Fifty years without anyone being held accountable for the mining accident in Fígols: "It was murder"

BarcelonaOn November 3, 1975, Txema Gómez was eight years old. It was a normal Monday at school until frantic shouts erupted in the playground amidst the ball games. "There's been an explosion in the mine." Gómez had a strange feeling. He couldn't remember if his father was working the morning or afternoon shift that day, but he had a bad feeling. After a moment of tense silence in the classroom, there was a knock at the door. It was a neighbor, also a miner, who took him to a relative's house to confirm the news. "I grew up overnight," says the son of one of the 30 workers who died in that firedamp explosion at the La Consolació mine in Fígols (Berguedà), 50 years later. Half a century later, none of the responsible managers have been convicted for the negligence that the victims' descendants have identified in the wake of the accident.

The company Carbones de Berga SA (CBSA) was then owned by Fecsa, the electricity company founded by the Franco's banker Juan March. They called it "the Regime's darling" because the regime had accelerated its modernization during the oil crisis to power Catalan factories with its coal. That lignite mine was a labyrinth of tunnels 1,000 meters underground. In mines, ventilation is one of the essential elements for ensuring safety. "If there are gas accumulations, it dilutes them," explains Gómez. Gases that hide among the coal layers, like firedamp, a compound greatly feared by miners and which triggered the explosion in Fígols.

After decades of investigations, Gómez and the brothers Marcelino and Emili Díaz, also sons of one of the victims, have confirmed that at La Consolació the ventilation systems had been installed hastily and had been turned off for two consecutive days. The gas had accumulated for more than 48 hours. "That Friday before the explosion, the miners wrote a statement because they had been complaining for a week about the unbearable heat," says Gómez. In the first report after inspecting the mine, the engineers determined that an electrical spark in some of the machinery had most likely caused the ignition. If the spark had occurred 20 minutes later, Gómez explains, 400 miners could have died.

There were no devices to measure the presence of gases, and, as the families discovered, the security guards didn't go down before the first shift started, as regulations required. "They had already been audited, and warned that a large pocket of gas could be released. They were extracting tons of rock from a great depth," adds this miner's son. Both he and the Díaz brothers participated in the production of Grisú, the tragedy of Fígols, a documentary for 3Catwhich explains how the Franco regime concealed responsibility for the accident.

Gómez, his sister—who was five years old at the time—and his mother—who was 34—don't even know for sure if the body they mourned was their father's. "They wouldn't let us see him," he says. The burials took place the following day without allowing time for the bodies to be identified. Two days later, a funeral was organized with more than 6,000 people, including three Francoist ministers, the civil governor of Barcelona, and the president of the Provincial Council, who at that time was Juan Antonio Samaranch. After the official procedures, the company focused on reinforcing its version of events to protect its officials from possible prosecution: in one of the inspections, a pack of Rex brand cigarettes and a box of matches had been found, and they blamed the miners for causing the explosion by smoking a cigarette. "If that was a fireball, where could it have come from? It was a strategy that allowed them to provide an explanation and create a narrative," Gómez laments.

A "farce" trial

The executives—who could have faced an eight-year prison sentence and a 32 million peseta bail—were pardoned, and after much pressure, the widows accepted compensation to settle the case. Later, a few resumed litigation, advised by lawyers like labor attorney Marc Viader, and gathered enough evidence to take the company to trial. The trial finally took place in February 1978, but Gómez criticizes it as a "farce." "They called in miners, colleagues of those who died, as witnesses, saying everything was fine. It was a scandal," he recalls. He adds that blaming the dead was probably easier for the survivors to bear psychologically: "It's better to think it was some reckless colleagues than that the mine was structurally a dump and you have to go in there every day."

The court concluded that the explosion could not have been foreseen and acquitted those responsible for the operation. Gómez still vividly remembers the names, especially that of Manuel Portis, the mine director. "The term 'accident' has been ingrained in our culture by those in power. It's a catch-all phrase that employers have always used," Gómez asserts. After the tragedy, his family also had to endure a climate of silence, collective shame, and taboo that permeated the region. His mother and the other women who lost their husbands in the mine were nicknamed "the golden widows," to emphasize that at least they had profited from those sudden deaths. "I've had to work through this anger for many years," Gómez admits. He still remembers how his grandmother, who had cared for the children of one of the engineers, would insult them whenever she saw them in the street: "She would say to me, 'These people murdered your father.'" The mine continued operating until 1991. Fifty years later, Gómez is certain that the explosion was not an accident: "It was murder." He also laments that, given the current state of workplace accidents, it's likely that even if that incident had occurred in 2025, it still wouldn't have been preventable. Despite the lack of recognition from the administration and the justice system, Gómez and the Díaz brothers feel a little more at peace because, at least, they have brought the facts to light and have been able to make public the evidence that the Regime tried to bury.