The corporate betrayal of Cananea

Mine union members Ysedro Rios and Julian Arredondo on strike guard duty.

“It’s treason; Grupo Mexico has betrayed us,” Arredondo said quietly. “Grupo Mexico is waging a union-busting effort. They want to get rid of our union.”

Twenty years working in the Mexicana de Cananea mine as an electrician, this day Arredondo was part of a different routine. He was standing guard on the 7 to 3 shift with more than a dozen fellow members of Seccion 65 of the Mexican Union of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers, “Los Mineros,” making sure the mine remained in control of the workers. Los Mineros legally occupied the sprawling facility since striking against the multi-national corporation, Grupo Mexico, in July 2007.

“They want to get rid of our collective bargaining agreement,” Arredondo added. “If they get what they want, this town will end.”

Now, a month later, the building is a blackened ruin from a fire that raged the night 3,500 federal and state police assaulted the city and the union and handed the mine back to Grupo Mexico. The strike is over. So is the collective bargaining agreement and Los Mineros’ representation at the mine. Just as Arredondo said. A new company union, or “sindicatos blancos” now represents the miners.

Cananea still exists of course, but its way of life lies shattered and uncertain.

This outcome was made possible by Grupo Mexico’s powerful reach into the current Mexican government of President Felipe Calderon. “Of course PAN, which is the party of the president, wants nothing to do with [a settlement],” Cananea Mayor Reginaldo Moreno said in an interview. “They are completely in the hands of the corporations.”

Grupo Mexico’s huge open-pit mine and processing facilities are the heart of the economy of Cananea, a small city 30 miles south of the Arizona border. The city, the mine and the miners have a long and famous history.

“A hundred and four years ago in the Mexican State of Sonora copper miners for American-owned Cananea Consolidated Copper Company went on strike,” writes Judy Ancel, a labor educator at the University of Missouri,
Kansas City. “The Cananea strike gets the credit in Mexico for starting the Mexican Revolution of 1910.”

In May, Ancel organized a delegation of labor educators and others who spent three days gathering testimony, information and the background to the current strike. I videotaped the entire three days. We were able to tour the enormous open pit mine and its facilities.

Cananeans, many with family ties to the original strike, are proud of their history. “My grandfather was a striker in 1906 and then went off to fight in the Mexican Revolution,” said Arturo Rodriguez, the town historian. “Then he came back to work in the mine.”

Los Mineros union strike flag hung for almost three years on the main gate to the mine.

Los Mineros was a strong and militant presence in the mine for much of the 20th century. U.S. based Anaconda ran the facility until the \’70s when it was nationalized by the Mexican government; throughout this time the union and the company maintained a sort of social contract that benefited all parties, including the city of Cananea.

“When U.S. corporations owned the mine, things were a little different because they actually provided free water to the people of Cananea. They paid a percentage for their employees of the cost of electricity and gas,” Mayor Morena told us.

“When the North Americans left, the government took over and administered. And they too supplied various kinds of facilities and support for the workers, especially through the collective bargaining agreement, that benefited the workers and the town. But once the government decided to privatize and sell the company to individual capitalists, then everything changed.”

That privatization happened in 1991 when Mexican President Carlos Salinas aligned himself with the structural adjustment regime of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and began “selling off” state-owned businesses. Under the new “neoliberal” rules of capitalism, the Cananea mine was sold for pennies on the dollar to Grupo Mexico. Owner German Larrea is now one of the richest men in Mexico.

The up-to-date Clinica Obrero withers away after being closed by Grupo Mexico in 1999.

The current battle continues the fight that began with that transfer of wealth and ownership. Grupo Mexico has played its part, imposing the new rules of the global economy with a vengeance. In a succession of acts that included the closing of a worker’s clinic and refusal to share water with the city, Grupo Mexico shredded the longstanding social contract between the mine operation and the city and people of Cananea. After they closed down the up-to-date Clinica Obrera, the Workers Clinic, that operated as part of the company-union agreement, they then tried to close the hospital that served as its alternative.

“On May 11, 2008, we arrived at work and we saw the notice that the hospital was closed. There had been no previous notice at all,” Dr. Alfredo Parra Ybarra, director of the Hospital Ronquillo, recounted. “The Grupo Mexico people actually were there inside the hospital blocking our way in.” Dr. Ybarra led resistance to the closing, working without pay for months, and the hospital remains open. However it suffers from severe lack of funds and shortages of medicines and other supplies.

Toxic dust from mine "tailings" rises high in the air, day after day.

