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Gregorio Orozco was convinced that he was going to catch it on that day in late March when he had to attend three co-workers who seemed to be sick with coronavirus. "One vomited and came coughing, without a mask. He went home, but the other two continued working. The next day they also had a fever and also went home," he recalls.
The assumption of the 48-year-old Colombian became a certainty on April 7. "It had been bad for several days. I had not been able to go to work the day before. My whole body hurt, I lost my sense of smell and sense of taste. I spoke to the doctor and he said: Gregorio, you have all the symptoms of Covid-19 "
In fact, Gregorio says that most of the employees at the Litera Meat slaughterhouse shared his anguish. "Everyone said: here we all fall, we will all end up screwed," he says.
Veterinary technician and resident in Spain for 15 years, Orozco began working in the premises installed in the Aragonese town of Binéfar (Huesca) as soon as it opened in August 2019. "We had the illusion that everything was going to be very Pretty. Everything was shining ", he recalls with a certain irony.
The project aimed to be the largest slaughterhouse in Europe and to slaughter up to 32,000 pigs a day.
From euphoria he went very quickly to disappointment. As soon as he had to face exhaustive working hours, the cut in overtime pay and ways that, he says, were always dominated by "threats" and "fear".
"The company only cared about producing"
But the tip came with the coronavirus, a pandemic that came to exponentially complicate the economic objectives set by the Italian-born firm, which had signed in January a significant pork export contract with one of the main pig companies in China, WH Group .
The Colombian affirms that the protection measures that were applied in the slaughterhouse were as insufficient as they were chaotic, with daily crowds for the collection of masks, attendance at a dining room where "up to 16 people sat together", or the absence of any type of social distance in changing rooms or smoking areas. "It was a disaster, because the company did not care about the Covid-19, only the Chinese, producing and producing," he says.
"At the beginning there was no separation, neither in the dining room, nor in the changing rooms, nor anywhere. One day I met a person lying in the entrance of the slaughterhouse. He fell to the ground. He did not want to enter because he was afraid, but a friend convinced me. The next day that friend was also sick, "explains Mamadú Kasse , another former worker at the compound who was recently fired.
As the weeks went by, the sick leave began to multiply. Including that of Gregorio himself or that of Mamadú. Finally, the company decided to carry out a series of general tests on April 25 to confirm the presence of Covid-19, and the results were certainly explicit: out of a total of 742 tests -the workforce exceeds a thousand employees-, 178 positives were recorded, 24%.
30% of infected
The alarm multiplied when images were disseminated on social networks in which queues of hired workers were seen and without keeping the slightest distance during the day, and it was triggered when the results of the tests carried out this week in the second were known. local slaughterhouse, Fibrin , where the positives represented 30% of the tests.
The Cemsatse doctors and nurses union hastened to issue a statement on the same day, April 25, criticizing the fact that "many people have been put at risk of health, allegedly mixing healthy workers with the sick," exposing the contagion to the toilets who attended the appointment and facilitating the "uncontrolled extension of the outbreak".
The CNT union has demanded the immediate closure of Litera Meat and has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor's Office, accusing the firm of an alleged crime against the safety of its employees, while CCOO did the same before the Labor Inspection.
"They have forced people with symptoms to work until creating a public health problem. The benefits cannot endanger everyone's life," proclaims Fernando Martínez , secretary of Union Action at CNT Huesca.
"It was foreseeable. Complaints and videos have been coming to us showing that they continued without respecting any separation for weeks and did nothing," said Pilar Acín , representative of the same union in Binéfar.
The Pini consortium - owner of Litera Meat - accumulates a series of international controversies that have brought him to justice in Poland and Hungary. The top leader of this group, Piero Pini , was arrested by the Hungarian police in March 2019, accused of tax fraud, as reported by the Italian press at that time.
Owners response
This newspaper attempted to contact those responsible for the aforementioned slaughterhouse, but the response of a Human Resources representative was conclusive: "Francesco [Pini, son of Piero Pini, one of the heads of the Aragonese center] is not interested in talking to you. Le it does not matter what is published ". For its part, Fibrin reported that it will take advantage from May 1 to 3 to carry out "aseptic treatment throughout the industrial complex."
The general director of Public Health of the Government of Aragon, Francisco Javier Falo , has assured that the regional authorities are trying to "cut as quickly as possible" this outbreak, but in the streets of Binéfar a new anxiety spreads that - curiously - they had not felt during the most critical weeks of this health emergency.
"We were fine here. We only knew one positive case. There are none in the nursing homes. But now everything has changed. Of course we are very concerned," says Faustino Royo , a 91-year-old local, who returns to his home.
Binéfar began hosting sub-Saharan immigrants, especially from countries like Mali , The Gambia or Senegal , almost three decades ago. A flow of labor that contributed to this town being one of the few in Huesca that increased its population until the start of the last crisis and that now gives it a singular image of a mixture of races and creeds. According to official statistics, almost 20% of the residents of the town are foreign immigrants.
"Life is always a risk"
Despite the high number of infections, the foreign workers of Litera Meat face the expansion of the epidemic with the resignation that gives them a troubled existence that has forced them to leave their country to try to find a better existence in distant lands.
"Life is always a risk," says Mohalabid , a 25-year-old boy, outside the slaughterhouse. It is not a metaphor. He spent two years wandering through Africa, from Sudan to the shanty towns of Mount Gurugu in Morocco - where he was beaten by the Moroccan police - until he managed to enter Melilla.
"Yes, there are coronaviruses in the slaughterhouse, but it is better to work than to be on the street," he argues.
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