Wet Sierra, more than two years of resistance without jobs or salaries

Jared Laureles

La Jornada newspaper
Sunday, February 9, 2025, p. 4

In the municipality of Sierra Mojada, nestled in the desert of Coahuila, the workers and their families have resisted more than two years without jobs or salaries, which has had an impact on the local economy, which since 1943 depended on the Fierro Hercules mining company, SUBSIDIARY OF HIGH HORNES OF MEXICO (AHMSA), which practically abandoned this extremely damaged community.

This site became the main supply center of the mineral to the aceler that the businessman Alonso Ancira led to bankruptcy: 80 percent of the iron that the steel required was supplied by Hercules, a unit that daily sent him 13,500 tons through A 350 kilometers fer, highlights Norberto Monreal Gutiérrez, local leader of Section 265 of the National Mining Union, head of the Collective Labor Contract.

Until a couple of years ago, this ejido and its community were a great mining center; Today it looks like a ghost town because much of its inhabitants emigrated to other cities in states such as Chihuahua and Coahuila himself.

Abraham Regino García, one of the more than a thousand workers who are still fighting without receiving their salary since then, points out that between 6 thousand and 8 thousand inhabitants in 2021, about 300 only live there.

They are families without work, without medications, with little food, and the only possibility they have had to get ahead is to be used in the Mennonite fields, located 5 kilometers from the Hercules ejido, in the sowing of cotton, chili or onion, with working days 14 hours a day for a payment of 35 pesos each, he explains.

He says that on several occasions the community has remained in darkness, due to the millionaire of Minera del Norte (Minosa), owned by AHMSA, of electrical energy, and even with the generators, they have failed and the lack of electricity is continuous, the lack of electricity, what that has affected children’s assistance to classrooms.

Monreal Gutiérrez considers that Ancira still It has influence In the mine, because people close to him They tried to close the schoolswith the purpose that people abandon the people. In addition, in the accesses of this town there are police officers industrialists and municipal, which prevent the passage to actuaries that come to make some judicial notification.

The situation of this community worsened with the closure of AHMSA, in December 2022, and has now sharpened. They say that the shops closed, the food is scarce and There are no medications.

The workers appreciate the solidarity of the mining leader and federal deputy Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, in whom, they have found, they have found Always support; He has sent them food, pantries and medicines, given the lack of attention of the Government of the State of Coahuila.

The Hercules unit was also declared bankrupt in May 2024, and two months later the workers exploded a strike for violations of their collective work contract. Currently, the miners take care of the company’s assets, because they hope that it will operate again. We will not allow the goods to take out. It is the only source of employment and incomethey underline.