For nine years, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia has been a political exile from his homeland. But that hasn’t stopped him from leading one of Mexico’s most influential trade unions — the National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Allied Workers of the Mexican Republic, or Los Mineros for short.

Far from it — every day he chats on Skype to his union executive, talking pay disputes, conditions in one of the world’s most dangerous industries and taking on powerful corporations like Grupo Mexico (GM), the mining giant he accused of industrial homicide in 2006 after 65 of his members died in an explosion.

Shortly after he demanded the resignation of the minister of labour, who he says also had a commercial relationship with GM, he found himself facing fraud charges for embezzling union funds.

He has always protested his innocence — and Interpol appeared to agree, refusing to support a Mexican arrest warrant after Gomez fled to Vancouver, Canada, where he now makes his home.

When I meet him in London, where he’s come to raise awareness of the plight of Mexican union activists while President Enrique Pena Nieto swans around Buckingham Palace on a state visit, he looks up full of resolve.

And he needs it. The fraud charges were dropped last August and he can finally think about going back.

“Usually when union leaders in Latin America face attacks like this they end up in jail or dead. I hope in the short term, in the next few months, to be able to go back.

“But now we have the legal exoneration I need political exoneration before I can return.”

“We are survivors. I’ve been re-elected six times since I left Mexico.” Alongside the support of his members, he credits his endurance to the support of his wife and family and solidarity from unions across the world — including the US United Steelworkers and Britain’s Unite, his hosts this week. “Without these it would have been very, very difficult to survive,” he says.

He says there are rights abuses in Mexico “every single day.”

The relationship between big business and government is a cosy one, he says, and never is that clearer than on state visits.

“Yes, there are strong ties between companies and the government, it is clear they’re working together.

“It’s clear that’s their priority, rather than to protect workers’ rights and human rights.”

The crackdown on Los Mineros was brutal — but not entirely surprising. Mexico’s dominant and Orwellian-sounding Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has long sought to maintain control of trade unions — appointing pro-government union chiefs known as “charros.”

“We have two kinds of trade union — the official ones that are close to government and the democratic ones,” Gomez explains.

“The government has the right to choose whether to recognise unions and whether to recognise the leadership of unions.

“It’s a fascist way of having control of unions they like and those they don’t. It’s an instrument of control that was used in nazi Germany and fascist Italy — Mexico is one of the few countries that still has it.

“If you’re not a recognised union then you can’t open a bank account on behalf of the union and you can’t negotiate.”

He strongly rejects the suggestion from critics that Los Mineros, which was previously led by his father Napoleon Gomez Sada, had itself been too close to the government in the past.

“Los Mineros has always been independent,” he says. “We’ve always been at the forefront of the struggle for labour union independence.”

But the 2006 Pasta de Conchos mine disaster demanded a more radical approach, as Los Mineros had repeatedly warned about safety hazards on site.

“False accusations” against Gomez and other union leaders followed and the government refused to recognise his leadership.

With oil workers in the US on strike over safety concerns and their counterparts here threatening the same, I wonder if safety is becoming the centre of modern labour disputes.

“Mining is a very high-risk industry and companies tend to neglect health and safety, because it’s not in the interests of their profits,” Gomez says “We’ve decided that where we have common ground with unions abroad, we need a common strategy.”

When Los Mineros first established its partnership with the United Steelworkers union, Gomez met with a representative who told him the future of trade unions was bleak if they didn’t “globalise their actions.”

“If they’re globalising their businesses, then we should globalise our strategies,” he argues. “When we have multinationals that are common employers to us across the world, we can negotiate together with much stronger bargaining power.”

As mining communities across Britain commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1984-85 strike, I ask Gomez if he sees parallels between the treatment of the NUM under Margaret Thatcher and how Los Mineros has fared in recent years.

“Absolutely, yes,” he remarks, saying that he’s read Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within several times over.

“It’s very clear that in many ways there are similarities, the way (Thatcher’s government) used the media, the smear campaign, the way they tried to corrupt union leaders.

“It’s become a model to attack and destroy democratic and independent unions.

“We have great respect for the struggle of the miners in Great Britain.”

Can they can learn from the British miners’ defeat to build for success?

“Each struggle is different,” he says. “We have a different end to the struggle, but we can learn from what happened here.