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CANANEA, Sonora — A little over a year ago, on July 30, 2007, more than 1,000 unionized miners walked off the job here over health and safety concerns at the nation’s largest copper mine.
Since then, the prospects for resolving the dispute have become increasingly complicated by a feud between union leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, mine owner Grupo México, and now, the Mexican government.
In this proud Sonoran mining city of 35,000, the standoff has spurred already-ambivalent feelings over Gómez Urrutia, who has lived in Canada in self-exile since fleeing from legal problems in 2006.
Feliciano Mariscal, 43, who has worked at the Cananea mine for four years, said he would like to see the strike resolved. But he doesn’t see it happening as long as Gómez Urrutia is involved.
  
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“If it continues the way it is going now, the strike will never end. It will continue and continue,” Mariscal said.
But Alfredo Paredes, secretary of the union’s strike committee, said the miners want Grupo México to solve the problems at the mine and to show respect for the workers — as well as for their leader, Gómez Urrutia.
“The government has certain impressions of Napoleón Gómez, but until now the charges against him have not been proven,” Paredes said.
Gómez Urrutia has long been a polemic figure both in Cananea and nationwide. Since taking over as the head of the nation’s largest mining union in 2002, he has battled the government over labor reforms, fought mine bosses over worker rights and fended off dissidents within his own group who doubt his credibility and accuse him of misappropriating funds.
He’s also fighting the law: Since 2006, Gómez Urrutia has lived in Vancouver to avoid corruption and embezzlement charges.
Through it all, his rank-and-file has overwhelmingly re-elected him as their leader and taken to the streets when the government declared him ineligible for the post. In a country where union leaders have long sold out the interests of workers for the benefit of employers, the government or themselves, the majority of miners appear willing to look past the idiosyncrasies of their fiercely independent leader.
“He’s not a charismatic figure, he’s not a caudillo, he’s not a cacique (strongman),” said Dan La Botz, editor of the journal Mexican Labor News and Analysis and author of several books on Mexican labor unions.
“He is someone who has come to symbolize for miners their right to control their own union and not have it controlled by the state or employer. They defend him because he is their elected leader and they believe they have the right to (self-control).”
As the possibility of Gómez Urrutia’s return to Mexico becomes more of a reality — on July 31 a judge set aside the arrest warrants against him — the question of how Grupo México and the government will deal with this unconventional and unyielding labor leader becomes increasingly salient. If the strike at Cananea is to be resolved, it appears that it will have to happen with Gómez Urrutia seated at the bargaining table.
Unorthodox ascent
Just as his methods have been atypical of a union boss — he often conducts interviews and reportedly plans strikes via video from his exile in Canada — Gómez Urrutia’s route to the top of one of the country’s most powerful unions has been an unusual one.
Born in Monterrey into a union household — his father, Napoleón Gómez Sada, led the mining union for 40 years until his death in 2002 — Gómez Urrutia studied economics at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, or UNAM, and pursued graduate studies in Great Britain and Germany. He later taught at his Mexican alma mater and Tecnológico de Monterrey before working in industrial planning for the federal government and serving as director of the national mint. He also ran a mine in Autlán, Jalisco, until it was privatized in the mid 1990s.
But despite his pedigree and his mining-related experience, Gómez Urrutia’s credentials have long generated controversy, both within the union and the government.
Union rules stipulate that only members with at least five years of service as a miner can be leader. As a result, in 2002, then-Labor Secretary Carlos Abascal refused to recognize Gómez Urrutia’s selection to succeed his father as union boss.
That issue was temporarily resolved when a document dated April 18, 1994, was produced, showing that the Oxford-educated Gómez Urrutia had worked in the accounting department of Minera Mexicana La Ciénega, which operates a gold mine in the state of Durango, for a salary of 28 pesos per day.
Faced with this evidence, Abascal eventually recognized the new union boss. But given his previous employment history — not to mention his 1992 bid for the governor of the northern state of Nuevo León — questions linger to this day over the legitimacy of Gómez Urrutia’s stint in the business.
“It’s difficult to believe that someone who had already been planning director for Mexican Steel and Ironworks, and CEO of the mint, as well as PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) aspirant for the governor of Nuevo León in 1992, would have then worked as an accounting clerk,” wrote conservative commentator Sergio Sarmiento in a recent column in the newspaper Reforma.
Anti-establishment
Since taking up the post of union leader, Gómez carved out a reputation for battling his critics, as well as fighting the powers that be.
Already at odds with the administration of then-President Vicente Fox because of his selection as union leader in 2002, Gómez Urrutia vehemently fought against the president’s labor reform bill, known as the “Plan Abascal” in honor of the labor secretary. The measure, which critics said would have tightened the power of employers over workers, eventually failed to pass Congress.
Gómez Urrutia also took on mining giant Grupo México on behalf of his constituency and organized strikes after the miners felt threatened by restructuring moves and job cuts when the company acquired a number of government-owned mines earlier in the decade.
The government, however, declared some of the strikes illegal, and in February 2006, the Labor Secretariat stripped Gómez Urrutia of his title and named Elías Morales — a rival ousted from the union after the death of Gómez Sada — as union boss.
But Gómez Urrutia was returned to power after forged signatures were discovered on the documents used to depose him.
Still, the government refuses to recognize Gómez Urrutia as the head of the union, in spite of his re-election this spring by an overwhelming margin. In response, workers have staged a series of temporary walk-outs at other mines to support their leader, and the union now refuses to recognize the government as a legitimate intermediary in negotiations.
