Video: Mexican police shoot striking miners in Michoacan

BoingBoing reader Daniel Armando says,

This is a video of Mexican police shooting at striking miners in Michoacan, Mexico.

The footage is from last Thursday, when the State Police and a Federal agency tried to throw the miners out of the plant they were occupying. In the video you can see the police shooting at the striking miners and an helicopter flying around the site also shooting at the people on the ground. The shooting was apparently done by the State police, but the federal agents did not intervene. Mexico's attorney general has declared that the federal government wil not investigate. Two young miners, ages 19 and 24 named Mario Alberto Castillo y Hector Alvarez were killed by shotgun wounds.

The miners at the Sicartsa plant in Michoacan, Mexico owned by Grupo Villacero, have been on strike for close to 20 days now. They want, among other things, better safety conditions after the widely reported collapse of a mine in the north of Mexico on February 19. The accident was said to have been caused by poor safety conditions.

The footage is being streamed in the website of mainstream newspaper El Universal. I had to do a screen capture of this video because the source website was using shockwave to stream it.

Link

Reader comment:

inspector42 says,

I guess the recent shooting of two striking mine workers in Mexico demonstrates that their employer, Grupo Villacero, certainly can "mix it up with the best of them", as described on the company's Yahoo Finance page: Link.