Billions of people cheered the recent rescue of 33 heroic Chilean miners. This outpouring of admiration and sympathy for the workers and their families encourages our revolutionary communist Party. It shows that worldwide class-based solidarity is indeed possible.
But the cheers and tears that filled the world’s media for the miners rescued from the San Esteban Primera Company’s San Jose copper and gold mine occurred amid an orgy of Chilean patriotic nationalism led by billionaire President Sebastián Piñera. It should not obscure the collaboration of profit-hungry mining bosses with Chile’s capitalist government which caused this disaster and many others.
José Rojo, a 20-year veteran miner, charged that the bosses had “turned a blind eye to the San José mine. They told us it was coming down; every so often there were cave-ins. They knew it was going to happen. At times when I was there with the Jumbo drill, I had to stop because I saw that the roof was coming down on me.” (Argentine daily, “Pagina 12”) On the day of the cave-in, he was lucky — the machinery he operated was broken, so he was not at work!
Philippe Sanchez, 51, who worked at the mine between 1987 and 1999 and whose nephew was among those trapped, told a reporter, “It is one of the worst mines in the area. It has always been dangerous. There are accidents all the time and when you are hurt, you had better not complain or you will be sacked — there is a culture of silence.”
Two factors saved the miners: their own courageous working-class egalitarianism and the capitalists’ opportunistic grab at a rare chance to appear benevolent. In the crucial first 17 days, the miners, left for dead by the pit’s owners, selflessly rationed scant food supplies. “They had two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours,” said Dr Sergio Aguila, who was part of the rescue team. (London Telegraph, 8/24/10) They took turns at finding water and trying to get messages to the outside. That’s when the capitalists decided to cash in and launched their nationalistic orgy.
Just like West Virginia’s Massey Coal Company whose illegal unsafe conditions killed almost 30 miners this year and the deaths in the Chinese Wangjialing coal mine earlier this year (an average of seven miners die in China every day; 24 miners die every year in Chile), the capitalists are happy to pay fines rather than paying for more expensive safe working conditions for miners. Less than a week after the drama in Chile, at least 25 miners perished in preventable incidents in China and Ecuador. The yearly worldwide mine death toll numbers in the thousands and doubles with deaths from lung disease.
Under capitalism, we, the working class and its allies, are locked in a death struggle with the bosses that profit-driven mine disasters lay bare. In every case, it’s cost-cutting shortcuts on safety procedures that keep killing workers. With capitalism rampant, concern for the bottom line continues to trump workers’ well-being.
For safety on the job, workers need the power to make it safe. That can only come with communism, when workers rule society and the capitalists and their profit drive at any cost no longer exist.
This San José mine has had 80 “accidents” since 2004 when a miner died after a cave-in. In 2006, a truck driver was also killed in an “accident.” That same year 182 workers were injured, 56 of them seriously. The mine was closed in 2007 after a geologist died in a rock explosion. The owners were charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was dropped after they agreed to pay the family $170,000.
To re-open the mine, the government required that San Esteban construct an emergency ladder that would lead to the surface from the very shelter where the 33 trapped miners huddled together. The miners got only one-third of the way up before discovering that the mine owners had never bothered to finish the ladder to the top! Moreover, one of the trapped miners said that when they reached the shelter itself, “The energy was cut off and there was no ventilation,” forcing them to sleep in the shafts.
Continuing their arrogance, the mine bosses did not pay the miners’ families while their breadwinners were trapped, forcing their families to rely on charity. When a court ruled that the company freeze $1.8 million for future compensation to the miners, the bosses threatened to declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile, San Esteban is poised to open another mine in the Atacama Desert! The union leadership has proven ineffective in rallying workers to fight these bosses because they’re defenders of the capitalist system and therefore did virtually nothing to fight for the workers during the previous 80 “accidents.”
Chile’s politicians are partners in these capitalist crimes. President Piñera, who has milked this rescue mission for every ounce of patriotic fervor he could mount, ran for president on a platform of privatizing Chile’s copper mines, provoking miners’ strikes against his proposal.
Piñera, a billionaire businessman, is a political descendant of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime his brother Jose served as minister of labor and of mining. Under Pinochet, Jose Pinera pushed through a Constitutional Mining Law in 1981 that privatized much of Chilean mining, leading to more severe declines in safety conditions.
The right-wing president has tried to claim ownership of the rescue effort, appearing at the mine site and attempting to turn the entire operation into an exercise in patriotism. He furthered capitalism’s classless myth that “we’re all in this together” as a nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even more shamefully, Socialist Party Senator María Isabel Allende Bussi, the daughter of former president Salvador Allende (who Pinochet had assassinated with CIA help), embraced Piñera at the mine, responding to Piñera’s call for “national unity.” The revolutionary left of the 1970s that fought the fascists, conservatives and liberals, virtually disappeared during Pinochet’s murderous regime. Now it’s necessary to build the Progressive Labor Party in Chile to take on the Piñera-phony leftist gang-up.
Chile is sharply divided between rich and poor. Chile’s bosses subject the indigenous Mapuche people to vicious racist attacks, driving them off their ancestral land. Currently, 34 Mapuche fighters, jailed under the Pinochet era’s “anti-terror” laws, are continuing a two-month hunger strike, demanding an end to those laws. There has been no media circus around the efforts of these anti-racists.
Chile’s modest 4.1% annual per-capita growth rate over the past two decades has been accompanied by widening social and economic inequality. Fourteen percent of Chile’s population — 2.3 million people — live in poverty, with millions more barely making it above the poverty line.
Lucrative book and movie deals with U.S. media giants, absolving the guilty pit operators, await the traumatized miners. That’s their next form of exploitation under capitalism in this age of weak class consciousness. Not so long ago, however, mine cave-ins helped spur communist organizing. It is our Party’s task today to rekindle that revolutionary working-class spirit.
Communist revolution is the path towards freeing the working class from racism and exploitation, and establishing workers’ power.
Box 1
‘SAVIOR’ CHILE CHIEF PINERA IS U.S. BOSSES’ LACKEY
Harvard-educated Pinera’s close ties to the U.S. ruling class shaped his self-serving, U.S.-boosting crisis management. He immediately put mining minister Laurence Golborne — a former boss at Exxon Mobil’s Chilean subsidiary — in charge. Pinera owes a good part of his fortune to his recent sale of Chilevision TV to Time Warner. Two years ago, Pinera was a keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. (Rockefeller and his daughter serve as its advisors.) Pre-presidential Pinera touted “New Horizons for Opportunities” to potential U.S. imperialist investors.
Box 2
U.S. COVERAGE REFLECTS GROWING SPLIT AMONG BOSSES
Back in the U.S., capitalist rivals for state power in the mid-term elections seek to turn the San Jose “miracle” to their own purposes. Tea-Party booster Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal trumpeted (10/14/10), “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.” That’s because, the Journal says, the drill used in it came from a small, unregulated company in Pennsylvania.
On the other hand, the liberal, Obama-loving Brookings Institution brays, “An Act of People, Leaders and Good Governance.” Brookings just as fancifully insists that the workers survived mainly because of extensive Chilean government regulation. The liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism that Obama serves needs tighter control of the economy by Washington for its current and future wars. Financing current U.S. military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia and looming conflict with Iran, China, and Russia requires enforced fiscal focus.