Colombia: Where joining a union means risking death
ROISIN DE ROSA and SOLEDAD GALIANA examine the campaign of assassination and intimidation against trade union activists in Colombia. This bloody campaign has been pursued by right-wing death squads with the support of the Colombian military, often in the interests of US multinational companies. It is a campaign, however, that has been ignored by the US administration.
In 1998, Domingo Tovar, director of Colombian trade union Workers Unitary Central's (CUT) organising department, and Jorge Ortega, the union's vice-president, were forced to flee Colombia when their lives were threatened. In September 1998, when they returned, Tovar and Ortega were threatened again. On Tuesday, 20 October 1998, Jorge Ortega was assassinated by an unidentified gunman, shot in the head in front of his house. The threats, and Ortega's death, appeared to be directly linked to a strike by public service employees (who wanted the government to negotiate with them on tax reform) which was entering its third week at the time of the killing.
Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, where mere membership of a union can serve as an instant death warrant. The country's cycle of violence has become a war against trade unionism and the fundamental principles of the labour movement. Colombian Trade union, Workers Unitary Central (CUT), had already recorded the assassination of 129 trade union leaders, members and activists by mid November this year. Another 68 trade unionists were disappeared, 24 suffered attempts on their lives, whilethe number of those threatened and forced to leave their homes is unknown. Last year, in its annual report, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, ICFTU recorded no less than 153 assassinations of trade unionists in Colombia, out of a worldwide total of 209.
The Sixth Division
"Sixth Division" is the title of the latest Human Rights Watch report on Colombia, as this is the phrase used in Colombia to refer to the death squads. "The Colombian Army has five divisions, but many Colombians feel that the paramilitaries are so fully integrated into the military's battle strategy and linked to government units via intelligence, supplies, radios, weapons, cash and common purpose that they effectively constitute a sixth division of the army."
The report finds that some government officials have taken action against paramilitaries but "their actions have been consistently and effectively undermined, cancelled out, or in some cases wholly reversed by actions promoted by the military-paramilitary alliance... Hundreds of arrest warrants against paramilitary leaders remain unenforced because the military has chosen not to execute them. Important Colombian government offices - the Vice-Presidency, the Interior ministry, the Defence Ministry, and especially the Armed Forces themselves - have failed to take the decisive action necessary to address this serious situation."
Part of the report is dedicated to readdressing US policy in Colombia. HRW worries how US law - the Leahy Provision, which prohibits military aid from going to security force units engaged in abusive behaviour - has been ignored and the rest of the human rights conditions imposed by the US Congress were lifted by President Clinton. "With one signature, the White House sent a direct message to Colombia military leaders... that as long as the Colombian military cooperated with the US anti-drug strategy, American officials would waive human rights conditions and skirt their own human rights laws. Judged by the Colombian military behaviour in the field - not by rhetoric and public relation pamphlets - its leaders understood this message clearly," says HRW.
In a report in 1996, Human Rights Watch had described Columbia's military-paramilitary partnership as "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry and official silence by the United States, that allows Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it".
US Senator Paul Wellstone (Democrat), addressing the United States Senate on 6 September, said: "As another Labour Day passes I could not in good conscience neglect to mention the plight of our brothers and sisters in the Colombian labour movement.
"For the past 15 years, Colombia has been in the midst of an undeclared war on union leaders. Colombia has long been the most dangerous country in the world for union members, with nearly 4,000 murdered in that period. Today, three out of five trade unionists killed in the world are Colombian.
"The right-wing AUC has been especially brutal, killing hundreds simply because they view union organisers as subversives."
Coca Cola workers
Senator Wellstone went on: "One of the most recent killings occurred on 21 June, when the leader of Sinaltrainal (Colombia's Food and Beverage Union) the union that represents Colombian Coca-Cola workers, Oscar Dario Soto, was gunned down. His murder brings to seven the number of unionists who worked for Coca-Cola and were targeted and killed by paramilitaries."
This summer, the International Labour Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers of America brought a suit against the Coca-Cola company alleging that the Colombian managers had colluded with paramilitary security forces to murder, torture and silence union leaders.
