Collapse of Dignity Read online

  On April 18, 2006, the PGR took its file from the mother claim, made copies, and sent each one to all the states, with special emphasis on Sonora, San Luis Potosí, and Nuevo León. Of course there was no mention of the CNBV ruling that had halted the case at the federal level (it would take us two years to even get our hands on a copy of this document). In these three states, they had found officials willing to go along with their plan, supposedly on behalf of the union members who lived there. Of course this was absurd; far from being the plaintiffs in a case against me, Los Mineros were actively protesting the attempt to remove me. There was no way of foreseeing this despicable plan, but we knew we were dealing with perverse characters. No action on their part would have surprised us.

  As the failed mother claim spawned three identical sub-claims, aggression at the federal level was ongoing. Immediately following Morales’s complaint in early March, the Mexican Mediation and Arbitration Board—the Junta Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje, or JFCA— had ordered the seizure of all the union’s bank accounts, including more than $20 million of the disputed $55 million. (The JFCA, the court that rules in all labor-related matters, is, absurdly, part of the executive branch even though it is a quasi-judicial entity. The arrangement leaves politicians an opening to meddle in matters of a purely legal nature.)

  Personal bank accounts of all those charged in Morales’s complaint were also frozen, in an attempt to financially strangle the union’s leaders. The government’s Financial Intelligence Unit made these unlawful seizures of personal assets notwithstanding the CNBV’s report. (The CNBV, once it issues its opinion, has no authority to stop actions that are inconsistent with that opinion; thus, the banking commission did not impede seizures of union and personal assets and cooperated with the unit making them.) My family’s home in Mexico City was seized, along with all its contents. The government even took possession of a house belonging to my wife’s grandmother in Monterrey. Now abroad in Canada, all my family had were the few possessions we’d taken with us out of the country.

  The fact that Grupo México encouraged the government to continue going after me and the other four men charged is not only absurd from a legal standpoint; it is also inconsistent with earlier statements made by its head, Germán Feliciano Larrea.

  The entirety of the charges leveled at us is based on the $55 million that my father had won in negotiations with Grupo México in 1989 and 1990. Following the privatization of Mexicana de Cobre de Nacozari and Mexicana de Cananea, the government and Grupo México had made a clear commitment to take 5 percent of the stock of both companies and give it to a trust controlled by the Miners’ Union, to be used for social, educational, and growth plans. The use of the money was to be entirely at the union’s discretion. The arrangement was approved by the National Financial Authority, the government bank that facilitated the privatization of the two companies. After fighting tooth and nail against keeping their end of the bargain, and only after I initiated a long legal process against them, the company had finally paid the debt in 2005, placing $55 million into the Mining Trust. Subsequently, in 2005, the trustees voted to dissolve the trust and transfer its assets to the union.

  Now, enraged by my accusation of industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos, Grupo México (through its puppets like Morales) began to argue, just two years after finally honoring their obligation, that the simple act of dissolving the trust was a financial crime and that the union’s leaders had nefariously used the money for its own purposes. The charge would have been funny had not so many officials—and the Mexican media—jumped on the bandwagon. The union kept meticulous records of each transaction involving the $55 million, and we could prove that a huge part of the assets, almost $22 million, had been paid out to workers who lost their jobs as a result of the privatizations at Canahen and Nacozari and to their families, while other smaller amounts went to legal and bank fees, publicity costs, real estate investments, and renovations—all expenses that served the union and all of its members.

  Morales’s claim, besides being utterly false, had its basis in the distinction between money belonging to the Miners’ Union and money belonging to the members of the union as individuals. Morales and the other two argued that the workers, not the union, owned the assets. Yet, back in August of 1990, fresh from negotiations with my father about the 5 percent of privatization proceeds, Germán Larrea had personally disproven this claim. That month, Grupo México was undergoing bankruptcy, and during the proceedings, the First Court in Bankruptcy Matters in Mexico City mistakenly referred in writing to the 5 percent of shares of Mexicana de Cananea as belonging to the workers of the company, when in fact, as Larrea well knew, the shares had been explicitly negotiated to become the property of the Miners’ Union itself.

