Tag: workers rights

A Silent Fury was a quick, medium-paced book which I finished in two sittings yesterday. It was a fascinating, informative and hair-curling read about the El Bordo mine fire which took place on the 10th of March in Pachuca, Mexico. I enjoyed reading the book but at times it did feel more like academic writing than a book.

The fire broke out and the alarm was raised at six in the morning. The shafts were sealed hastily after that and the company administrators declared that no more than ten lives remained inside the shafts. The administrators also very confidently assumed and proclaimed that those who were left inside were already dead since it would not take more than five minutes for the noxious gases to kill a person.

Once the mine was reopened after the fire, there were eighty-seven dead bodies- charred and disfigured, and also seven survivors. This is the turning point which highlights the ignorant and irresponsible actions of the company’s representatives. What seemed like an accident at first may have very well been a murder by the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company―the largest employer in the region.

Through this book, Yuri Herrera vividly exposes the bias and the war against workers by the judiciary, the company representatives and the media. He breaks the long silence on a wrong committed a century earlier. Herrera critically inspects the records left behind and forgotten a century after the incident took place. He also tries to analyze things that were never said or recorded, but should have been, for instance- how the women’s voices were stifled and the probe into the mine fire wherein the judge asked the inspector to look into a set of questions after the mine had already been cleaned post the fire. There was no probe into the Company representatives’ actions; or the discrepancies between what the representatives had to say about the fire and what the survivors had to say.

Herrera ends his book with a few more subsequent events that have highlighted workers’ abysmal conditions in Mexico and events that helped shape a movement. Herrera’s vexation about the misrepresentation of workers and their lives is evident on every page, as the title suggests- it is a silent fury.