Collapse of Dignity (43 page)

In mid-June, AFI agent Mario Martínez was brought into court to explain his agency's efforts to find and arrest the brothers. After hearing about the completely ineffective methods employed by the AFI thus far, Judge Trujillo ruled that the agency had not done professional work. Their attempts were half-baked and not serious. Before Martínez left the courtroom, he was ordered to bring in both Larreas to be cross-examined by July 27, 2009. The judge told him that this time he needed to use professionals to do it and to use local authorities as necessary. He made it clear that there would be no excuses for not finding them by the
deadline. That order was given on June 15, giving the AFI forty-three days to investigate the Larreas' whereabouts and bring them in.

When July 27 rolled around, the judge was presented not with the Larreas but with a document signed by two AFI agents from the judicial-orders unit and their subcommander. This report was a chronicle of laziness and stupidity that was hard to take seriously. Over the previous months, Marco and his team had requested possible addresses for the Larreas from every state in the country; we had gathered data from the Internet; we had even obtained copies of both men's passports and gotten confirmation of a good address from Grupo México CEO Xavier García de Quevedo. There was no shortage of information. Yet the two AFI agents assigned to the case had massively bungled their task—probably on orders from above.

First, the document stated that the PGR had located an address in its database registered as belonging to Genaro Larrea. The agents reported that they undertook surveillance of the building every day between June 16 and June 22 and never once saw either of the Larreas. Then, on June 23, they interrogated a person who came in and out of the building frequently. This person ended up being an attorney who was the owner of the building, which is used as offices for his practice. In other words, it took these brilliant agents a full eight days to realize that the building was not a home but the offices of a law firm.

After this failed attempt, the agents continued their search at another address in the database, this time for an apartment in a twelve-story building in another part of Mexico City. On June 29, they began surveillance of the complex and continued it until July 6. Again, there was no sign of either Larrea brother. On July 7, they spoke with the receptionist at the front desk of the apartment building, who informed them that for the past five years unit 1202 had been inhabited by a person who rented the apartment from Germán Larrea, and that Larrea lived in the United States. The agents knocked on the door of unit 1202 repeatedly to confirm the story, but there was no response. The agents had spent another eight days to find out that Larrea had not lived in the building for five years.

Their next stop was at an address in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, where they interrogated the receptionist of a third address connected to the Larreas. This person told them that the building did indeed belong to Grupo México but had been vacated over a year before. The receptionist also said that he thought the Larrea brothers now lived in the United States.

Next, the AFI agents were off to the Mexico City airport to see if they could find evidence of either Larrea leaving the country. They claim to have spoken with representatives from nine different airlines, all of whom denied them the information they were looking for. They had to have known this would happen going in; such information could have been given to a public prosecutor, perhaps, but certainly not an investigating agent. The agents make no mention of the time periods of the records they asked for or why they had requested this data only verbally. They also fail to address why they asked only nine airlines of the twenty-four that operate at the airport, or why those nine were chosen.

The final conclusion of the two agents was so stupid that there was no doubt they were trying to mislead us and waste our time. “There's a chance that the way to find the Larreas,” the report stated, “is to travel to Phoenix, Arizona.” No reason was given for why the Larreas might be in Phoenix. We knew that the offices of Asarco, a copper-mining company controlled by Grupo México, are located in Arizona, but it's unlikely the agents even knew that much—they were likely just told what to say.

This pathetic, scattershot investigation confirmed to us that the PGR was again covering for Grupo México and making a mockery of the court. Our legal team asked to interrogate the AFI agents about the deficient investigation they undertook. Our request was denied.

After the Larreas had missed their final deadline twenty times, Judge
Trujillo issued a writ to the attorneys of both sides, asking for their formal responses to the AFI's failed search. Agustín Acosta called up Marco to ask if he'd received the writ, and Marco told him yes. Acosta then asked Marco to email over his response. Marco agreed and asked Acosta
to send his as well. Marco received a rather routine statement and forwarded it on to my son, who was closely following the case.

Shortly thereafter, Marco got a reply from Alejandro. “Did you see the email below?” my son asked. Scrolling down, Marco now saw that when Acosta had forwarded his response to the judge's writ, he had also included several emails below it, one of which was to Roberto García, one of the attorneys of Grupo México. From the email chain, Marco saw that Acosta had also sent his response to the writ to García, and García had given him feedback and made a few changes. When García emailed it back, he copied Armando Ortega, legal director for Grupo México. So much for Acosta being totally independent of the company's legal team.

Here is the email from García that Acosta accidentally sent to us:

First of all, this email further proves that Acosta takes his orders from Grupo México and its lawyers. But it also reveals the relationship
between García and the public prosecutor from the PGR. Because the company has no part in the matter—the Larreas were called as witnesses only—its lawyers have no right to communicate with the PGR's office about the case. In the last part of the email, García is doubtful about whether Acosta should intervene on the matter of the Larreas' testimony, considering that Marco was constantly criticizing him for acting as just another defense attorney for the Larreas (which he, in fact, is). Acosta's role has always been that of Larrea's defender. We always knew it, but the email proved it irrefutably.