Requirements set forth in the original agreement with the federal government also obligated Grupo Mexico to protect the community from the carcinogenic “tailings” that are a byproduct of the processing operations. They have not complied. Spread out like a huge white scar on the desert floor bounding the city, the mudlike brew of toxic waste dries in the sun to form a fine dust that gets picked up by the winds and air currents. White plumes of this dust reach high into the sky, day after day. The cloud of lead and other materials blows over the entire state of Sonora and into Arizona.

Meanwhile, in the mine, routine maintenance and the safety of the workers deteriorated under Grupos’ leadership. “The company began to demand that we spend much less or no time on preventative maintenance and all of the work we did was corrective after the problem occurred,” explained Gabriel Cosa Lopez, a striking maintenance worker. “And as they pushed more pressure on the way maintenance was done, there was a real decline not only in the quality of the machinery, but it took an enormous toll on the workers in terms of health and safety.”

“We lost a lot of protection,” said Rigoberto Quiada, a miner for 36 years. “The company was demanding more of people. I was at the very top of my trade. The intensification of work was a problem. They always wanted more production.”

According to the union, none of the dust collectors has functioned since the company shut them down in 1999. In October 2007 a binational group of occupational and health experts from the Maquila Health and Safety Support Network conducted an inspection of the mine. They documented severe health and safety violations. The report paints “a clear picture of a workplace being deliberately run into the ground. A serious lack of preventive maintenance, failure to repair equipment and correct visible safety hazards . . .”

Los Mineros went on strike in July 2007 because of the life-threatening safety violations in the mine and because of additional constant and serious violations of their contract agreement. Linked to this fight is the union’s response to an explosion at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine that killed 65 miners in 2006. That facility is also operated by Grupo Mexico. The Cananea strike has been strongly supported by Leo Girard and the United Steelworkers.

But something about Cananea makes plain the larger fight against the values and ideas of the new capitalism. Perhaps it is the clarity of the way of life and standard of living provided by the mine for nearly a century, a way of life under major assault; perhaps it is Grupo’s stark disinterest in anything but profit and exploitation; perhaps it is the proud history of Cananea and an earlier generation of miners who sparked the Mexican Revolution in 1906 with the first strike there, or perhaps it is the articulate militancy of the miners themselves.

Copper processing facility at the Mexican de Cananea mine.

“They view us as just another piece of machinery,” stated Sergio Tolano Lizarraga, Seccion 65 Secretary General, when we interviewed him in May. “It’s shameful how our government allows companies like this one to do these things. With our hands we have made them rich, Larrea is the third richest person in Mexico, and yet what he does is use this money we made for him to destroy us. There is not one community where Grupo Mexico has entered that the infrastructure and life and culture of the community is not destroyed. Their goal is to subordinate and repress us as if we were puppets. And we hate this.” A warrant is now out for Tolano Lizarraga \’s arrest in the wake of the police siege.

On guard at the gate back in May, Rigoberto Quiada put it quite simply: “This means well-being, means my house, my standard of living.”

The miners say they will fight on. The outcome of the struggle being waged by Los Mineros is considered central to the future of labor relations in Mexico, with significant ramifications for labor, human and environmental rights there and throughout the hemisphere. And already the collusion of big business and big politics has pushed back a strong, militant and proud union.

An Action Alert sent out by the Cross-Border Network for Justice and Solidarity is calling for letters to Mexican President Calderon, as well as President Obama and other U.S. officials. According to the Alert, “Congress\’s Appropriations Committee, Foreign Operations subcommittee is currently considering another $310 million in funding for Plan Mexico or Plan Merida which has already sent $1.4 billion to Mexico for training and equipment of security forces over the last three years.” Some of that money was used to break the miner’s strike in Cananea.

You can read the Alert here.

Howard Kling, Telecommunications Projects Director at the Labor Education Service, went to Cananea, Mexico in May as part of a delegation of labor educators. This is his report.

For more information
TEAR GAS IN CANANEA by David Bacon, in The Nation, 6/17/90

Embattled Striking Miners in Mexico Are Led from BC by Mike Bruce, 10 Jun 2010, TheTyee.ca

Steelworkers Condemn Mexican Government Attack on Cananea Miners

ICEM

Grupo Mexico Imposes Company Union at Cananea Mine by Dan La Botz, Labor Notes, Tue, 06/15/2010

Storming of the mine in Cananea, Mexico: “Nothing peaceful about it”: United Steelworkers charge Calderón brought on “reign of terror”
[Translation of an article from La Jornada for June 8. See also “Mexican authorities retake Cananea mine,” posted here on June 7, and “Pasta de Conchos mine sealed,” posted on June 8.]

Maquiladora Health and Safety Project
Workplace Health and Safety Survey And Medical Screening of Miners At Grupo Mexico’s Copper Mine (pdf file)