Collapse of Dignity Page 29

  Linares, Pavón, and Barajas were targeted in this new case precisely because Ancira knew they were some of the most important figures in the executive committee. With me out of the country and these three out of commission, the union’s day-to-day operations would be severely compromised. As justification for the arrests, Ancira claimed that these three were responsible for a multimillion-dollar fraud against Altos Hornos de México. The accusation was completely false and easily disproven and, at its core, resembled the federal charges against us. Ancira’s complaint said that Altos Hornos had given the union one thousand pesos for every active worker in its operations but that the union’s leadership had kept these funds for themselves. They twisted it to make it sound like the Pavón, Linares, and Barajas had hoarded the workers’ money, which wasn’t the case at all. The complaint failed to mention that the money was meant for the continuation of social programs for the miners, which is precisely what it had been used for. That purpose was clearly stated in the collective bargaining agreement signed by Ancira himself. His complaint was nothing but a malicious scheme to further slander these three men, imprison them if possible, and keep them locked up until they became traitors to Los Mineros.

  On December 4, personnel from the federal Department of Public Security burst into Pavón’s home in Mexico City to carry out the arrest warrant based on Ancira’s charges. They dragged him away with ridiculously excessive security measures—it was as if he were a notorious drug lord. He was taken to the airport, where he would be flown back to Monclova, Coahuila. Even though the warrant had been issued by a state judge, a jet owned by the federal government was waiting to take him away.

  From the PGR’s hangar in the Mexico City airport, Pavón called Marco del Toro. (Curiously, the arresting agents hadn’t yet taken his cell phone.) Pavón was distraught, and he begged Marco to send help. After that, he called me too, and he sounded absolutely paralyzed with fear. We assured him we would help him fight the arrest, and within the hour, Luis Chavez, a lawyer from Marco’s firm, was on a flight to Coahuila to meet him. Marco had had to rent a plane to get Chavez there in time, but it was a necessity: if someone wasn’t there to represent Pavón, he would likely be appointed a public defender instead.

  The following morning, Pavón appeared in court to make a statement to the judge who had ordered his arrest. The courtroom was crawling with news reporters who had been sent by Alonso Ancira. Because of the way Mexican courts operated, there typically wouldn’t be much to see: court cases are conducted mostly in writing, and judges typically sit in their offices for the majority of the day while clerks attend hearings and take notes for them. But in Pavón’s case, Ancira wanted a show. Not only did the judge personally appear to listen to Pavón’s statement, but she also agreed to take an interview with a group of reporters as soon as she left the courtroom, which was an unusual move. In this interview, she warned that if a provisional release were requested for Pavón, the bail amount would be close to ten million pesos. With our accounts freshly frozen by Gómez Mont, there was no way we could bail Pavón out at that price.

  Later that day, Pavón was on the verge of a breakdown. He met again with Marco’s associate Luis Chávez and was in tears. Luis told him not to worry—he and Marco had come up with an idea. Their plan was to request Pavón’s provisional release not through the presiding judge but from an amparo judge. No one would expect the move, and they had a hunch that they could convince the amparo court to drastically lower the bail amount to something the union could afford. (For Ancira’s charge, bail was possible; the supposed crime was not on the list of “serious” offenses.)

  During the nine days Pavón was in jail, we began to see signs of great timorousness in him. In the telephone calls they allowed him, he tearfully reported to Luis Chávez that the union’s enemies—including business associates of Alonso Ancira—had been visiting him in jail. He said they had offered him freedom and a large sum of money, in exchange for a denouncement of the union’s executive committee. He said he turned down the bribe, but he yelled and wept, in a cowardly and stupid manner, accusing us of having abandoned him. He said he was deathly sick, that jail was going to kill him. And he showed no appreciation for our strenuous efforts to raise the money needed to get him out of jail. By the end of Pavón’s stay in jail, Luis was at his wits’ end listening to the man’s complaints.

