MEXICO CITY — As hopes faded of saving 10 guys caught in a flooded Mexican coal mine, proof installed that the present administration’s populist policies haveactually driven the revival of the harmful, primitive mines that continue declaring lives.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador enacted a strategy 2 years ago to restore coal-fired power plants in northern Mexico and provide choice to purchasing coal from the tiniest mines. The purchases were part of the president’s policies to offer more earnings to the poorest Mexicans.
In doing so, the administration resuscitated a type of coal mining so hazardous that legislators in both homes of Mexico’s Congress had attempted to restriction it a years back.
Experts state that mines so narrow and primitive that just one miner at a time can be decreased into a narrow shaft — and just one pail of coal drawnout — are naturally hazardous. At some pits, understood as “pocitos,” or “little wells,” air is pumped in and water pumped out through plastic tubes. Some wear’t even have that. There are normally no security exits or auxiliary shafts.
Fifteen guys were working inside the Pinabete mine in Sabinas, Coahuila, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas, on Aug. 3. A wall of water from an deserted mine next door — and perhaps wastewater pumped in from a close-by town — filled the single shaft about 40 meters (yards) deep. It blew out so numerous wood supports that they haveactually formed drifting barriers to rescue teams.
Five employees handled to escape as the mine flooded, however there hasactually been no contact with the rest.
Promoting coal is part of López Obrador’s effort to coast up the state-owned power energy, the Federal Electricity Commission, headed by old-guard politicalleader Manuel Bartlett. Not just was the policy questioned by ecologists; lotsof likewise stated it threatened miners.
“Manuel Bartlett’s fantastic concept of purchasing more coal from the tiniest manufacturers, and less from huge manufacturers, offered increase to a black market that injury up in the exploitation of mines that absence the safeguards required to safeguard the lives of the employees,” Miguel Riquelme, the guv of Coahuila state and member of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, stated after the mishap.
The federalgovernment energy had safeguarded its choice to buy about two-thirds of coal for power generation from little mines.
“We had