Mexico: miners attacked, call for emergency protests

An emergency picket has been called for Saturday January 12 at 3 p.m outside the Mexican consulate in New York to protest a police attack on striking miners in Cananea, Mexico.

Address: 27 East 39th Street (between Madison and Park).

This morning the Mexican Mediation and Arbitration Board declared "non-existent" the 6-month-old strike of copper miners in Cananea (in the Mexican state of Sonora).

Within minutes, in what was obviously a pre-planned operation, hundreds of federal and state police swarmed through the streets of Cananea heading for the mine, which has been occupied by strikers for more than six months. Initial reports are of more than 30 people injured and a number of miners arrested.

The miners are protesting notoriously dangerous safety conditions at the mine (the largest open pit copper mine in the world), and the smelter. The facilities have greatly deteriorated since the mine was privatized in 1990.

The ruling also affects striking miners in the state of Zacatecas, and in the silver mining town of Taxco.

The federal government has repeatedly used the corporatist labor laws, modeled on the labor code of Mussolini's fascist Italy, to outlaw the miners' strike.

The safety conditions at the plant are so notorious that an international team of doctors and health professionals, which visited the struck plant in October, showed "the clear picture of a work-place being 'deliberately run into the ground.'"

In Mexico City, the SITUAM union of university workers and others are calling for a demonstration Saturday. Last December SITUAM sent a delegation to Cananea in a show solidarity with the striking miners.

The picket in NY is being called by the Internationalst Group, which in 2006 initiated a number of demonstrations in support of striking teachers in Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico.

More info: call Jan Norden 212-460-0983.