Sinaltrainal, Colombia's Food and Beverage workers Union, has long maintained that Coke is among the most notorious employers in Colombia and the company maintains open relations with death squads as part of a programme to intimidate trade union leaders. On 20 July, ironically Colombian Independence Day, Sinaltrainal filed suit in the US District Court against Coca-Cola and Pan-American Beverages, Inc.
Daniel Kovalik, Assistant General Counsel of the Steelworkers of America says: "While the offences detailed in the Complaint occurred in an industry outside the Steelworkers' core jurisdiction, we are filing this case to show our solidarity with the embattled trade unions of Colombia. We absolutely must stand up together to stop such criminal activity against our union brothers and sisters, regardless of where or in what industry it occurs."
Killings
Other plaintiffs include the Estate of Isidro Segundo Gil, a trade union leader assassinated while working at a Coke bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The manager of the plant has been accused by the United Steel Workers International Labour Rights Fund of ordering Gil's murder. Five other leaders of the union, while employed by Coke, were subjected to torture, kidnapping and/or unlawful detention in order to encourage them to cease their trade union activities".
In just one year, 1996, 20 union workers of Coca Cola were either disappeared or assassinated.
In fact, since the formation of the CUT (Unified Central of Columbian workers, equivalent of the ICTU here) in 1986, General Secretary Hector Fajardo says some 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia.
Drummond Coal Company
On 12 March, Valmore Locarno, president of the mineworkers' union and Victor Oracita, the union's vice-president, were just finishing up negotiations with the Drummond Coal Company, a US-based firm, over a longstanding labour dispute. Dan Korvalik, in his special report to the US Labour Committee, takes up the account. "Mr Locarno asked the Drummond management if they could stay overnight at the worksite because he and Mr Oracita had received death threats. This request was denied. Instead, both Mr Oracita and Mr Locarno were taken away in a Drummond-owned bus. En route to their homes the bus was stopped by armed paramilitaries, the paramilitaries forcibly removed Mr Locarno and Mr Oracita from the bus. They murdered Mr Locarno on the stop and took Mr Oracita away. The remains of Mr Oracita were found the next day."
Teachers
The Report goes on to say that the hardest hit by the violence are teachers. Since 1986, 418 teachers have been murdered. Tariscio Rivera Munoz, vice president of the teachers' union (FECODE), explains "we have teachers who are political prisoners in the country's jails when their only crime has been to interpret the needs of the students and people".
Dan Korvalik reports that he met several teachers at the FECODE office who were on the run because they are on a hit list kept by the paramilitaries. One of these teachers related that she was on the hit list because three years ago she had denounced the massacre of 12 people, some of them children, by the paramilitaries.
Agents of the State
Roberto Molino of the well respected human rights organisation Committee of Colombian Jurists (CCJ) says Colombia is experiencing a grave deterioration of human rights. In 1988, the CCJ reported that there were ten victims of politically motivated killings per day. This figure is now double that. Last year alone, 6,000 Colombians were killed as a result of social and political violence.
Molino explains that violence against trade unionists is a central item in these overall figures, which he believes principally flows from institutional opposition to the exercise of labour rights in Colombia. "Trade union activity is Colombia is considered by the government and private employers to be 'subversive activity'," he says.
The Special Report goes on to cite the ILO's (International Labour Organisation) conclusion that agents of the state have been directly involved in the violence against trade unionists and have in fact created paramilitary groups that have carried out this violence. "While thousands of trade unionists have been murdered, the government has never found even one person guilty of such assassinations."
Paramilitaries blamed
In a press release from the CUT, blame for the assassinations is firmly placed with the "paramilitary group of the extreme right led by Carlos Castano". However, Amnesty reports how an arrest warrant for Castano and 11 other paramilitary members was never acted on. This despite a three-day attack in February last year by 200 paramilitary gunmen who raided the village of El Salado, killing 36 people, including a six-year-old child. The charges were dropped, in a system of military justice which claims to have jurisdiction over human rights cases.
