Collapse of Dignity (19 page)

One other major resolution came out of that convention: We would publicly demand that the government immediately stop its aggression against the Miners' Union, and if the government did not respond immediately and grant full recognition to the union's true executive committee by April 3, 2006, we would call for a national forty-eight-hour strike that would shut down the country's entire mining and metalworking sector.

Our stay in Albuquerque was short. After three weeks, the Steel-
workers encouraged me to relocate once again—this time to Canada. They were aware that the ultraconservative U.S. president George W. Bush had no affinity whatsoever for the nation's labor unions and that he had a close relationship with President Fox, to the point that Fox had taken to dressing like his Texas counterpart. The two had had a friendly meeting at Fox's ranch soon after they both took office, popularly referred to as the “Boot Summit”; both men showed an affinity for Western-style clothing. Given that closeness between them, the leaders of the USW lacked confidence in their ability to protect a politically persecuted union leader in the United States, especially if the Mexican government were to request my forced return.

Canada, a country much more sympathetic to the union cause than its southern neighbors, seemed like the best option, though my family and I received invitations to come and live in several other countries, many of them in Latin America. Nestor Kirchner, president of Argentina, and his Minister of Labor Carlos Tomada, and Brazil's president, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, had both been following the developments in Mexico and showed sympathy for our cause, offering us political asylum in their countries. I am still grateful for their show of support. Lula de Silva was particularly vocal in his encouragement, since he had started his career as a leader of Brazil's metalworkers' union. Thus, the crisis had given rise to new friendships, both within the union world in Mexico and, now, with world leaders.

Before our departure to Canada, Oralia left for Texas, where she would meet our eldest son, Alejandro. I then flew with Marcelo and Hector to Portland, where we rented a car and drove to Seattle to meet my middle son, Ernesto. From there, the four of us drove forth to Vancouver—our new temporary home. We showed up in Vancouver on March 23, 2006, in our rented Ford like a bunch of tourists, driving around downtown and choosing a random hotel to stay at. Underneath the sadness of the circumstances, I felt a growing sense of freedom and safety at being out of reach of my enemies. I felt the beginning of something new—a time for me to reassess and prepare new strategies to keep Los Mineros strong
and independent. I felt freshly inspired to strengthen the union against attacks, build international solidarity, and continue making our organization a vital part of the global labor movement.

Meanwhile, the members of the national executive committee made a decision to support all the legal, travel administrative, and maintenance expenses of my family and our colleagues, as long as the political persecution and the conflict lasted. Their resolution was confirmed unanimously during the next general convention of the Miners' Union.

A week later, Ernesto and I were at the Vancouver International Airport waiting for Oralia and Alejandro to arrive. Ernesto and I had found a furnished apartment and met with Steve Hunt, director of USW's District 3 in Vancouver, and his assistant director, Carol Landry, both of whom would become very close friends. At last we saw Oralia and Alejandro walking toward us through the terminal. We ran toward them, and tears welled in Oralia's eyes as the four of us embraced. It was a tremendous relief to be with them again, all together except our youngest son, Napoleón, who would be visiting soon.

That night, over Chinese takeout at the new, rented apartment, we stayed up late talking about our trips and the most recent developments in the campaign against Los Mineros. It pained me to see my family suffer, but at that moment, I felt our unity and commitment to the struggle grow stronger than ever. A week later, our son Napoleón would arrive to be with us in Vancouver, but he would soon decide to fly back to Mexico and continue his studies at the University of Monterrey. I worried about him but agreed that he should stay on at school if that's what he wanted.

The move to our new temporary home in Canada was a difficult transition for all of us, particularly Oralia, who'd had to leave her aging mother behind in Monterrey. Each of us was struggling with separation from the land we called home, from our friends and extended family. But we bonded together, committed to fighting a fight we knew was just—even if we had to do it from thousands of miles away.

The joy is in the struggle, in the effort, in the suffering that accompanies the struggle.

—
MAHATMA GANDHI

In the early 1990s, three brothers from the border town of
Matamoros, Tamaulipas—Julio, Sergio, and Pablo Villarreal Guajardo—inherited a scrap steel business from their father. The operation made its profits by purchasing low-quality steel that had been discarded due to some defect and then reselling it. Jorge Leipen Garay shared the story of these three brothers with me, and it is well-known that as the brothers built up the company, which came to be known as Grupo Villacero, they developed relationships with crooked employees in the purchasing and sales divisions of two of its main suppliers: Fundidora Monterrey, a quasi-governmental iron and steel company, and Hylsa, a Mexican steel mill that today is called Ternium. The brothers pressured these employees into making superficial holes and tears at the heads or tails of the pristine rolled metal sheets, instantly converting high-quality steel to scrap. The Villarreals would then buy this lightly damaged metal for a vastly reduced amount and resell it at premium prices.

The brothers ran this scam on hundreds of thousands of tons of Fundidora Monterrey and Hylsa's metal, shamelessly amassing their ill-gotten gains in the coffers of Grupo Villacero. As the company grew, they began to regard themselves as masters of industry, but they were in reality little more than corrupt intermediaries and tawdry salesmen.

Their fraud played a large role in the eventual bankruptcy and dissolution of Fundidora Monterrey in 1986, though the brothers Villarreal proclaimed that it was the union's fault—according to them, it was the workers' demands for wage and benefit increases that had sent Fundidora under. Of course the true cause was the brothers' mafia-like style of business that had brought Fundidora Monterrey to bankruptcy. The company, which had previously belonged to the Mexican people, was sold off at ridiculously low prices. Fundidora's main subsidiary, Aceros Planos de Mexico, despite having the best and most modern sheet mill in Latin America, was auctioned off at an absurd price of less than $100 million.

