justice Council, Juan Linares Montúfar. Linares and Estrella
had been discussing the wisdom of leaving for the site that morning, and they were now adamant that we delay our trip by a day in order to finish dealing with the damage done by Elías Morales and the thugs. At first I disagreed, insisting that we get to Pasta de Conchos as soon as possible to assess the situation and help save any lives we could. But as I listened to their argument, I began to see what they meant. If the entire leadership of the Miners' Union left Mexico City, we couldn't proceed with the complaint we'd filed against the four attackers who had been captured and then released. Even though we had been replaced in the eyes of the government, our lawyers' power of attorney was still valid, and we were determined to have the assailants of the union headquarters prosecuted.

On top of that, we would be financially strangled if we left right away: Morales and his crew had stolen huge stacks of checks and other bank documents during their assault, and we'd been forced to close our bank accounts on Saturday. We had to jointly sign for the opening of the new accounts, but we could only do that on Monday, the bank being closed on Sunday. (At this point, the banks were still cooperating with us, despite the government's decree that we were no longer the union's leaders. Soon enough, they would receive orders to act otherwise.)