LABOUR-ARGENTINA: Miners Suffocated by Negligence

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 17 2004 (IPS) - This week’s fire in a coal mine in southern Argentina left seven dead and seven missing. But it was a foreseeable tragedy, because for the past decade, the miners had been denouncing their employer for corruption and maintenance and security flaws.

Río Turbio is a town of 10,000 in southern Argentina whose very existence is due to the presence of the country’s most important coalfields.

Located in the province of Santa Cruz, in Argentina’s Patagonia region, more than 3,100 km southwest of Buenos Aires, it is one of the southernmost cities in the Americas.

The town, which is at the foot of the Andes mountains, only receives six or seven hours of sunlight a day during the cold months of the southern hemisphere winter, from June to August.

In fact it was cold and dark on Monday when a spark from a conveyor belt set off a fire, and 14 workers who were just starting their shift were trapped in the mine. At least 37 escaped, some with smoke inhalation damages.

So far the bodies of seven miners have been found, but the lack of oxygen and the carbon monoxide fumes resulting from the blaze have hampered the work of the rescuers.

Survivors and the victims’ families have little hope that the seven missing miners are still alive. ”It would be a miracle” if they are found alive, said Luis Méndez, the father of Silverio, one of the missing coal miners.

The blaze broke out nearly 700 metres underground and seven km from the entrance. Most of the workers were riding in a truck in the mine-shaft, but the smoke made it impossible to continue driving, so they got out and sought the entrance by foot, some walking for four hours through the galleries.

Earlier this year, a government agency, the Superintendency of Labour Risks, found that the rate of accidents in the Río Turbio coal mine was twice the normal mining industry average, and urged the insurance company that the firm had hired to implement a plan to reduce the number of accidents.

The Superintendency, which is charged with overseeing safety and hygiene in the workplace, says the highest incident rate tolerated in the mining industry is 52.9. When it is 10 percent above that limit, authorities demand that specific measures be taken to reduce the risks.

The Río Turbio incident rate was 123.8, more than twice the acceptable level.

The Yacimientos Carboníferos Fiscales coal company was created by the state in 1942. At its height, in the 1960s, it employed more than 5,500 workers, who had come from distant provinces to find jobs in the mine.

But in 1994, the government of President Carlos Menem (1989-1999) decided to turn over the operation of the coal mine to a private consortium, as part of its broad privatisation policy.

The IATE business group, led by Sergio Taselli, won a 10-year concession for operating the mine, which at the time had 3,300 employees, and was awarded a government subsidy of more than 20 million dollars a year to help cover wages, and a contract to sell the mine’s entire output to a thermal power plant.

The Association of State Workers (ATE) holds Taselli responsible for ”destroying” the company (which had been renamed Yacimientos Carboníferos Río Turbio) and stripping it of its assets.

Taselli ”is a crook who caused great damage to the company, which today is reflected in the deaths of 14 workers,” trade unionist Luis Maceiro, a member of ATE’s National Board of Directors, told IPS.

Maceiro was in charge of receiving complaints from workers in Río Turbio. ”These fellow workers are at the extreme tip of the country, and they don’t live off of tourism, because nobody even visits that far-away spot. They depend on their work in the mine,” he said.

The workers ”were in permanent conflict with the company,” he added.

”We reported the company to the federal justice system, the provincial courts, the Superintendency of Labour Risks, the Anti-Corruption Office, and the Energy Secretariat Oversight Commission,” he said.

The government of President Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001) eliminated the enormous subsidy paid to Taselli’s consortium, which lost interest in the mine and threatened to pull out. In the end, the state took over the coal company, which returned to government hands in June 2002.

The government auditor, Eduardo Arnold, reported to the Anti-Corruption Office and the General Accounting Office that the mining company had been ”gradually dismantled” over the eight years that the concession lasted.

”The lack of maintenance and investment was very evident,” Arnold said this week.

Consulted by IPS, the Anti-Corruption Office reported that it currently has 70 functionaries sifting through 4,000 different complaints.

”We have not yet found the one about Río Turbio, but if it was filed, it must be here,” said an employee in the information division of the Anti-Corruption Office, in charge of investigating irregularities in the functioning of the state.

The Oversight Commission was made up of members of the national and provincial governments, and up to 2002, the delegate from Santa Cruz was the current national Energy Secretary Daniel Cameron, who was thoroughly familiar with the complaints about the mismanagement of the coal mine.

Arnold said the concessionaire was ”unscrupulous”, and was reported to the federal justice system. The report by the external auditors set the amount that Taselli and his company should pay for noncompliance and breach of contract at 130 million dollars.

The mine, which was not contributing a single kilowatt to the power grid before it was taken over by the government, began to operate at capacity, and is now producing 10 megawatts a day for the national grid, said Arnold, who today is first vice-president in the Chamber of Deputies.

President Néstor Kirchner visited Río Turbio on Jun. 4, just 10 days before the accident, to announce a plan to invest nearly 90 million dollars in the mine.

In a photo-op, the president embraced local miners amidst a climate of optimism and excitement over the projected reactivation of the mine.

But ”It came too late,” lamented a trade union leader in Río Turbio, Raúl Wanzo. Since 1999, the workers had been asking the national and provincial governments – when the governor of the province was Kirchner himself – to rescind the concession granted to Taselli, for breach of contract. However, that step was not taken until 2002.

Kirchner, who is from Santa Cruz, was elected governor of his province in 1991, 1995 and 1999, and held that post until he was sworn in as president in May 2003.

Wanzo noted that one of the changes carried out by Taselli was to eliminate the job of the ”botonero”, in charge of overseeing the operation of the conveyor belts.

It was precisely a flaw on a conveyor belt that caused Monday’s fire. ”The system was automatised, but the alarms didn’t go off,” he said.

The workers will not return to the mine-shaft until minimum safety conditions are in place and the causes of the accident have been clarified.

During his visit this month, Kirchner accused Taselli – who he called a ”scoundrel” – of stripping the company of its assets.

The businessman still has the concession for operating a passenger train service in Buenos Aires, which the government is deciding whether to cancel due to incompliance in a number of aspects.

Kirchner travelled to Río Turbio once again on Wednesday, where he met with the miners and families of the victims, and promised that if there was negligence, ”there will be no cover-up of those who were responsible.”

The wife of one of the victims told Kirchner how moved and excited her husband had been by the president’s first visit, when he promised to invest millions of dollars in the mine.