  Larrea, after spotting the error in the court’s document, filed a petition requesting that the judge correct the mistake and clarify that the funds correspond exclusively to the union, not to the workers individually. The petition, which we have copies of, signed by Larrea in his capacity as legal representative of Mexicana de Cananea, contains this passage:

  As can be noted in the comment presented by His Honor in subsection C of point VIII previously transcribed, there is a mistake since it says that the company I represent offered to deliver 5 percent of its share capital to the workers of the bankrupted company, when in fact the company I represent declared to offer the said percentage to the Union of Miner, Steel and Related Workers of the Mexican Republic, as Trust Beneficiary of the Trust established on November 14, 1988, with Multibanco Comermex S.N.C.

  In other words, Larrea himself said in August 1990 that the assets were the union’s, directly contradicting the argument he would later use as the pretext for his persecution against me, some sixteen years later. Upon receiving Larrea’s petition in that original matter, the judge issued an order modifying the sentence in the bankruptcy document to show that the assets belonged to the union, not to any particular group of workers:

  As a background to the document presented by Germán Larrea MOTA VELASCO on behalf of Mexicana de Cananea, S.A. de C.V. Considering the reasons given by the petitioner and considering that the resolution issued by this Court on August twenty-four of this year, which accepted and approved the auction of the company mentioned above is imprecise, it is important to clarify point VIII subsection c) which refers to the allotting of five per cent of the share capital of MEXICANA DE CANANEA, S.A. DE C.V., in favor of the workers of the bankrupted company, should say the following; “. . .) MEXICANA DE CANANEA, S.A. DE C.V., offers to assign up to five per cent of its share capital . . . in favor of the Union of Miner, Steel and Related Workers of the Mexican Republic, as Trust Beneficiary of the Trust established on November 14 of one thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight with MULTIBANCO COMERMEX, S.N.C. . . . which are the property of the said Union. In support of which we refer to Article 84 of the Code of Civil Procedures, applicable additionally, considering that this clarification is an integral part of the resolution issued on August twenty-four last.

  From the moment the correction was made, it was crystal clear that the contents of the Mining Trust belonged to the union. In alignment with this and with our proof of having used the assets appropriately, the PGR had received a clear opinion from the CNBV that the union and its executive committee were innocent of any mishandling of the $55 million. Now, as 2006 progressed, the PGR and the labor department were ignoring the obvious truth and working together to widen and complicate the legal onslaught against us—all at the behest of Grupo México.

  Germán Feliciano Larrea, aided by the Villarreal Brothers, was doing all he could to demonize me to the public and persuade public officials to persecute me on his behalf. We were told by a confidential source that he offered payments and gifts to Interior Secretary Abascal, Labor Secretary Salazar, Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, Secretary of Finance Francisco Gil Díaz, PAN senator Ramón Muñoz, and the presidential couple themselves, among many more, hoping to succeed in destr
oying the legitimate leadership of the Miners’ Union. Larrea reportedly dangled a huge financial carrot in front of each one of these individuals, offering between $10 million and $30 million if they could help the government-corporate cabal reach its objective of destroying, at any cost, both my leadership and the Miners’ Union itself.

  At the beginning of 2007 in a private meeting between Germán Larrea and one of the vice presidents of Televisa, Alejandro Quintero, Larrea told Quintero that he would pay whatever it took to launch a smear media campaign in order to discredit me, the union, and my family. (Larrea is also a member of the board of directors and a shareholder of Televisa.) He told Quintero that he would risk his fortune just to break the union and break me too. In 2011, Xavier García de Quevedo, one of the closest accomplices of Larrea and a top official in Grupo México, made a public statement saying that the conflict with Los Mineros had cost them at that time more than $4 billion.

