After almost a month of failed attempts to rescue the 10 miners who were buried in a coal mine in Coahuila, their wives signed an agreement with the Mexican government to receive compensation and recover their remains.
Under the agreement, the new rescue tasks will include the heavy machinery cutting of the Pinabete mine and the three adjacent shafts: an intricate system of interconnected tunnels where workers were trapped on August 3 after a flash flood.
The national coordinator of Civil Protection, Laura Velázquez Alzúa, reported that topographical work has already begun so that
"machinery can enter at any time" to dig the holes.
Volunteers drain water from a mine where miners were trapped in Sabinas, Coahuila state, Mexico, August 4, 2022. Alfredo Lara / AP
In addition, the widows will receive as compensation an amount not disclosed to the public;
a ceremony to fire the workers will be held on Saturday;
and at the end of the open pit, a memorial will be built right there.
[Relatives accept that miners will not be rescued alive]
"We are going to take responsibility for paying the compensation, not only the conventional but more, for the situation, not only because of the grievance of losing their relatives, which is very sad, but
also because of the situation of poverty in which people live"
, The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declared this Wednesday in his usual morning press conference.
López Obrador had advanced the agreement with the wives over the weekend, after government experts warned that all corners of the mine had been flooded, that the execution of the new rescue plan would take between 6 and 11 months and, therefore, Therefore, there was no hope of finding them alive.
AMLO says that the compensation to relatives of the trapped miners will be greater than "conventional"
Aug. 30, 202201:06
Some relatives of the workers were outraged when it was announced that they would stop trying to get them out of the mine alive and criticized the fact that they negotiated exclusively with their wives.
“The widows accepted that a novena is going to be held and that everything is going to stop,”
Juanita Tijerina Amaya, sister of Hugo Tijerina, one of the miners who disappeared after the flood, lamented in an interview with the newspaper Reforma on Monday.
López Obrador clarified that the construction of the miners' memorial will not begin until the bodies are recovered.
[These are the 10 miners trapped in a Coahuila mine for eight days]
"At the same time we continue working to rescue the miners and we are not going to stop working, the rescue is not going to stop, it has not stopped, we continue extracting water from the wells," he said.
The collapse has reactivated the controversy in Mexico over the actions of the mining companies in the coal region of Coahuila, where more than 100 deaths of people dedicated to mining have been recorded, according to the Pasta de Conchos Family, which brings together relatives of who died in the 2006 collapse at the mine of the same name, reported the EFE news agency.
The families of the 10 miners trapped in Pinabete have denounced precarious conditions and have accused the Government of acting late and slow in rescuing the workers.