  Nevertheless, Marco’s plan to request bail from an amparo judge ended up working. Pavón was granted provisional release with a lowered bail amount of about five and half million pesos. It was still a steep price, but we thought we could come up with it, and we were confident we would be reimbursed after we won the case in court. To make the payment, we had to pull from one of our last remaining assets—a striking fund that was used to support the workers at Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea, as well as the families of the men lost at Pasta de Conchos.

  Once Pavón was released, he asked to be relieved of his duties for a week so he could visit his family in Zacatecas. When he got back to Mexico City, though, he was a different person than the man who had been arrested. He seemed nervous and shifty all the time, and his contributions to the executive committee meetings were scattered and confused. The illness he was supposedly dying of in prison had mysteriously vanished. A few weeks after his release, he flew to Vancouver to meet with me, and I noticed this change in demeanor firsthand. I was shocked to hear him personally blame our colleagues in the executive committee for leaving him in jail so long—a baseless and unfair accusation. We had gone to great lengths to get him out. Before his arrest, Pavón had been a key spokesperson for the union and one of the most visible defenders of the cause of Los Mineros. He’d loudly criticized the conspiracy against the union, and had even called Labor Secretary Lozano an “asshole” in public. Now he was the opposite: a weak, complaining mess. Nevertheless, the union’s legal team continued the amparo case in his defense and made significant progress toward having him acquitted.

  Over the following months, it became apparent that Pavón hadn’t told us the full truth about what had happened in prison. He had in fact accepted the bribes offered to him, and every day since his release, he had been working against the union from the inside. He was now following the marching orders of Javier Lozano, Germán Larrea, Alberto Bailleres, and of Alonso Ancira—the very man whose false accusations had put him in jail. In the spring of 2009, we found that Pavón had been trying to cut deals with Grupo Peñoles, to the detriment of the workers, and that he’d been actively promoting internal divisions. We had no choice but to expel him, which we did in May of 2009.

  All pretense of support for the miners fell away after that. He suddenly reversed sides and became openly treacherous. He claimed that I was a burden on the union, that I had left him in jail without legal support, and that I had stolen the $55 million all along. He even stated that I was encouraging the strikes in Taxco, Sombrerete, and Cananea just to pressure the government and the companies into dropping the charges against me. He seemed to develop an addiction to appearing in the media for the sole purpose of spreading lies and bashing me and his former colleagues. Never once, however, did he give an explanation of why, if he believed this, he had spent so much time defending the union’s leadership.

  Pavón was quickly taken under the wing of Alberto Bailleres of Grupo Peñoles, who had great business interests in Pavón’s home state of Zacatecas. Bailleres gave Pavón complete legal support and helped him set up a company union that, like Grupo México’s SUTEEBM, would compete with Los Mineros. Pavón even had the gall to use my father’s name in the title of this new organization. His betrayal was among the worst we had experienced thus far.

  Unfortunately, the defense team had already completed work on Pavón’s defense in Coahuila, and he had been acquitted of the fraud against Altos Hornos de México. But when we contacted the court about the huge sum of money we’d put up for Pavón’s conditional release, we found that the court no longer had possession of the funds. Right after his charg
es were dismissed, Pavón had traveled to Monclova, presented himself in court, said it was he who had put up the bail money, and collected over five million pesos. It was money that was supposed to support striking miners and the widows of Pasta de Conchos, but now it was in the hands of this vulgar turncoat.

  Once we were aware of this robbery, we filed charges against Pavón. Curiously, Pavón suddenly had a new legal team to defend him, and it happened to be paid for by Grupo Peñoles. He claimed he had given the money to the treasurer of the union section in Zacatecas—a total lie. Our case against him is still pending.

  Meanwhile, Juan Linares was still languishing in jail for his “serious” crimes. But unlike Pavón, Juan had shown great strength and loyalty. Despite the pitiful conditions he was living in—the cell was rude and bare, and his diet consisted of cold food out of cans—Linares was in good spirits, committed to holding fast until his accusers could be proven wrong. A couple of weeks after Linares’s December arrest, Marco del Toro visited him in his cell. After the two of them discussed the case for a while, Linares—with his full white beard and large frame—said, “You know, Marco, this year, Christmas isn’t coming.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Marco.