In this attack, according to the Amnesty International Report of 2001, many victims were tied to a table in the village sports field and subjected to torture, including rape, before being stabbed or shot dead. Others were killed in the village church.
Why kill trade unionists?
A report in Focus, the journal of the Public Services International, the organisation of public service trade unions, including Irish union IMPACT, quotes Carlos Castano's answer to the question of why paramilitary groups kill civilians. "Indiscriminate attacks? Us? Never! There is always a reason. Trade unionists, for example. They keep people from working! That's precisely why we kill them!"
On 19 October of this year, 16 oil workers' union leaders were detained in an operation ordered by the National Attorney General, charging the USO (the oil workers' union) members with the crime of rebellion, which carries many years in prison.
These latest detentions arose in the context of a work stoppage at Ecopetrol, where workers demanded that the national government provide guarantees for union activity. They are living under continuous threat of killings and persecution by the paramilitaries.
d then there are protests about the level of wages, which are as low as 56 cents an hour in factories producing for export to the US. They are about the policies imposed by the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, as these agencies prepare Colombia for the 'Free Market' trade block, stretching from Canada to Argentina, which aims to plunder the rich natural resources of Colombia, including minerals, oil, coal and gold.
IMF austerity policies
In the summer, there was a strike which lasted for over a month, of health care and education workers, actively supported by parents and students. They were protesting the austerity policies of the so-called Transfer Law. The strike denounced the cuts in education of $US4.3 million, and the transfer of costs of health care and education to the municipalities, many of which are almost bankrupt. The President of the public service union Sinalserpub, German Garcia, stressed that these measures are taken by the national government directly as a result of the conditions imposed by the IMF and IDB.
The US Congress has approved $1.3 billion for the Colombia Plan, thinly disguised as a plan to wipe out coco production, but in fact a military aid package, and President Bush is now looking for a further $567 million on top in additional military aid for next year.
US connections with Castano
Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) called on the US Ambassador, Thomas Pickering, a year ago, on 27 November 2000, to address allegations that the US government had ties to the notorious Colombian paramilitary leaders, Fidel and Carlos Castano.
Acting Director of Government Relations Carlos Salinas is reported in this Amnesty International document, as saying that "recent news reports point to an extremely suspect relationship between US government and the Castano family - at a time when the US government was well aware of that family's involvement in paramilitary violence and narcotics trafficking". AIUSA called on Ambassador Pickering to address these allegations "which if proven true, further erode the US government's already abysmal record of tacitly supporting forces in Latin American that have committed grave human rights violations".
In breach of US law
For many Colombians, the 'marriage' between Colombian military units, particularly the army and the right-wing death squads, now estimated to number over 8,000 members, translates into a daily terror. Witnesses brave enough to testify about the sixth division and its links to security forces are threatened or murdered with numbing precision.
Yet US law, known as the Leahy Provision, prohibits military aid to security force units engaged in abusive behaviour until effective steps are taken to bring the perpetrators to justice. Human Rights Watch contends the US has violated the spirit of its own laws and in some case downplayed or ignored evidence of continuing ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups.
On 22 August 2000, President Bill Clinton, citing "interests of US national security", signed a waiver that lifted the human rights conditions imposed by the US Congress, in essence allowing security assistance to be provided to the Colombian military even as the State Department reported that some of its units continued to be implicated in support for paramilitary groups.
"With one signature, the White House sent a direct message to Colombian military leaders... that as long as the Colombian military cooperated with the US anti-drug strategy, American officials would waive human rights conditions and skirt their own human rights laws. Judged by the Colombian military behaviour in the field - not by rhetoric and public relation pamphlets - its leaders understood this message clearly," says Human Rights Watch.
Courageous stand
Against this background of terror, the nation's unions have been very vocal in their calls to participate in the peace talks between government and the left-wing guerrillas and to expand the talks to cover important social and economic issues that are opposed vehemently by the far right.
As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says: "Colombian trade union leaders have been the leading advocates for peace, human rights and economic justice in a nation afflicted by internal violence and external economic pressure. And they have paid a heavy price for their advocacy."
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