Gómez Urrutia’s maverick, fighting spirit has allowed him to maintain support within the mining and union ranks, even if his background is still questioned. Analysts say his methods for negotiating collective agreements upset the status quo in Mexico, where rich union bosses are renowned for being under the sway of company owners and neglecting their members’ interests for personal and political gain.
“He is not a typical union man, but rather, someone who developed as a technocrat,” said Aldo Muñoz, a political science professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. “He doesn’t allow (owners) to just operate the companies as they wish.”
Gómez Urrutia supporters also say he broke the mold by serving the union instead of political or business interests.
“The majority of unions in Mexico are sellouts,” said Carlos Pavón, secretary of political affairs for the miners union. “They’re traitors to the rank-and-file, because they don’t work for them. They work for the well-being of the government, or to gain political stature. (The leaders) work for their own personal ends.”
“The mining union works for its members,” Pavón said.
In Cananea, that sentiment is echoed by people like 49-year-old Guadalupe Orrozco, who has worked at the copper mine for 22 years.
“People like him because he fights for the workers,” Orrozco said.
Controversial style
Indeed, Gómez Urrutia’s style of re-negotiating contracts — which he has done for each of the 85 chapters of the mining union — has served the miners well, analysts say.
Since the 1980s, unions in Mexico have negotiated contracts based on two factors: inflation rate estimations from the Bank of Mexico and the national minimum wage. But Gómez Urrutia departed from the old methods, negotiating individual contracts for each local chapter instead of hammering out a blanket national agreement. He also began winning wage increases based on the price of metals, which have recently spiked due to surging demand in world commodity markets.
Muñoz said that while miners benefited from this tactic, it made Gómez Urrutia unpopular in business circles.
“Mining and metals companies hated this,” he said.
At the same time, Gómez Urrutia’s unorthodox leadership has prompted questions within some factions of the union.
Some 6,000 dissidents — many of whom have bolted the 35,000-member union — accuse the mining boss of misappropriating a $55 million trust fund.
The origins of the trust fund date back to 1988, when the government-owned Cananea copper mine went bankrupt and was privatized. Workers in at least four Grupo México facilities received 5 percent of the shares, but eventually decided to sell their part of the company for $55 million in 2004.
The money initially went into a Scotiabank Inverlat trust fund, which the miners union then dissolved and placed under its management. An Aug. 3, 2006, a congressional commission report questioned the propriety of dissolving the trust fund.
“The trust fund always had an irrevocable character and the legal act that upheld that the trust fund could be extinguished has not been demonstrated,” the report read.
Management of the funds also was called into question.
“Inconsistencies have been detected in the management of figures related to the amount of the trust fund that prejudices the beneficiaries,” the report stated.
The commission’s report showed that money was transferred out of Scotiabank Inverlat and into a union bank account. Documents from a federal court in the state of San Luis Potosí also show that some of the funds were subsequently moved into other accounts outside of Mexico and that some of the money was used to pay approximately $100,000 in American Express credit card debts held by Gómez Urrutia’s relatives.
“Clearly, the money trail shows that it was moved to advance the private interests of Napoleón Gómez Urrutia,” said Agustín Acosta Azcón, a lawyer representing three groups of miners that accuse Gómez Urrutia of mismanagement. “He liquidated the workers’ trust fund and he hasn’t given them a real, rational explication for the liquidation.”
Attempts to reach Gómez Urrutia for comment were unsuccessful. But his lawyer, Efrain Cárdenas, said the $55 million could be accounted for. He added that both the Finance Secretariat and a Swiss auditing firm hired by the International Metalworkers’ Federation reviewed the union’s account and found no irregularities.
Gómez Urrutia, too, publicly maintains his innocence. In a 2007 speech to members of United Steelworkers Canada, he described his travails with the Mexican legal system as a “terrible and perverted persecution.” The Steelworkers, in turn, declared Gómez Urrutia “an innocent in exile.” Two left-wing Canadian political parties have also come to his defense.
But there is some lingering resentment in Cananea. Retired miner Rodolfo Chacon, for one, said he feels entitled to some of the $55 million. Orrozco, on the other hand, said he thinks the claim that Gómez Urrutia misused the money is a “lie.”
Napoleón’s return
While a judicial panel has now set aside the arrest warrants against Gómez Urrutia, it is unclear whether he’ll return — and if he does, what reception he’ll be given.
His lawyers say that his legal status remains blurred, given that the judicial ruling is not legally binding, and the authorities in Mexico will likely appeal the decision to set the warrants aside.
And his absence over the past two years has spurred claims that he is not doing his job properly. In one case, the families of victims killed in the 2006 Pasta de Conchos mine explosion that claimed 65 lives in the state of Coahuila say that Gómez Urrutia failed to act on their behalf.
Whether Gómez Urrutia returns to Mexico or not, there is a growing urgency in Cananea to get the mine running again, both from Grupo México, which says the strike has cost it $1.3 billion in lost sales, and from the local community.
In mid-July, the government-owned news agency Notimex reported that a survey of 900 homes in Cananea conducted by Beltrán y Asocidados showed that 93 percent of the city’s inhabitants want the strike to end. Some 61 percent also reportedly felt that the local union section is protecting the interests of Gómez Urrutia and not those of the workers.
Longtime Cananea resident Gudelia Aceves Castro said the strike and subsequent economic slowdown have taken a heavy toll on her city.
“We are in a crisis,” she said.
David Agren of The News (an English-language daily newspaper in Mexico) reported from Mexico City. Jonathon Shacat of the Herald/Review reported from Cananea. Jonathan Clark of The News contributed additional reporting from Mexico City.
curious wrote on Aug 11, 2008 8:58 PM: