The American Prospect
January 28, 2002
By David Bacon, who writes on immigration and labor issues, is an associate
editor for Pacific News Service, which has published a different version
of this story.
AFTER THE LEADER OF their union was shot down at their plant gate in
late 1996, Edgar Paez and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory
in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government
to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers
themselves wound up behind bars, while the murderers went free.
Convinced that Colombian officials were unable or unwilling to bring
the perpetrators to justice, they decided to go abroad for help. Accordingly,
last July, the Colombian union Sinaltrainal, together with the United Steelworkers
of America and the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), filed a lawsuit
in the Florida courts against Coca-Cola, Panamerican Beverages (the largest
soft-drink bottler in Latin America), and Bebidas y Alimentos (owned by
Richard Kirby of Key Biscayne, Florida), which operates the Carepa plant.
The suit charges the three companies with complicity in the assassination
of the union leader Isidro Segundo Gil.
The case has become the centerpiece in a new strategy devised by Colombia's
labor movement to stop a wave of murders of union activists that's lasted
over a decade. International labor cooperation, the unions believe, is
the only means left to them to counter the power of the corporations that
they think are the instigators and beneficiaries of the repression. Increasingly,
U.S.-based unions have been willing to help. On November 19, Paez was joined
by Teamsters President James P. Hoffa in front of the World of Coca-Cola
Museum in Atlanta, where Hoffa proclaimed: "As the union that represents
the most Coca-Cola workers in the world, we demand that Coke stop the violence
against workers."
The level of violence against Colombian unionists is staggering: In
2000, assassinations took the lives of 153 of the nation's trade-union
leaders. In 2001, the figure had reached 143 by the end of November. According
to Hector Fajardo, general secretary of the United Confederation of Workers
(CUT), Colombia's largest union federation, 3,800 trade unionists have
been assassinated in Colombia since 1986. In the year 2000, three out of
every five trade unionists killed in the world were Colombian, according
to a recent report by the United Steelworkers.
LAST SPRING, TWO LEADERS OF A union at the U.S.-owned Drummond coal
mine, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita, were killed in
an incident that eventually drew worldwide condemnation. Media attention,
however, didn't prevent the subsequent murder of Gustavo Soler Mora, another
leader of the union in the same area in October.
Unionists and human-rights activists hold Colombia's paramilitary forces
responsible for almost all the trade-union assassinations -- though those
forces aren't working simply for themselves. Robin Kirk, who monitors abuses
in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between
the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation's leading
paramilitary grouping, and the Colombian military. "The Colombian military
and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anticommunist since the
1950s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives -- as
a very real and potential threat." Roberto Molino of the Colombian Commission
of Jurists contends that "in the case of the paramilitaries, you cannot
underestimate the collaboration of government forces." Those forces, says
Samuel Morales of the CUT, "believe it's a crime to try to present any
option for social change."
The AUC is also quietly backed by elements of the nation's business
and economic elite. "There are powerful economic interests that support
the paramilitaries," Kirk says, "and they attack union leaders again and
again." Morales concurs: "The paramilitaries are an armed wing of the same
military forces and government structures that have historically taken
positions against us. In Colombia, they're called the army's 'sixth division.'"
According to the complaint in the Florida case, here's what happened:
At 8:30 A.M. on December 5, 1996, a right-wing paramilitary squad of the
AUC showed up at the gate of the Coke bottling plant in Carepa. Gil, a
member of the union's executive board, went to see what they wanted. The
paras opened fire on Gil and he dropped to the ground, mortally wounded.
An hour after he was assassinated, paramilitary forces kidnapped another
leader of the union at his home; he managed to escape, however, and fled
to Bogota. At 8:00 P.M., paras broke into the union's offices, destroyed
the equipment there, and burned down the entire house, destroying all the
union's records.
The next day, the heavily armed group went inside the bottling plant,
called the workers together, and gave them until 4:00 P.M. to resign from
the union. "They said that if they didn't resign, the same thing would
happen to them that happened to Gil -- they would be killed," recalls Paez,
who visited the United States in November to ask union members here to
support the suit. Not surprisingly, union members resigned en masse. A
number of workers also quit their jobs outright, undoubtedly fearing that
they would be killed simply for showing up.
