was one of the main protagonists. Montes had himself taken part in these conflicts, for which he suffered reprisals from the military regimes of the day. In the years following the recuperation of democracy, Montes continued to play an active role in labor disputes, such as during the 1985 struggle for an increased minimum wage. With the collapsing price of tin in the mid-1980s, much of the labor movement's power came crashing down, and the mining population was significantly reduced. Montes became part of the small contingent of laborers that—willingly or not—continued working the mines after the crash. In 1988, Montes transferred to the Huanuni mine in Oruro, where he began scaling the ranks of the area's trade syndicates. By the early 1990s, he had acceded to the directorate of the Syndical Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers, and he was later elected executive secretary of the Oruro Departmental Workers' Center. During this time, he was thrice expelled from the state-owned Bolivian Mining Corporation, only gaining back membership through his personal relations with influential figures such as Oscar Salas. Bolivian Workers' Center In June 2006, during its XIV National Congress, Montes capped off his union rise with his election as executive secretary of the Bolivian Workers' Center (COB). His designation came at a time of weakness for the organization, which in recent years had lost influence to emerging peasant unions and organized social movements aligned with the Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP), whose leader, Evo Morales, was elected president the year prior. The MAS had sought to have its own representative elected to head the COB, opening the door for amendments to the organization's statute that would allow aligned indigenous and peasant organizations membership. Although Montes was adamant in his assertion that the COB would maintain its political independence from the government, his tenure nonetheless saw the organization grow far closer to it than it had under previous leaders. In 2007, for example, he joined the National Coordinator for Change, a political arm of the MAS; in 2008, he signed an alliance with the organization on behalf of the COB, and by 2009, most of the entity's forty member groups had originated from the COB. In part, this burgeoning alliance had less to do with Montes and more with Morales, whose administration struck a markedly more conciliatory cord with the COB, which contrasted with the adversarial position taken by the liberal governments that