Emir Olivares and Alonso Urrutia
Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 10, 2022, p. 8
When the report on the progress in the rescue operations of the 10 workers trapped in a coal mine in Sabinas, Coahuila, was released, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador estimated that between Wednesday or Thursday the rescuers will be able to enter.
This once the water that is accumulated inside has been extracted, which has complicated the work for the evacuation of the workers.
In the morning, the president mentioned that until yesterday morning there were still 16.4 meters of water to be pumped from one of the wells, 10.4 from another and 11.3 from one more, all of which was necessary to create conditions conducive to the entry of aid bodies.
He reiterated that the priority is the rescue of the workers and later responsibilities will be established. First is that (get the miners back), that’s what we’re doing. The Attorney General’s Office (General of the Republic) has already started the investigation to punish those responsible, those who have to do with the mine. And the third thing is not to leave relatives helpless
.
The head of the federal Executive stressed that his government is completely different
to past administrations and gave as an example the case of the Pasta de Conchos mine, also in Coahuila –which in February 2006, during the mandate of Vicente Fox, registered an explosion due to accumulation of gas that left 65 workers buried–, since there is the commitment to rescue the bodies, for which an investment of more than 2 billion pesos will be allocated, which did not happen with Fox, nor during the administrations of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.
He recalled that the permit for exploitation of the damaged mine last week was given in 2003, with Fox, valid for 50 years. In this sense, he criticized the fact that in 36 years of the neoliberal period, 120 million hectares have been granted in concession, equivalent to 60 percent of the national territory.
“Not even Porfirio Díaz handed over as much homeland as the rulers of neoliberalism did (…) General (Lázaro) Cárdenas handed over 18 million hectares to one million peasant families; and in just one six-year term, Calderón (gave) 26 million, but not for peasant families, but for national and foreign mining companies,” he said.
Remotely from the scene of the incident, the national coordinator of Civil Protection, Laura Velázquez, connected to the president’s conference to report that an underwater drone was introduced on Monday that confirmed that until then the necessary conditions did not exist for rescuers they will enter
He said that yesterday morning, the teams operating for the rescue had accumulated 134 hours of uninterrupted work since the incident occurred on August 3, and had managed to extract 103,666 cubic meters. He stressed that yesterday the efforts to maintain the extraction would continue.
