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Agujita (Mexico) (AFP) – The relatives of the ten workers trapped in a mine in northern Mexico denounced this Saturday feeling “desperate” due to the slow progress of the rescue, while expressing distrust in the leadership of the operation and in the maneuvers carried out so far.
“We are desperate,” Martha María Huerta, wife of Sergio Cruz, one of the miners held captive after the flooding last August 3 at the coal mine in the town of Agujita, in the state of Coahuila, told reporters. North of the country.
Ten days after the incident, the authorities acknowledge that “there is no way” to determine when they will reach the area of the mine where it is presumed that the workers could be trapped, according to the national coordinator of Civil Protection, Laura Velázquez, declared on Friday.
However, the official also said that there were “conditions” to enter the mine after the drop in water levels.
But this Saturday, neither Civil Protection nor another government agency had offered information on the progress of the operation.
In an impromptu conference near the rescue area, Huerta and other relatives explained that they had avoided expressing their concerns to the press because they wanted to give the authorities “the opportunity” to rescue their relatives.
“But we’re tired of it,” said the woman.
Visibly frustrated, several relatives who also work in mining said they have asked the authorities to allow them to carry out the rescue themselves using other means, but that their suggestions are ignored or “put aside”.
Given this, they demanded that other rescue experts be summoned, whether local or foreign, and that Velázquez be removed from directing the operation.
They also expressed their fear that the trapped workers could not be rescued, as happened after the accident at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, also in Coahuila, on February 19, 2006.
“I don’t want the same thing to happen that happened in Pasta de Conchos. A cousin, Gil Rico Montelongo, remained there, and they never took him out,” said María Magdalena Montelongo, Jaime’s 61-year-old sister, who went to the scene of the disaster to try help your colleagues.
At Pasta de Conchos, a mine controlled by the Grupo México conglomerate, 65 workers were killed but only two bodies were recovered.
The relatives also demand to present these claims to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Let him sit down at a table to talk with his relatives,” said Gabriel Rodríguez Palomares, the brother of another captive miner.
The Agujita accident occurred when the wall of an adjoining mine, flooded and abandoned, collapsed, causing the flooding of the shaft where 15 miners were maneuvering. Five of them managed to escape.
Since then there have been no signs of life of the 10 remaining workers, whose rescue involves several hundred people including soldiers, Civil Protection officials and volunteer miners.
Mining accidents are frequent in Coahuila, Mexico’s main coal producer.
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