For more than 40 days, 14 men in the north of Spain have spent their days and nights in dark shafts, 3,000 feet underground. They are not trapped. Instead, these miners have voluntarily locked themselves in the depth of the mines to protest against the massive government cuts to the sector.
Mr Dario Martinez has been living for more than a month inside Candin shaft in a claustrophobic 270 square foot chamber. The temperature is about 77 F degrees but the humidity ranges between 80% and 100% and there is plenty of dust in the air. They have no toilets or showers, sleep on planks and eat what their colleagues from the surface send them four times a day via a service elevator.
Like the Martinez family, more than 10,000 others in the coal mining regions of Spain worry they might soon be unable to feed their children. The entire sector has been on general strike since May 28th 2012, following an April announcement by the conservative government of President Mr Mariano Rajoy that it would cut subsidies slated to be received this year by 63%, the sharpest cut in the budget to any program.
Without public aid, the mining industry and the villages that depend on it are doomed to disappear and quickly.
Coal mining in Spain is a loss making sector that has been publicly subsidized for more than a century. It has been traditionally regarded as a strategic industry because it is the only local resource in a country with an energy dependency of 81.7% (30 points above the EU average).
With economic modernization and changes to Spanish industry that took place in the late 1980s, the mining sector became less important. The number of miners in Spain shrunk by 90% over the past 20 years. Even so, the sector is essential for the survival of certain towns like Langreo, which is almost fully dependent on coal mining.
In 2010, then President Mr Jose Luis Zapatero signed a plan to cut the subsidies by 10% in 2012 but the current government decided to increase that six fold resulting in a total reduction of more than EUR 200 million.
Source - Global Post
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