  Linares smiled. “Because Santa Claus is in jail.”

  Clearly, the appointment of our supposed “communication bridge” hadn’t solved anything. One day Gómez Mont was assuring us he would end the conflict, the next he was stripping us of our resources and having us arrested. Though he was, like Javier Lozano, a lawyer by trade, he seemed to delight in perverting the law. The position of interior secretary demands that a person have stature, ability, and integrity—Gómez Mont had none.

  Not for a moment had he stopped acting as attorney on behalf of his former client. He staunchly defended Grupo México and its leaders, the only change being that he now had use of the public power that came with his new position. He had broken his promise of acting impartially in his role as interior secretary—not that we ever expected him to overnight be transformed from a vigorous defender of Grupo México into an angelic and honest mediator.

  In the years after his appointment, Gómez Mont would develop a close partnership with Lozano, through which the two pressured federal judges and even Supreme Court justices to impose the whims of Grupo México at any cost. Their shameless fight against workers’ rights would continue throughout the remainder of the Calderón administration. In 2009, they would together engineer the demise of Luz y Fuerza del Centro (Central Power and Light), a state company. When Felipe Calderón announced the end of the company, more than 44,000 workers lost their jobs in one day, but it was all a maneuver to destroy the Mexican Electricians’ Union, one of the three or so democratic and independent unions in Mexico.

  The people whom Gómez Mont associates with are yet another indicator of his character as a politician—or lack thereof. Roberto Correa, a former government official who today is a casino businessman, has deep connections with Gómez Mont and the law firm to which he belonged. Correa, who served as Director of Gaming and Raffles in the Calderón’s interior department, was investigated for granting forty-one expansion permits to gaming company Atracciones y Emociones Vallarta just twenty-four hours before resigning from his position. Like many Mexican regulators, he helped companies develop workarounds for federal antigambling laws, in one instance allowing betting on poker games only allowing players to collect their winnings only after taking a trivia quiz.

  A 2011 story in El Universal outlined the connections between Correa Méndez, his associate Juan Iván Peña, and the Esponda, Zinser, and Gómez Mont law firm. According to the article, both men “boasted of their close connections with politicians and lawyers such as Julio Esponda, who is a partner of Alberto Zinser and Fernando Gómez Mont, the ex-secretary of the interior.” Correa Méndez and Peña Neder, who was also a former official of the interior department, operate the companies Juegos de Entretenimiento y Video de Cadereyta, and Ferrocarril Endige and, according to El Universal, “through them sell documents, some of them false, used to install and operate casinos in various states.”

  None of the lawyers of Esponda, Zinser, and Gómez Mont refuted the accusation that they were linked to these unscrupulous casino owners. Even when they take on the guise of public servants, these lawyers remain staunch servants of big business, to the detriment of their own names and their professions.

  SIXTEEN

  THE LARREA BROTHERS GO MISSING

  Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

  —BUDDHA

  Juan Linares rang in the year 2009 in his cramped cell in Mexico City North Prison. Like Carlos Pavón, he had been offered his freedom several times. The price was always the same: betrayal of Los Mineros. “I could walk out of this jail tomorrow if I were willing to betray my union,” Juan told family and friends who visited him, “but that’s something I could never do.”

  It was tremendously painful to see one of our colleagues locked up like a criminal when he was totally innocent. But because his crime was “serious,” and because he was jailed on orders of Grupo México, no bail was set. We could do little but press forward with his legal defense. Along with Pavón, we had acquitted Linares of Ancira’s charges in Coahuila—his arrest warrant in that matter had been nullified. But the charges regarding the Mining Trust were still in play, so in jail he stayed. (José Barajas, the third defendant in Ancira’s case, had avoided capture long enough that our legal team was able to block his arrest completely; he was allowed to merely sign in monthly before the courts in Monclova rather than stay in jail.)