The companies, meanwhile, disclaim all responsibility for the violence
and coercion. Coca-Cola spokesperson Rafael Fernandez asserts that Coke
has a code of conduct requiring respect for human rights. Coke's Colombia
mouthpiece, Pablo Largacha, insists that "bottlers in Colombia are completely
independent of the Coca-Cola Company." The bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos,
says it had no way to stop the paramilitaries from doing whatever they
wanted -- after all, they had guns. "You don't use them, they use you,"
owner Kirby told a reporter. "Nobody tells the paramilitaries what to do."
But the suit charges that plant manager Ariosto Milan Mosquera claimed
that "he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task
of destroying the union." Workers believed him because he had a history
of partying with the paramilitaries.
Paez says not only that the plant's managers were responsible for what
happened but that Coke clearly benefited from it. "At the time of Gil's
death, we were involved in negotiations with the company [Bebidas], presenting
proposals to them," he says. "The company never negotiated with the union
after that. Twenty-seven workers in 12 departments left the plant and the
area. All the workers had to quit the union to save their own lives, and
the union was completely destroyed. For two months, the paramilitaries
camped just outside the plant gate. Coca-Cola never complained to the authorities."
The experienced workers who left the plant, who'd been earning between
$ 380 and $ 400 a month, were replaced by new employees at minimum wage
-- $ 130 a month.
During a subsequent investigation by the Colombian Justice Ministry,
the plant's director and production manager were detained, along with a
local paramilitary leader. All three were later released, with no charges
filed against them.
The assassinations were neither the first nor the last targeted at union
leaders in Colombian Coke plants. In 1994, two other union activists, Jose
David and Luis Granado, were also murdered in Carepa, and at that time
as well, paramilitaries demanded that workers quit the union. In 1989,
unionist Jose Avelino Chicano was killed in Coca-Cola's Pasto plant. This
year, again during negotiations, a union leader at the Bucaramanga plant,
Oscar Dario Soto Polo, was murdered. When the union denounced the killings,
the plant's chief of security charged its leaders with terrorism and rebellion.
Five were arrested and jailed for six months.
THE PARAMILITARY WAR ON unionists is escalating at a time when U.S.
aid to Colombia's official armed forces has also grown rapidly. Under Plan
Colombia, the U.S. effort to reduce the flow of illegal drugs from Colombia,
the United States has funneled $ 1.3 billion into the country, almost entirely
in military assistance. Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S.
military aid in the world, and several members of Congress have tried to
call attention to the possibility that some of our aid may be funding the
anti-union bloodbath. "Deaths due to political violence [have] roughly
doubled from previous years," Massachusetts Democrat John F. Tierney told
fellow House members in early July. "These are innocent people trying to
make Colombia a safer and more prosperous place." Democratic Representative
Jan Schakowsky of Illinois concluded that "cutting funds from the Colombian
military makes sense. This is a military that has repeatedly been implicated
in the brutalization and murder of the very people that it is supposed
to protect."
The Colombian government views union activity as a threat because it
challenges its basic economic policies. The administration of President
Andres Pastrana is under intense pressure from the International Monetary
Fund to cut its public-sector budget, in part through privatizing public
services. Union leaders who oppose privatization have also been targeted
for extinction. After leading a fight to maintain public service in the
city of Calf, Carlos Eliecer Prado, a public-sector union leader, was murdered
in May.
This spring, the United Steelworkers sent a formal delegation to Colombia
in the wake of the murders of the union leaders at the Drummond mine. The
delegation met with leaders of the CUT, after which the two unions joined
with the ILRF to file the complaint against Coca-Cola and its bottlers.
One stated objective of the suit is to build pressure on the Colombian
and U.S. governments to comply with rights guaranteed unions and workers
under the conventions of the International Labor Organization and the Geneva
Accords on human rights. But Colombian unions would also like to see those
responsible for the murders brought to justice.
"We want to strip off the mask hiding the involvement of transnational
corporations in our internal conflict," Paez explains. "To do this, we
need a judicial forum outside the country, since within Colombia those
guilty of these crimes are treated with impunity. In this particular case,
those responsible include Coca-Cola. But they're not the only company pursuing
policies that violate human rights. By strengthening our ties with the
Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO, we're creating our own global answer to the
globalization of the corporations."
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