  In Vancouver, I watched the conflict escalate in the spring of 2006 with a heavy heart. The bodies of sixty-three miners still lay buried at Pasta de Conchos. The failed eviction at Lázaro Cárdenas had proven the government’s willingness to use lethal violence against us. My family had been forced into a strange land, with all our assets in the hands of the government. And it was looking more and more like our stay in Canada might last longer than we originally hoped. I was also getting discouraging calls urging me to step down as head of Los Mineros. Alonso Ancira and his advisor, Moises Kolteniuk—who supposedly had been a friend a long time before—both tried to convince me to surrender the fight and allow Salazar to impose Elías Morales on the workers. I was unwilling to even entertain the thought. Doing so would be tantamount to a confession, and it would be a betrayal of my fellow workers and my father’s legacy.

  Through it all, though, we had the stalwart support of our friends in the USW, and of the miners and steelworkers of Mexico. They refused to accept the lies of politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Upon hearing the full story, no one could believe that Morales was anything but a liar and traitor. He hadn’t even troubled to show up at Pasta de Conchos. The only time he’d set foot in the union’s headquarters in the past six years had been while trying to raid and destroy it with a band of intoxicated vandals. Since I’d left Mexico, he hadn’t become involved in the union’s work in any way, never negotiating a single issue on the workers’ behalf. All Morales did was give libelous interviews in the media and attend official ceremonies where, in the presence of companies and government officials, he was presented as general secretary of the union.

  The loyalty of Los Mineros, the USW, and the global labor community was unwavering in the wake of Pasta de Conchos, but securing legal help proved more difficult. In stark contrast to excellent lawyers like Nestor de Buen and his son Carlos, who worked on the labor side, and steadfast supporters like Marco del Toro, who would take on our case later, we would encounter our share of lawyers who let us down.

  A matter of days after the explosion at Pasta de Conchos, a lawyer from Monterrey named Bernardo Canales had been referred to me by Celso Nájera. Canales offered me his professional services, and I was grateful for the potential help. Canales made a good first impression. He seemed like a hard worker, and I trusted that he had the union’s best interests at heart, even though he was the cousin of Fernando Canales Clariond, a PAN member from Monterrey who had served as secretary of economy under President Fox. Throughout March of 2006, Canales provided legal defense services to the five of us who were charged, but at the beginning of April, he told me that his close friend, Guillermo Salinas Pliego, had invited him along on a motorcycle tour of Europe in the middle of the month to celebrate Holy Week. He told us he would call every day while he was gone and that he would have his cell phone by his side, day and night, in case of emergencies.

  Canales’s overly fervent assurances worried me slightly, as did the fact that Salinas Pliego, his traveling partner, was the brother of the president of TV Azteca—the multimedia conglomerate that had been particularly unfair toward Los Mineros since the conflict had begun. Salinas Pliego was a major TV Azteca shareholder himself. The two of them left Mexico in mid-April of 2006 and spent Holy Week motoring around Europe. The first few days he was gone, we didn’t get the promised phone calls. Then emergency struck: the government authorized full searches of the union headquarters, the homes of my union colleagues Juan Linares and Félix Estrella, my home in Mexico City, and my home in Monterrey. In need of help to block these intrusions, we called Canales’s phone over and over with no effect. At last he sent some colleagues from his firm to help us, but never once did he himself speak to one of us. He had been receiving our messages but simply refused to speak to us. We were left without defense in a moment of great aggression from the government.

  When Canales got back, he ceased all communication with me or anyone from the union. Finally, a secretary from his legal firm called my office in Mexico City, saying that Mr. Canales was not going to continue with this case and that we should send someone to collect all the files from his office in Monterrey. A colleague called me at my Vancouver office with the news. That was it. Canales had collected more than $300,000 for doing absolutely nothing besides a few weeks of defense work. Like a coward, he made off with the workers’ hard-earned money without personally calling me or any of my colleagues to say he was leaving the case.

