Mining Union Denounces Drug Cartel Intrusion with Support of Transnationals

ByAlfredo Valadez Rodríguez

This article by Alfredo Valadez Rodríguez originally appeared in the June 19, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Zacatecas, Zac. The intervention of organized crime organizations in the country’s mining sector “has become a cancer that is promoted by foreign capital, especially by Canadian and U.S. companies,” Óscar Alzaga Sánchez, attorney for the National Mining Union, headed by legislator Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, said yesterday.

On behalf of the national leader, Alzaga participated in the seminar The Voice of the Communities, the Workers, and the Academy, held at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas.

At the meeting, the federal government was asked to demand that businessman Germán Larrea Mota Velasco remedy the environmental and health damages caused in the Sonora and Bacanuchi rivers.

They also demanded that he be criminally punished for the homicide of 67 miners in the Pasta de Conchos accident in Coahuila in 2006.

Alzaga Sánchez recalled the conflict that the union currently has with the Peñasquito mine, which he described as one of the richest in Mexico.

“Like most of the veins, the owners are foreigners, specifically Canadians and U.S. nationals, Koreans and Japanese,” he noted.

In Zacatecas, he indicated, there are two conflicts with transnationals: Camino Rojo, of the Canadian company Orla Mining, and Peñasquito, of the U.S. company Newmont.

At Camino Rojo, since May 2024, “the owner, with Mexican managers and lawyers, has paid little heed to national laws; in particular regarding union freedom,” he accused.

He pointed out that their litigators have prevented the leaders elected by the workers from carrying out their union activities, and have called on the National Federation of Independent Unions, the FNSI of Monterrey (company unions), which they want to bring in to replace the National Mining Union.

The last straw, Alzaga Sánchez lamented, is that “since May 2024 they have even gone so far as to call on drug-trafficking mafias that provide their services to the mining companies.”

“This is a cancer that our country is living through, promoted by foreign capital. Be clear: it is above all the Canadian and U.S. mining, metallurgical, and steel companies that resort to these forms of union control,” he elaborated.

He recalled that the pressure and intimidation by transnationals against the freedom of union association of the miners who sympathize with the Mining Union is because that union “is the only one that has carried out strikes in this century.”