In 1991, Grupo Villacero bought a company called Sicartsa from the government, during the presidency of Carlos Salinas, champion of privatization. Sicartsa, since its foundation in 1969, operated a steel mill complex in the industrial port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico. (The port town was named after the Mexican president who in the 1930s had fought for workers' rights, nationalized the oil industry in 1938, and placed many of the country's resources back in the hands of the Mexican people.) Though the government had invested over $8 billion in Sicartsa over the years preceding the sale, Grupo Villacero picked it up for a mere $170 million, according to Jorge Leipen Garay, former undersecretary of Energy and Mines and former director of the government's steel holding company, Sidermex. Retaining the Sicartsa name, the Villarreal brothers set about ensuring the fattest profits possible at their new operation. By the time I became head of the union in 2002, they had about sixty subcontracting companies at the Sicartsa mill complex in Lázaro Cárdenas, fifty-seven of which were owned primarily by the Villarreal brothers themselves.

In Mexico, this is a common arrangement. A company is granted a concession, and it then hires contracting companies also owned by the company. The contract workers might make eighty pesos a day, while the contracting company charges the concession holder eight hundred pesos for the same job. It's a criminal arrangement by which companies like Grupo Villacero simultaneously steal Mexico's resources and get rich off the workers who labor in their facilities.

The leaders of Los Mineros, knowing the brothers hadn't changed since their steel-scamming days, had taken the incorporation papers of Grupo Villacero's contracting companies at the Sicartsa complex to Labor Secretary Abascal, demanding an investigation. Predictably, nothing was done. Adding to the atrocious situation at Lázaro Cárdenas, Grupo Villacero pretended that its contract workers had a union of their own, but no trace of this supposed union could be found. The “organization” wasn't registered, and it certainly didn't advocate for its members.

When open aggression toward Los Mineros began in February 2006, Grupo Villacero partnered with Grupo México and President Fox to carry out a wave of intimidation and repression. It was the Villarreals' lawyers, the scheming, discredited Patricio and Antonio O'Farrill brothers, who filed the “mother claim” on Elías Morales's behalf against me and my colleagues in March. Grupo Villacero had been more than willing to lend its help to Elías Morales as a way of weakening the union that troubled their operation at Lázaro Cárdenas.

As it turned out, the workers of Los Mineros were not prepared to accept these lies and welcome a backstabber like Morales as their leader. Union Local 271 from Lázaro Cárdenas would protest the attempted imposition most loudly of all, and in doing so would become the focus of the next major confrontation in the war against us.

Following the union's convention in March, we continued demand
ing that the government cease its attacks and hold Grupo México accountable for its fatal abuses at Pasta de Conchos. They utterly disregarded us. The lies and slander continued, legal action against me and my colleagues was continued, and Germán Larrea continued leading his destructive company with no repercussions for causing the death of sixty-five men. As agreed, we prepared for a national two-day strike in protest, to be held on April 3 and 4.

The members of the union's national executive committee developed a plan and arranged the massive strike. Meanwhile, I had started to grow accustomed to organizing and directing union business through email,
phone calls, videoconferences, and frequent visits from my colleagues. In advance of the event, we elected a strike committee that would work with local union heads and the leaders of the executive committee on the logistics of each work site, as well as on how to handle negotiations.

Early on the morning of April 3, hundreds of thousands of workers around the country showed up at their plants and mines, preparing the picketing line and blocking the entrance and exit gates so company representatives couldn't get in. At each operation, workers organized into teams that worked in shifts to maintain the demonstration. The national strike was observed by all members in all the union locals, and because Los Mineros are such an integral part of the country's hundreds of thousands of mining and steel workers, the entire chain of production ground to a halt. Without the unionized workers, no one could work, regardless of whether they were part of Los Mineros.

The right to strike is guaranteed in the Mexican constitution as a last recourse for workers to defend themselves, and even in this time of aggression, Los Mineros exercised that right with respect and responsibility. Inside the facilities, we assigned teams where necessary to maintain blast furnaces, electrical systems, and anything else that could damage the work site if left unattended during a strike. The goal of a strike is never to damage the company's machinery or destroy its property; it is merely the best way to demonstrate our unwillingness to tolerate abuse, aggression, and disrespect for the needs and rights of workers. For two days, the strike paralyzed all work sites in Mexico's metal and steelworking sector.

After the stoppage, eight union sections around the country decided to continue the strike in protest of the government's violation of the union's autonomy. Many of those eight also had ongoing disputes with their employers regarding working conditions, wages, and respect for the union. The largest of these sections was Section 271, the Lázaro Cárdenas branch that had workers at the Sicartsa mill. In addition to their protest against the government's attempt to replace me with Morales, the five thousand steelworkers at the Sicartsa steel mill—3,500 union members, the rest contractors—had several other demands against Grupo Villacero and the exploitative Villarreal brothers. Rather than
getting any significant share of profits, workers would get meaningless gifts—like key chains. With the full support of the executive committee, Section 271 decided it would continue the strike indefinitely, until their demands were met.

As the workers of Lázaro Cárdenas stayed off the job, and as they reached the end of the third week, Elías Morales and the Villarreal brothers asked that the labor department declare the strike illegal and petitioned for armed intervention to crush the striking workers. Morales, who purported to be on the workers' side, declared the workers of Lázaro Cárdenas “terrorists.”

Sadly, President Vicente Fox, Labor Secretary Salazar, Interior Secretary Abascal, and Abascal's director of government—Arturo Chávez Chávez, who would later be appointed attorney general of Mexico with no qualifications except his pliancy in carrying out abuses ordered by those in power—eagerly complied with the request. Like Grupo México, Grupo Villacero had great influence with Fox's government. The federal government and the state government of Michoacán readied their forces to expel the strikers.