Mexico’s president revived harmful type of coal mining

MEXICO CITY (AP) — As hopes pale of rescuing 10 males trapped in a flooded Mexican coal mine, proof mounted that the present administration’s populist insurance policies have pushed the revival of the damaging, primitive mines that proceed claiming lives.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador enacted a plan two years in the past to revive coal-fired energy crops in northern Mexico and provides choice to purchasing coal from the smallest mines. The purchases had been a part of the president’s insurance policies to present extra earnings to the poorest Mexicans.

In doing so, the administration resuscitated a type of coal mining so harmful that lawmakers in each homes of Mexico’s Congress had tried to ban it a decade in the past.

Specialists say that mines so slender and primitive that just one miner at a time might be lowered right into a slender shaft — and just one bucket of coal extracted — are inherently unsafe. At some pits, often called “pocitos,” or “little wells,” air is pumped in and water pumped out via plastic hoses. Some don’t even have that. There are often no security exits or auxiliary shafts.

Fifteen males had been working contained in the Pinabete mine in Sabinas, Coahuila, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of Eagle Cross, Texas, on Aug. 3. A wall of water from an deserted mine subsequent door — and presumably wastewater pumped in from a close-by city — crammed the one shaft about 40 meters (yards) deep. It blew out so many picket helps that they’ve shaped floating boundaries to rescue crews.

5 staff managed to flee because the mine flooded, however there was no contact with the remainder.

Selling coal is a part of Lopez Obrador’s effort to shore up the state-owned energy utility, the Federal Electrical energy Fee, headed by old-guard politician Manuel Bartlett. Not solely was the coverage questioned by environmentalists; many additionally mentioned it endangered miners.

“Manuel Bartlett’s sensible thought of shopping for extra coal from the smallest producers, and fewer from massive producers, gave rise to a black market that wound up within the exploitation of mines that lack the safeguards wanted to guard the lives of the employees,” Miguel Riquelme, the governor of Coahuila state and member of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Get together, mentioned after the accident.

The federal government utility had defended its resolution to purchase about two-thirds of coal for energy technology from small mines.

“We needed to have the mindset of favoring the smallest (producers) as a result of we needed to make their financial circumstances extra equal,” Miguel Alejandro Lopez, the subdirector of buying for the corporate, mentioned in July, describing the orders he obtained below Lopez Obrador. “As a result of as he (the president) has mentioned, one in every of this nation’s foremost failings is inequality.”

Lopez mentioned small mine homeowners had been required to submit proof they complied with labor legal guidelines, which in Mexico govern mine security.

However even the president acknowledged that the Pinabete mine had not complied with the few current security and labor requirements.

Accidents at small coal mines have been depressingly frequent.

In June 2021, seven miners had been killed at the same small mine in Muzquiz township, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Eagle Cross, Texas. The shaft on the Micaran mine additionally flooded and partially collapsed, and it took days to get well the miners’ our bodies.

The operations resemble wildcat mines from the U.S. Previous West: Horizontal coal faces unfold out from the underside of the shaft and are shored up with picket poles.

At some mines, the pit-head winches used to extract miners and coal are run off outdated automobile engines positioned on blocks.

Lawmakers already knew the hazards of the slender, unreinforced vertical shafts; explosive gasoline accumulations and flooding dangers are frequent.

Way back to 2012, Mexican legislators tried to move legal guidelines to dispose of such primitive mines. The 2006 tragedy within the close by Pasta de Conchos mine, the place 65 miners died after a gasoline build-up prompted a hearth and explosion, was nonetheless contemporary of their minds. That was a bigger mine the place gasoline monitoring proved to be inadequate.

A 2012 Senate invoice proposed “the outright ban on vertical coal mines, also referred to as ‘pocitos,’ as a result of that’s the place the best dangers happen.”

In 2013, a invoice within the decrease home acknowledged, “Coal mining actions have generalized dangers, as a result of their methods are artisanal and rudimentary … Dangerous mining practices have to be minimized or eradicated.”

It’s unclear why these legal guidelines had been by no means handed.

Mine security activist Cristina Auerbach famous that coal is politically delicate in Coahuila, particularly among the many impoverished communities that when made a dwelling from it.

“Coal is a political challenge in Coahuila, not an financial one,” mentioned Auerbach.

She mentioned that from 2006 via final 12 months at the least 80 miners had died in accidents in Coahuila. “The smallest companies within the coal area are essentially the most precarious, like Pinabete,” she mentioned.

However small-scale coal mining gave the impression to be dying out in Coahuila till Lopez Obrador directed the Federal Electrical energy Fee to ramp up purchases.

“The area was revived with the brand new buy orders from the federal fee,” mentioned Diego Martinez, a professor of utilized earth sciences on the Autonomous College of Coahuila.

Lopez Obrador needed to remove subterfuge and corruption in coal purchases, however apparently failed at that; one man was arrested in reference to the Pinabete mine accident after it was discovered that the mine was apparently registered below completely different names or titles on buy contracts and in labor division data.

Nobody has been sentenced for the 2006 deaths on the Pasta de Conchos mine.

It’s not the primary time that Coahuila coal mines have been accused of unlawful practices; miners make as little as $200 per week, and even when the few authorities inspectors have discovered violations, it has been onerous to close them down.

Lopez Obrador mentioned that the Pinabete mine contract with the Electrical energy Fee mentioned explicitly it couldn’t be subcontracted, however apparently was anyway.

Auerbach, the mine security activist, mentioned that a whole bunch of “excessive threat” small mines proceed working.

“That’s why we’re asking that all the coal concessions granted in excessive threat areas be cancelled, as a result of (miners) are at all times going to die,” she mentioned.