Collapse of Dignity Read online

  An explanation soon surfaced. Leaders of some of the smaller unions in the Congress reported that Flores and the others had the previous evening organized a secret meeting in Interior Secretary Abascal’s office to reelect Flores, even though such an action violated the bylaws of the organization. They had agreed to reelect him, then gone straight to the Labor Secretary Salazar’s office, where they were issued a toma de nota—the document through which the government officially recognizes a union leader as legitimate. Getting the toma de nota usually takes months, if not years, but coincidentally the document had already been prepared for Flores. He was immediately declared president of the Congress, with the full support of President Fox.

  The union leaders who told us this had been caught in the middle of the break; Flores had tried to convince them to join his side, but they had refused. The breakfast table buzzed with the news, the excitement of a coming change in leadership turned to anger at Flores’s betrayal.

  On Wednesday, February 15, we reconvened at the Labor Congress headquarters, in a large complex many referred to as “the bunker.” Reports had confirmed that Flores had been elected as president in Carlos Abascal’s office and been issued the toma de nota. We also knew that the missing members of the Congress were hiding out in the Lepanto, a nearby hotel supposedly owned by Victor Flores, and wouldn’t appear. Nevertheless, we waited for an hour to begin the meeting, full of disappointment.

  At the time the session was scheduled to begin, we opened the meeting and formally decided that we would stand unified and, independently of the government’s will, refuse to support Victor Flores’s presidency. Instead, we would move forward with the legitimate elections, as we had planned from the beginning. That day, we elected Isaías González, leader of the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), as the new president of the Labor Congress. I was voted first vice president, and Cuauhtémoc Paleta of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) was voted second vice president.

  It had been proposed that I serve as president of the Congress, but I ultimately decided to refuse that possibility. Abascal’s warning rang in my ears: The Mexican government, along with several powerful companies, were highly displeased with the Miners’ Union and the determination with which we fought for our rights, and I knew there was a strong possibility that outright aggression would begin soon. Having a president with that target on his back risked the integrity of the Labor Congress.

  In the end, we stayed at the Labor Congress headquarters until that weekend. We organized a formal ceremony to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its creation and held it in the courtyard of the building without Flores and the union leaders who had joined him. After that event, we returned to normal activities in our unions. We reaffirmed our commitment to preserve unity, and we called for the strengthening of it in partnership with other national organizations of workers, which we invited to join in this fight for union democracy and freedom. The adversity we were experiencing only reaffirmed our commitment to fight for the defense of the interests of workers. Our motto was, “An assault against a union is an aggression against everyone.”

  The government of Vicente Fox had succeeded in imposing Victor Flores on the Labor Congress without a democratic vote of all the organization’s members. Flores had struck a deal with Abascal and Fox: He would remain as the head of the Labor Congress with official consent and presidential endorsement, and in exchange he would support Fox’s labor reform project that the president had thus far been unsuccessful in getting past Congress and the Senate. Flores and his supporters seemed to have no concerns about the deep divide their actions would cause in the Labor Congress, and as I reviewed these developments in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps that’s exactly what Abascal had hoped to do. Divided and arguing amongst ourselves, the Labor Congress would be much easier for our external opponents to deal with.

  The consequence of this mistake was the immediate splitting of the Labor Congress and the creation, at the initiative of several participants, of a broad coalition of unions and national confederations aimed at democratizing the leadership and the whole labor movement. The National Workers Union (UNT), the Mexican Electricians Union (SME), the Social Security Union (SNTSS), the National University Workers Unions (STUNAM) and many others—all of which had long fought for freedom and autonomy among workers—agreed to stop attending Labor Congress meetings and cut off contact with Flores and his followers. They had proven themselves servants of the government of President Vicente Fox.

  By Friday afternoon, we had put together most of the details of the anniversary celebration that would take place the next day. Around 4:00 in the afternoon, some of my colleagues in the new union coalition and I held a press conference at the Marquis Reforma Hotel in Mexico City, where several of us gave speeches denouncing the reelection of Flores and questioning how he’d been able to secure a toma de nota so quickly. After we’d wrapped it up, I decided to head back to the Miners’ Union headquarters with three of my colleagues. I needed to finish up some work and collect a few documents I planned to read over the weekend. On car ride over, at about 5:30 p.m., my cell phone rang. It was a member of the union, and he was frantic. He said that a group of over 300 thugs, assailants, and gangsters, armed with sticks, stones, knives, and firearms and led by a group of former miners, including Elías Morales—the man who had betrayed the union and vied to take my father’s place—had assaulted the headquarters of the Miners’ Union and were trying to take control of the building. Morales, the caller said, was declaring that he was now general secretary of the union. He was waving around a toma de nota that supposedly proved it, and accusing the union’s leaders of misusing the $55 million Mining Trust we had won from Grupo México in 2005.

  The caller told me that the small band of secretaries and union staff present at the building had been helpless to keep the attackers out. Morales and his band were stealing documents, destroying property, and physically intimidating the union workers. The police had arrived with a grand total of two patrol cars and left right away, saying that they would seek reinforcements. They hadn’t returned.

  I tried to calm the caller down, advising that they should not confront the gang, since they were armed, assuring them it wasn’t worth it to risk anyone’s life. Yet I could hardly believe what I was hearing. How could Morales, who’d been expelled from the union for years, have the nerve to say he was the true leader of the miners? How could anyone believe that the Mining Trust—handled with great care, in the interests of all the union’s members—had been mishandled? There was only one way it was possible: He had to have powerful backing, from the government and from the reactionary mining companies that wanted me gone. I’d become too troublesome. I’d finally pushed too hard on labor rights, and now they were trying to break our union and remove me by force. Morales was an ideal replacement. Abascal was right—things had gotten complicated, but not out of control.

  As we drove, I explained to my colleagues what was happening. I insisted that we get to the headquarters as soon as possible, but they wouldn’t allow it, arguing that it was too dangerous. We changed course, heading toward my home. On the way, I was already lining up interviews with the press to denounce this unprecedented violation of our organization and defend the union’s leaders against the spurious allegations of mishandling the Mining Trust.

  We also called the fellow miners who were still gathered at the Labor Congress, asking them to return to union headquarters and help restore order. Word spread to Morales and the attackers that Los Mineros were on their way back to defend the building, and, less than an hour after descending on the building, they fled the scene. Defenseless female secretaries and other members of the administrative staff had been severely beaten, and important documents and many valuable items had been stolen. In the chaos, union members had managed to detain four of the assailants, whom they locked in the building and interrogated.

  After intense questioning, the four detainees would s
ay that they were hired in Iztapalapa in Mexico City for a fee of 300 pesos (approximately $30) and that they had been given their choice of cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, and alcohol to help them muster the courage to carry out their assignment: steal valuable documents, take control of the offices, and impose Morales as the new general secretary. They could hardly articulate a word as a result of the drugs and alcohol they had consumed, and though they confessed who hired them, it had been done through several middlemen. It was clear to all of us that the AFI (Federal Investigation Agency, a creation with which Fox wanted to imitate the USA’s FBI) and the secretary of the interior had knowledge and certainly planned this operation. The police response had been pathetic, and the tactic of using a gang of hired violent criminals was a classic trademark of the Mexican government. Most likely, they planned this attack to coincide with the meeting held on February 13 before the elections for president of the Labor Congress, with full endorsement of the government of Vicente Fox through Abascal and with the cooperation of antiunion companies and certain members of the Labor Congress.

  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 diff
erence, 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.