Shafted: A Mexican Tale

By T.S. Aguilar

Fate cannot be controlled and is frequently quite unpleasant. Yet, a bad hand that is dealt by fate can be the start to new and better phase in life. It all depends on how it is played.

Fate dealt the protagonist a bad hand when he ended up by chance in one of Mexico's many illegal silver mines. While he recuperates from the near fatal accident he escaped, thanks to his foreman saving his life, he gets embroiled in an impromptu miners' rebellion. He is not a miner, does not consider himself to be one of "them" or wants to have anything to do with their grievances. But the management's treatment of his foreman, accused and punished as the leader of the rebellion, is sufficient for him to become one of "them". He begins to explore the machinations of the management's dark schemes of manipulating the workforce not only into competing groups but also totally selfish individuals. The sense of 'unity is strength' is lost on the mine workers and consequently they are getting shafted.

The protagonist befriends the madam of the local brothel who gives him the job of janitor to supplement his meagre sick pay. Working in that establishment provides him yet more insights into the management's plots and schemes of keeping total control over the mining compound. The day he is declared fit to return to work in the mine, he is accused to have murdered one of the directors and beaten to a pulp by his colleagues. Thanks to the intervention of the medical station's nurse, he escapes serious harm besides the cuts and bruises he suffered. In the waiting room of the medical station, he learns that the collapse of one of the mine's stopes killed forty miners.

Something needs to be done to end the worker's exploitation and assure a safe work environment. But the one person, his foreman who could unite the workforce with a few pithy words has his own problems. He wants to escape the prison-like environment of the mine with his family. It is the protagonist's discovery of a fiendish control system of every movement of every person in the mine and the compound that makes an escape impossible. It causes the foreman to reconsider. The workforce undergoes a sea change once he creates a semblance of unity, and an uprising is on the cards.

Management plays the last ace it has up its sleeve - the corruptibility of the military. A regiment of the motorised cavalry is bribed to come in and cause a bloodbath. A most unlikely person, the madam of the brothel who is an excellent shot, takes out the commanding officer with a couple of bullets that leads to the special forces' withdrawal. That sets the scene for a final showdown. Thanks to the cunning of one of the male prostitutes, the national media could be persuaded to broadcast the uprising on live TV, and the entire nation watches the management getting shafted with ridicule.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0968771157
• ISBN13: 9780968771150
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: T.S.Aguilar
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Review of Shafted by T S Aguilar

It is a fact that the mining industry is full of inherent risks to life and limb. This applies to the extraction of most precious mineral ores, and, to a lesser extent, coal. In Europe, incidentally, most former coal mining nations have abandoned this heavy industry in favour of importing their diminishing fossil fuel needs from other EU countries. In North America, particularly as concerns precious metals such as silver, the emphasis, since the advent of NAFTA, has been on outsourcing operations to the south, over the border, down Mexico way. Whether or not this will continue, under threat of a wall, is the question. This is an interesting uplifting story of the workers versus the “gringo” directors and investors who decide that they will take advantage of Mexico’s laid back atmosphere where the lure of making a fast buck and the ease with which local and national officials are much easier prey to bribery and corruption has been too great to resist. Of course this labour force is not necessarily organised into syndicated trade unions, which makes the appeal of corporate profiteering south of the border ever greater. The story is told largely in the first person from a previous victim’s point of view. His interactions with other characters, male and female, pretty soon begin to expose the grinding poverty and deprivation around the fictional mining settlement of Tepetapa, somewhere north of Mexico City. There are many topical references to the theme of IT control and monitoring of employees who work for the company – and this is indeed a critical issue concerned with the preservation of privacy in the information age – and should be of interest to the thousands of Swedes who have microchips implanted in their limbs for the convenience of doors opening and unfettered access to nightclubs and junk food outlets. This issue sits comfortably side-by-side with the concept of inclusivity and diversity – also explored in the novel. For example, the economic necessity, brought on by deprived through company penny-pinching, of a partner in a marriage participating in activities normally classed as questionable in order to stay in the black and to keep the family intact. Additionally the local bordello’s operatives are both male & female and supervised by a Madame whose heroic stance towards the end inspires the reader to respect her entrepreneurial activities in some collaboration, earlier, with the directors. This contributes, ultimately, to their undoing at the end. All in all, this is an original story about the morality of the rich northern economies ruthlessly exploiting for sheer profit the cultural differences of countries below 30 degrees N. This is indeed a dark, but very topical, theme. The author writes with a good sense of humour nevertheless and has succeeded in creating a thoughtful and entertaining book. I highly recommend it for a long flight to a third world country!