El Sol de Zacatecas/Eulalio Contreras

Striking copper miners rally March 1 at Grupo Mexico’s San Martín mine in Sombrerete, Zacatecas, Mexico.

“The company would not agree to their demands for better equipment maintenance and safer working conditions and so they struck,” Consuelo Aguilar, a union spokesperson, told the Militant.

It was such disregard for safety by the bosses that led to the deadly explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine, coal miners and other workers in San Juan de Sabinas told the Militant.

Another 1,500 workers at a Grupo Mexico zinc refinery in San Luis Potosí, who are fighting for a contract, joined the strike February 28, Aguilar said.

As the Militant goes to press, the union called an indefinite nationwide strike March 1 involving its entire membership of 270,000. That walkout, Aguilar said, is in response to efforts by the Mexican government to interfere in the union’s internal affairs.

On February 24, Grupo Mexico executives and government officials informed the family and the media that rescue operations at the Pasta de Conchos mine were ending, due to high levels of explosive gases in the mine. They offered compensation to the families of the dead miners of 750,000 pesos ($72,000) each. Three days later they announced it may take months to recover the bodies of the miners.

“We want our loved ones, not your money!” family members shouted at the company officials here February 24. Hundreds have gathered in front of the mine entrance, keeping a 24-hour vigil there since the explosion. “For them it is less expensive to leave them underground than to recover them, but for us the money makes no difference,” Norma Letícia González, whose father was among the dead miners, told the Mexican daily La Jornada.

Mexican government officials and the big-business press across North America repeated claims that the miners themselves or “nature” were to blame for the conditions that caused the explosion.

“It’s terrible to say, because they are probably dead,” said Julian Gutiérrez, a federal mine inspector with the Mexican Geological Service, referring to the miners. “But they share much of the blame for this.”

“The most dangerous aspect of the mine was the poverty of the miners,” the New York Times asserted in a February 24 article. “Miners sometimes override safety triggers and work even when gas levels exceed the safety threshold.”

The same Times article also stated: “The omnipresent possibility of a methane explosion and death underground is as much part of the culture here as the dirt-poor towns of concrete-block houses, the taco stands, and the Roman Catholic Church.”

“No one can be blamed” for the miners’ deaths, Rogelio Aguirre, the supervisor of the five mine inspectors from the federal labor ministry, told the Houston Chronicle. “Nature imposes itself, the gas surges, accidents happen,” he said.

Miners who worked at Pasta de Conchos say these are lies. They say the company’s drive for coal production at all costs caused the deadly blast. With prices booming, production in Mexico’s coal mines is up 20 percent. Most of it is mined here in the state of Coahuila, along Mexico’s northeast border with Texas.

“The company never took into account how gassy this mine is. Especially in the section they were working in,” Manuel Flores, a mechanic who has worked at the mine for 17 years, told the Militant. While the mining machines are programmed to shut off at 1.5 percent methane, “I’ve seen them just keep on running way past this,” he said.

“I have never seen anything so terrible in terms of safety,” Ignacio Moreno, 38, a heavy equipment operator who had been working at the mine since last fall, told the Chronicle. “It was just produce, produce, produce. If they had put more money and attention into safety, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Flores said the company hadn’t replaced or tested his emergency oxygen supply, called a self-rescuer, for 17 years. “You don’t know if it will ever work when you need it,” he said. Flores is a member of the union. He said more than half the miners there are nonunion contract employees.

Leonardo Sánchez, a contract worker, started work at the mine a year ago. He said the contractors often are assigned to work with inferior equipment and have fewer rights than those in the union. Contract workers make up over half of those that perished in the mine collapse.

The miners are paid a base wage of $45 to $85 a week, and they depend on production bonuses of up to $450 a month for most of their earnings. The company designed the pay system this way to put the maximum pressure on workers to produce coal at all costs, Sánchez explained.

The company used antiquated methods to support the roof of the mine shafts, Sánchez said. He pointed out that there was a greater danger of roof falls there compared with other mines he had worked in. This could have contributed to the scale of the cave-in caused by the explosion.

Federal inspectors cited the mine “for at least 34 safety violations last summer,” noted the Chronicle article, giving the company “until this month to rectify them.” Among these was failure to use limestone powder on the mine walls and ceiling to dampen the explosiveness of coal dust.

Felix Mendoza Moreno, the former general secretary of a union local at a now-dormant coal mine nearby, was among those standing vigil outside the mine. He invited Militant reporters to visit him at his home in the mining town of Palaú, about 15 miles from the site of the disaster. The area is surrounded by massive piles of coal mine tailings, and several working mines.

Moreno described the importance of the union in defending safety on the job. “When faced with a dangerous situation in the mine we took action. We got out and the union backed it up,” Mendoza said. “Because this is the only job around here a lot of miners are now afraid to speak up. That has to change or more are going to die.”

José Aravena reporting from Mexico, and Paul Pederson and Luis Madrid reporting from New York, contributed to this article.
 
 
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