  Our defense team had had great success in fending off the lingering 2006 state-level charges against Linares. We had long before appealed the warrant against him that originated in the state of Sonora, and a year and a half before his arrest, in June of 2007, the First Collegiate Tribunal for Criminal Administrative Matters in Hermosillo had upheld the appeal, stating that there was no illegal conduct. On December 14, less than two weeks after he was taken into custody, the Eighteenth Criminal Court of the Federal District, which had inherited a warrant for the same charges from San Luis Potosí, also declared Juan innocent and ordered his release, saying that there was no evidence of a crime. (The PGR appealed this ruling but was later denied in May of 2009.)

  When we began our vigorous fight against the renewed federal charges in early 2009, we started with the premise that since the state charges against Juan had been thrown out by the courts, the renewed federal charges should also be dismissed, since they were based on the exact same accusation. We also argued that the three accusers—Elías Morales, Miguel Castillejas, and Martín Perales—had no right to press charges for the full $55 million. First of all, they had no proof that any crime had been committed. Second, although they claimed to be fighting on behalf of thousands of miners who made up a cooperative of ex union members called Veta de Plata, we knew that wasn’t the case. In reality, Morales, Castilleja, and Perales were the only true plaintiffs; therefore, they could claim only the small share of the trust they argued was theirs personally.

  But the judge presiding over Linares’s case rejected these requests. We therefore began calling witnesses to testify before the court, as did the opposition. Starting in early 2009, dozens of hearings were undertaken regarding the federal charges. All these took place at the Mexico City North Prison, in the open courthouse attached by a long tunnel to the bank of cells that held Juan. For extended stretches of time—sometimes more than fifteen hours in a row—the court held interrogations that lasted at least several hours per witness. The proceedings generated a file of seventy volumes. From Vancouver, I followed every step of the case, communicating with Marco del Toro daily via cell phone and two-way radio.

  The court had at first appointed a judge named Silvia Carrasco to the case, but after hearings were already under way, it decided to transfer the case to Judge José Miguel Trujillo of the First District Court. Judge Trujillo had ruled in some of ou
r amparo trials before—including the seizure of my son’s home—and we thought this move was unfair, especially since it took place after the trial had begun. We filed an amparo against the switch, but it was denied.

  Though judges in Mexico typically do not attend hearings themselves, Judge Trujillo was present for most of the proceedings in Linares’s trial. The main reason for his presence was that arguments would frequently break out in the courtroom between Marco del Toro and the lawyer representing Elías Morales and his fellow traitors. This attorney was a man named Agustín Acosta Azcón, a man whose shady past I was very familiar with. His father, Agustín Acosta Lagunes, had been general director of the Mexican Mint for years when I took over that role in 1989. Through his dictatorial management style, the elder Acosta had prompted the Mint workers’ union to strike several times. After he left the Mint, he would use his connections with President José Lopez Portillo to become treasury undersecretary and, later, governor of the state of Veracruz. In these two roles, Acosta Lagunes would use his power to repress peasants and leftist groups.

  Over the course of our legal battle with Grupo México, we came to find that Acosta’s son, Agustín Acosta Azcón, was hardly better. The younger Acosta had gotten his career off to an inauspicious start. A few days after Calderón took office, the new president had appointed him director of financial intelligence for the Treasury Department, but Acosta Lagunes soon ran into scandal. One of his clients was René Bejarano, a high-ranking member of the Mexico City legislature, and mere weeks after Acosta began his new job, a video surfaced of Bejarano taking a bribe from a well-known businessman. The grainy footage, which originally aired on a popular news program, hosted by Brozo the Clown (Victor Alberto Trujillo Matamoros in real life), showed Acosta’s client taking stacks of money from the businessman and thrusting them into a briefcase, a plastic bag, and his pockets. For weeks, the video was a staple of Brozo’s show. The scandal ruined Bejarano’s career and got Acosta kicked out of the Treasury Department. Thanks to the misdeeds of his client, Acosta had set a new record for shortest tenure in an appointed government position, with four weeks in office.