A while after the failed AFI search and after they had escaped testifying in court close to twenty times, we finally got word that Genaro Larrea had surfaced and would appear in court. Sure enough, he showed up at the North Prison courthouse with a whole battalion of lawyers headed by Roberto García (who now, for once, had an actual reason to be present in the hearing). Once Genaro and his team had arrived, Marco del Toro stood and made an announcement that stunned everyone: “We're not going to cross-examine Mr. Genaro Larrea.” The room erupted in gasps and shouts. “We asked for testimony from both brothers,” Marco argued. “If I cross-examine this man, he will immediately run to his brother and tell him all the questions he will be asked. We're not going to cross-examine him!” Marco had a point, and his argument held up in front of the judge. Germán was the one we really needed to talk to, and we wouldn't accept just his brother. As Genaro left the courthouse surrounded by his legal team, he shook his head and said ruefully, “I don't understand Mexico.”

Soon after all this, Judge Trujillo, despite issuing the arrest warrant for the Larrea brothers in the first place—and notwithstanding their lack of compliance with such order—reduced their penalty from a three-day arrest to a fine. In other words, Trujillo was refusing to make any further move to physically take the brothers into custody to appear in Linares's trial. It was a decision that blatantly favored the plaintiffs and put Juan Linares at a severe disadvantage. In October 2010, based on this biased action, we filed a criminal complaint against Judge Trujillo for crimes against the administration of justice.

Judge Trujillo immediately recused himself from the case. In order to justify dropping Linares's case from his docket, he presented a copy of the criminal complaint we filed, even though under the law he should not have had access to the document. As Judge Trujillo should well know, the secrecy of every criminal investigation is crucial, and his knowledge of our filing constituted a crime. Nonetheless, he argued that due to the complaint, he now felt enmity against Juan Linares and should not preside in the case. Juan would just have to wait, unjustly imprisoned, while the case was transferred to a different judge.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

—
BEN JONSON

Grupo Peñoles was perhaps the only one of the country's metal
companies that did not directly participate in the shady privatization boom of the 1980s and '90s. However, Peñoles does have a history of staunchly opposing unionism. In 2009, as we fought against the arrest warrants for me, Linares, and the others, the company's current president, Alberto Bailleres, joined in the outright aggression against the Miners' Union. He took up Carlos Pavón as his pawn, using him much as Germán Larrea was using Elías Morales.

Bailleres's father, Raul, hadn't gotten Grupo Peñoles off to a good start. The late Jorge Leipen Garay—director of Sidermex, the government holding company that had controlled several companies, including Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA), before privatization—told me on a trip to Vancouver about Raul's shady dealings. According to Leipen Garay, the elder Bailleres had made his fortune shortly before and during the global conflagration of World War II. Although Mexico was aligned with the Allies, Raul mined mercury in Huitzuco, Guerrero, and secretly sold it to the Japanese, who used it to make powerful chemical weapons for the Axis powers. The mercury was transported to the port of Acapulco in small to medium-size trucks and then carried by boat fifteen or twenty miles offshore. There, Japanese ships would be waiting to purchase the mercury at dramatically inflated prices. Thanks to Raul
Bailleres's clandestine trafficking, the Axis powers got their hands on precious—and dangerous—Mexican resources. Leipen Garay also gave me a copy of Juan Alberto Cedillo's
The Nazis in Mexico
, and although the book doesn't name Raul Bailleres specifically, it gives a general picture of how he and other Nazi sympathizers in the mining and steel sector created a whole line of business selling minerals to Mexico's enemies.

According to Leipen, Raul's son Alberto inherited his father's habit of disloyalty. Many Mexican businessmen have repeated one particular story of his unethical business dealings. It is said that Alberto was once dining with his friend Carlos Trouyet, the most prominent Mexican businessman of the 1960s, '70s, '80s, when Trouyet told him that he planned to buy El Palacio de Hierro, a chain of department stores, from García Cisneros Group, a large Spanish holding company. Bailleres, upon learning of his friend's intent to purchase the chain, immediately sent one of his partners to Spain to meet with the García Cisneros Group, instructing him to offer slightly more money than Trouyet had. Bailleres, taking advantage of his friend's confidence, won the department store chain for himself.

After Carlos Pavón was released from prison and made off with the union's bail money, Alberto Bailleres used the traitor to actively promote dissidence among the union's members. Bailleres set up the now openly treacherous Pavón in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, just southeast of the striking workers at Grupo México's mine in Sombrerete. The Fresnillo worksite, where Section 62 of the Miners' Union was set up, boasted the largest silver mine in the country, run by Grupo Peñoles subsidiary Fresnillo PLC. The workers at the site had temporarily suspended work when they heard news of the unlawful arrests of Pavón and Linares back in December 2008. Now the man they had gone on strike for had returned, but he was singing a new song. He now took every chance to appear in the media and slander my name and disparage Los Mineros.

Pavón quickly set about establishing a useless company union in Fresnillo at the behest of Grupo Peñoles and Calderón's labor department. To aid him in this villainous effort, Grupo Peñoles did its best to divide the forces loyal to the Miners' Union at the silver mine; the
company handed out illicit money to workers and threatened them with violence and job termination if they didn't side with Pavón.

The workers of Union Section 62 and the leaders of the national union were outraged by these threats and bribes, though a minority, including local head David Navarro, caved in to the pressure and sided with Pavón's new company union. In response, a group of loyal union members from around the country requested a meeting on June 10, 2009, to reveal Pavón and the other traitors at Fresnillo as violators of the union's unity and democracy. At the meeting, they hoped to reestablish the section's solidarity with the executive committee of Los Mineros and show that Pavón was a tool of Bailleres.