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LABOUR-COLOMBIA: Foreign Firms Urged to Help Prevent Rights Abuses

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Jul 3 2007 (IPS) - Amnesty International is calling on foreign companies operating in Colombia to use their influence on the government “to end and prevent human rights abuses against trade unionists.”

In its report, “Killings, Arbitrary Detentions and Death Threats – The Reality of Trade Unionism in Colombia”, the London-based rights watchdog warns that Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict “provides a useful cover for those seeking to expand and protect economic interests.”

The report, released Tuesday, provides a long list of case studies of labour activists who have been the target of attacks in the health, education, public services, agricultural, mining, oil, gas, energy and food sectors.

According to Colombia’s National Trade Union School (Escuela Nacional Sindical, ENS), 2,245 trade unionists were killed between January 1991 and December 2006, while 138 fell victim to forced disappearance and 3,400 were the targets of threats, making Colombia “one of the most dangerous places in the world for trade unionists,” says Amnesty.

Another leading international human rights group, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, says 75 percent of the attacks were committed by the far-right paramilitary groups that are allied with government forces and which partially demobilised as a result of controversial negotiations with the government of right-wing President Álvaro Uribe. The army is also blamed for a significant proportion of the killings.

The Amnesty report, meanwhile, says leftist guerrillas are responsible for a small portion of the killings, targeting “those they consider to be siding with their enemies or who oppose their interests – including trade unionists.”

Amnesty describes a pattern of systematic attacks against trade unionists involved in labour disputes and in campaigns against privatisation and in favour of workers’ rights in some areas where extractive industries operate.

The message is clear. “Don’t complain about your labour conditions or campaign to protect your rights because you will be silenced, at any cost,” said Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s Americas Programme Director.

Pointing out that over 90 percent of the cases reported by the ENS have gone unpunished, Amnesty says “Substantive improvement in the human rights situation faced by trade unionists will not be secured without decisive action to end the impunity enjoyed by the vast majority of perpetrators of human rights abuses against trade unionists.”

“This report is a wake-up call for any multinational company operating in an environment in which human rights are systematically violated. Inaction is no longer an option,” said Lee.

The U.S. mining company Drummond is facing charges in a federal court in the state of Alabama in connection with the 2001 murders of three Colombian trade union leaders.

Two of the unionists, Víctor Orcasita and Valmore Locarno, were killed while the Drummond miners union was negotiating labour contracts with the coal mining company.

The firm’s profits in Colombia rose eight percent in 2006, and since 2001 the amount of coal it mines in Colombia has more than doubled.

Edwin Guzmán, a former Colombian army sergeant who later became a member of a paramilitary group, testified last Thursday before a U.S. congressional panel that Drummond and other U.S. companies provided financial and material support to the paramilitaries.

Guzmán said his troops were in charge of guarding the property of the Alabama-based mining company, which operates the largest open cast mine in Colombia and one of the largest in the world – El Cerrejon in the northeastern province of La Guajira – among other mines.

The military and paramilitaries jointly protected the firm’s installations and coal shipments, said Guzmán.

He also said that Colombian army training “tells us that we have to attack the leftists in any way we can, and that unions are guerrilla groups and we have to attack them by legal and illegal means.”

Shortly before the murders of Orcasita and Locarno, pamphlets that circulated in Drummond’s coal mine in La Loma, in the northeastern province of Cesar, lashed out at “the guerrillas’ union” and accused the two union leaders of backing the insurgents.

Seven months after the two men were pulled off a company bus on their way home from work and killed by paramilitaries, Gustavo Soler, who replaced Locarno as president of the union, was murdered in a similar fashion.

According to Guzmán, who will also testify in the Alabama court this month, the paramilitary groups and the Colombian army see the Drummond miners union as representing “a subversive organisation and consequently a legitimate military target.”

He also said the murders were considered “military victories.”

The day that Guzmán was testifying before the U.S. congressional panel, representatives of the Colombian government agreed to labour and environmental amendments to the free trade agreement (FTA) signed with the U.S. government.

But on Friday, Democrats in the Democrat-controlled lower house of Congress, led by Representative Nancy Pelosi, said “we cannot support the Colombia FTA at this time.”

“There is widespread concern in Congress about the level of violence in Colombia, the impunity, the lack of investigations and prosecutions, and the role of the paramilitary,” said the lawmakers. “Issues of this nature cannot solely be resolved through language in a trade agreement.”

Approval of the FTA will depend on concrete progress in combating the impunity surrounding abuses against trade unionists, and in investigating and prosecuting the paramilitaries and their political accomplices who have been arrested for their ties to the ultra-right-wing groups.

Speaking live on television, the president said angrily on Saturday that “This has to be a relationship of allies, as we deserve, and not of domination by the United States over a servile Colombia.”

“They are going to punish Uribe by postponing the FTA,” Enrique Daza with the Colombian Action Network Against Free Trade told IPS.

Daza said “the FTA is dead, at least for this year,” because Uribe “has not shown any willingness” to resolve the question of the trade unionists, and because “new scandals are emerging every day” in the so-called “parapolitics” scandal.

“The Democrats are thus forcing the government to come up with results” on both fronts, said the activist.

Dozens of legislators and other politicians allied with Uribe have been thrown in jail for their links with the paramilitaries in the “parapolitics” scandal since the first arrests in late 2006.

But to judge by Amnesty’s assessment, solving both problems would imply major changes in the way the Colombian government has been handling the war.

Amnesty says there are “concerns that a coordinated security force-paramilitary strategy exists to undermine the work of trade unionists” by physically eliminating labour activists and through attempts to discredit the legitimacy of trade unionism.

“The security forces have covered up their involvement by using paramilitary groups to carry out their ‘dirty war’ tactics and have sought to improve their human rights image by denying that paramilitaries operate with their acquiescence, support or, as is often the case, under their coordination,” says the report.

“Terror tactics are also used to enable powerful economic elites to protect, expand and consolidate their interests,” it adds.

On May 2, paramilitary chief Rodrigo Tovar, better known as “Jorge 40”, was charged with involvement in the murders of Locarno and Orcasita.

Tovar, who is among the thousands of demobilised members of paramilitary groups, was to begin confessing to his crimes this week. In order to qualify for the legal benefits offered as part of the demobilisation negotiations, such as a maximum prison sentence of eight years, he must make a full confession of his human rights crimes.

Since Uribe first took office in 2002, the number of murders of trade unionists has gone down. His administration has provided union leaders with cell-phones, armoured vehicles and bodyguards, depending on the level of risk they face.

But the ENS reports that the proportion of unionised workers has steadily declined in Colombia since 1996.