8 September, 2008The technical officer who produced the post-explosion report on the Pasta de Conchos mine tells a Mexican press conference it is possible to reopen the mine to recover the bodies of the 63 miners who died on 19 February 2006.
MEXICO: In an interview published in the August 26 edition of the Mexican daily newspaper Excélsior, José Luis Fernández Zayas, the technical officer who produced the post-explosion report on the Pasta de Conchos mine, said it would be feasible to reopen the mine to recover the bodies of the 63 miners who died on 19 February 2006.
José Luís Fernández Zayas, a researcher at the Institute of Engineering of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and, until two weeks ago, director of the Foro Consultivo Científico y Tecnológico (Scientific and Technological Consultative Forum) that inspected the mine after the explosion and wrote the report, said that the company manipulated the report to its own advantage and used it to claim the mine was too unsafe to reopen.
He said that Grupo Mexico and the Labour Secretary have distorted what the technical report actually says and used it to refuse to reopen the mine to recover the bodies.
Zayas says it is possible to recover the bodies. However, all normal safety measures would have to be taken in the mine before doing so.
He said that Grupo Mexico twisted the words in the report, which stated that the mine was not then safe and that it would therefore not be correct to risk anyone else's life by entering the mine. However, Zayas said that this situation could be changed without running any risks or entering the mine and that there are experts in the country who know how to conduct such an operation. The problem was that the company "closed the case".
Zayas added that "only an irresponsible company could tolerate this culture of poor working conditions, only a company that does not know how to behave properly would endanger the safety of its workers. The result is there for all to see and they have been paying wages for years now even though the mine is closed and producing nothing. I think this is a lesson and it must never happen again, and we put this in the report."
Zayas said his report also made it clear that the unsafe conditions present in the mine before the explosion were not much different from the conditions after the explosion, when attempts were made to recover the bodies of the dead miners.
After the interview was published in the press, the miners' union and NGOs distributed copies of the article in Mexico City, including to the United States, Canadian and Spanish embassies, the UN offices in Mexico, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies and to the Presidential Palace.
The tragedy at Pasta de Conchos started a dispute between the mining union and the government and Grupo Mexico that resulted in the union's leader, Napoleón Gomez Urrutia, going into exile.