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Colombia's
Dirty War Against Unions
By
David Bacon, Pacific News Service,
May 9, 2001
To work in a high profile position in a union in Colombia
is to risk death. That simple fact has helped US unions, which
for many years stayed at more than arm's length from Central
American unions, to become actively involved in criticizing
both the violence in Colombia and the U.S. contribution to
that violence. PNS commentator David Bacon writes widely on
immigrant and labor issues.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Working with a labor union often means
taking the chance of losing a job, being blacklisted, and,
in some places, spending time in prison.
 But
holding union office carries greater danger in Colombia, where
labor activism is often punished with death.
In the first three months of this year, 25 Colombian trade
union leaders were violently murdered. Last year 129 were
assassinated. By most estimates, at least 150 are killed on
average each year.
The situation has provoked a wave of protest from unions everywhere,
including U.S. unions, which are increasingly vocal not only
in challenging human rights violations in Colombia, but U.S.
government policies that, unions say, make the carnage possible.
In mid-March, gunmen in military uniforms stopped a company
bus carrying miners to their jobs at the Loma coal mine in
northern Colombia. Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo
Orcasita were pulled off the bus, and pumped full of bullets
in the dirt at the side of the road as their fellow workers
watched.
The two were chairman and vice-chairman of the union at the
mine, which is owned by Drummond Co., Inc., a multinational
based in Birmingham, Alabama. Last year, Drummond closed most
of its U.S. operations, and relocated coal production to the
Loma mine although they knew "that country's hostile political
climate and egregious human rights violations," says Jerry
Jones, vice-president of the U.S. United Mine Workers of America.
Colombia is the world's fourth-largest coal exporter. It shipped
$794 million worth in 2000, making coal the country's third
largest source of export earnings.
Just days after the mineworkers' murders, two leaders of the
Colombian electrical workers union were gunned down. A few
days before, a union activist in an oil town was dragged from
his home and shot in the street. And on March 31, the leader
of a cement workers union was kidnapped by armed gunmen.
Colombia's rightist paramilitary army, the United Defense
Groups (AUC), have been charged with responsibility for this
and the coal miners' murders. The country's main guerrilla
group, the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)
allegedly "taxes" coal moving out of the Loma Mine, and the
region has been the scene of intense conflict between the
FARC and the AUC.
Unionists hold the AUC and the Colombian military responsible
for almost all of the trade union assassinations. The Colombian
government views union activity as a challenge to its basic
economic policies.
For example, in March, the General Confederation of Democratic
Workers, organized a 24-hour strike of 700,000 workers, including
300,000 teachers and education employees, to protest mass
layoffs among public workers -- layoffs made in response to
pressure from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
to cut the public sector budget.
Both Colombian and U.S. unions say the wave of death and violence
is made possible by growing U.S. aid to the Colombian armed
forces in its war against all critics of the Colombian social
and economic order, including unionists.
Last year, the AFL-CIO called for ending U.S. military aid
to Colombia. That position, which puts labor at odds with
the Bush administration on a key foreign policy issue, is
a strong contrast to its relative silence on Latin America
during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In that era, AFL-CIO
President Lane Kirkland suppressed criticism of U.S. foreign
policy in union ranks, and stopped grassroots efforts to organize
support for Salvadoran trade unionists facing the kind of
wave of death now evident in Colombia.
This spring, the United Steel Workers sent a formal delegation
to Colombia and met with leaders of the CUT -- a group Kirkland
and others once accused of being too left-wing while the CUT,
like many third world labor federations, accused the AFL-CIO
of supporting only those unions defended U.S. foreign policy.
Today, U.S. unions want relations with all sectors of Colombian
labor, and use a single standard in calling for the defense
of unions under attack. "Trade union rights are human rights
and our union will fight to protect them everywhere," Gerard
says. "We demand that the Colombian government protect all
trade unionists in their country and do everything in its
power to bring these assassins to justice."
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