  When he took on the case, Canales never intimated that he was not able to carry out his work, that he was afraid, or that there was any other problem that would cause him to stop representing us. He took on our case without appreciating the magnitude of the aggression against the union, and then profited from the union’s resources—heavily depleted from the government’s arbitrary seizures—before realizing the enemy he was up against. We had trusted Canales and put all our confidence, and all our legal files, in his hands. The betrayal stung.

  As we did our best to fend off searches, seizures, and threats, our efforts to prosecute Salazar and Morales for forgery was encountering frustrating setbacks. In order for the labor department to fast-track the approval of Morales as leader of the union in the days before Pasta de Conchos, Morales was required to submit certain documents to the labor department, and it was in these papers that they had forged the signature of union executive committee member Juan Luis Zúñiga Velázquez, who subsequently in 2010 betrayed the union. The false signature appeared on four different documents, all dated February 16, 2006. The first forged document was a union resolution sanctioning the five of us for the supposed banking fraud involving the $55 million. The second document informed Labor Secretary Salazar of the sanctioning. The third, which is addressed to both the union and the labor department, states that I have been removed as general secretary and expelled from the union. The fourth forged document is Zuñiga’s supposed resignation from the union—as if he had coincidentally signed all these documents and resigned on the very same day.

  These documents formed the cornerstone of our legal case against the labor department and the traitors headed up by Morales. As soon as he learned of the forgery, Zuñiga filed a criminal complaint. On February 28—the same day Salazar made the official declaration of the government’s support of Morales—Zuñiga had personally alerted the labor secretary of the forgery and the fact that the false documents were being used to illicitly achieve the aims of Grupo México. Salazar was then obligated by law to inform the PGR of this crime, but of course he didn’t; he was in on it.

  Nevertheless, based on Zuñiga’s criminal complaint, an investigation into the forgery moved forward. In late March, our conviction that the signatures had been forged was confirmed by a report from graphoscopy experts at the PGR. Though the attorney general’s office had been instructed to press the campaign against us in every way possible, no one had been paying attention to the graphoscopy department—a technical team that was uninvolved in the PGR’s overarching political machinations. The report, for us, was an exciting development. It was only after we went
public with it that the PGR realized it had a problem.

  Unbelievably, the attorney general’s office announced in a brief public statement in mid-April that the false documents, along with the reports declaring their falsity, had been stolen from the PGR’s Mexico City offices. Suddenly the most compelling hard evidence we had against Grupo México and the labor department was gone, without a trace. The PGR insisted on blaming low-level officers for the theft, failing to state why such officers would be motivated to take the documents. La Jornada—a daily paper that has done a better job than most at reporting honestly on the conflict—ran a story on the highly suspicious theft, along with several other major media outlets.

  Once again, the economic power of Germán Feliciano Larrea had gotten him what he wanted. He’d managed to have evidence stolen while it was in the custody of the PGR itself. More than likely, he’d simply paid off someone in the attorney general’s office to make the papers disappear.

  As a result of this supposed theft, the falsification of the signatures remained unpunished, as it does to this day. In the coming years, we would continue to hold labor department officials responsible for the forgery. Marco del Toro, the criminal lawyer who would do so much for Los Mineros, presented several complaints on Zuñiga’a behalf. Incredibly, in 2010, Zuñiga would leave the union and publicly withdraw his complaint regarding the forgery, declaring that he no longer claimed any crime had been committed. He’d finally given in and been bought off by Grupo México, joining the side of the enemies of the union.

  In May of 2006, a month after the PGR sent duplicated case files to San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León, and Sonora, each of those states issued arrest warrants for me as well as for my union colleagues Juan Linares Montúfar, Héctor Félix Estrella, José Angel Rocha Pérez, and Gregorio Pérez Romo (a courier who wasn’t even a union member). The judge overseeing the complaint in the state of Nuevo León handled the warrant differently from the other two judges. Being slightly more principled, this judge saw that he clearly had no jurisdiction over the matter and said so—although all he did was wash his hands of the case, transferring it instead to the Court 32 of the Federal District in Mexico City.