Colombia's 'dirty war'
Right-wing terror squads torture and kill union workers and kill activists
BY PATRICK KEANEY
BARRANCABERMEJA, DEPARTMENT OF SANTANDER, COLOMBIA -- When his body was
recovered, it was clear that Aury Sara Marrugo spent his last hours alive in
agony. His gums had been butchered. A blowtorch had been used to sear the flesh
under his arms and the soles of his feet. Over 70 small incisions were found on
his corpse, and strong acid had been applied to his abdomen. At some point
during the savagery, a single bullet was fired at close range into the middle
of his face, ending his misery. Sara had been "disappeared" on November 30,
2001. His remains, and the grisly warning they were designed to convey to his
colleagues, turned up the following week.
Sara drew his final, tortured breaths in the town of Cartagena, on the
northwest coast of Colombia. His executioners, members of a right-wing
paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), wanted his fate to be public knowledge.
According to a statement by the AUC, Sara was executed because he was thought
to be a member of one of Colombia's armed opposition groups, the National
Liberation Army, or Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). Others
familiar with the paramilitaries and their role in Colombia's long-running
civil war point to a more likely explanation for Sara's murder. He was
president of Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) -- the Oil Workers' Trade
Union, Cartagena Section -- and was therefore guilty of a crime that cost
nearly 170 Colombian men and women their lives last year: he was a trade
unionist.
Since 1985, over 3800 union workers and leaders have been assassinated in
Colombia, making it by far the most dangerous place on earth to
fight for workers' rights. In 2001, according to the United Workers' Central,
or Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the country's 600,000-member central
trade union, there were 169 assassinations of union workers, 30 more attempted
assassinations, 79 "disappeared" or kidnapped, and over 400 reports of threats
and intimidations. And, as of the third week in January, this year shows every
indication of keeping pace with 2001's horrific toll: already there have been
six assassinations, including Maria Ropero, president of the Union of Community
Mothers, who was shot 13 times. According to human-rights advocates at Amnesty
International, in Colombia "the security and armed forces, as well as their
paramilitary allies, often accuse trade unionists of being guerrilla
sympathizers or auxiliaries." This makes them "military targets."
The leaders of Colombia's labor unions believe they are being targeted because
they openly denounce the violence and unjust distribution of wealth that takes
such a heavy toll on the majority of their country's population. As the most
prominent members of Colombian civil society, trade unionists -- especially
representatives of the threatened public sector -- find themselves at the point
where four very powerful vectors meet. First, there are North American and
European transnational corporations, which look to take advantage of Colombia's
vast natural resources and growing, low-wage labor pool. Second, there is the
Colombian government, including the armed forces and national police, whose
stability is threatened by the civil war, and whose stated goals are to
eliminate the leftist guerrillas and enter the global economy. Third, there is
the US government, which has started to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars
to the Colombian military, ostensibly to fight the "War on Drugs," but whose
desire to protect US-based corporations operating abroad is well-known. And,
last, there are the paramilitaries, a group whose various links to the
country's elites, the transnational corporations, the Colombian military, and,
by extension, the US government are a matter of record. Traditionally, their
primary function has been to perform the dirty work of torturing and killing
Colombians like Aury Sara.
COMPOUNDING the ongoing tragedy of Colombia's embattled trade unionists is the
plight of the country itself. Now in the 38th year of a civil war between
leftist guerrillas and the government, which claims the lives of more than 3000
people annually, and having recently become the prime target in the United
States government's "War on Drugs," Colombia's 40 million citizens
confront a daily level of violence beyond the comprehension of most Americans.
Further exacerbating the situation is the two-tiered class structure of
Colombian society, in which the handful of wealthy elites who own most of the
land and resources have an equally disproportionate role in shaping
governmental policies. Unemployment hovers around 20 percent, with
underemployment affecting many more. More than half the country's inhabitants
live in poverty. Finally, there is the role of international financial
institutions in Colombia: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is insisting on
extensive privatization of state-owned enterprises so the country can pay off
its external debt, which means more foreign corporations investing in, and
taking profits out of, the Colombian economy, plunging it further into
poverty.
For decades, leftist guerrillas such as the ELN and the Colombian Revolutionary
Armed Forces, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), have tried
to loosen the wealthy landowners' stranglehold on Colombia's economic life.
Heavily influenced by Marxism's revolutionary ideals and rhetoric, the
guerrillas were committed to a program of wealth and land redistribution. They
resorted to kidnapping rich landowners and charging ransoms, as well as levying
taxes on local businessmen's commerce, to fund their operations. By the mid
1980s, the ranchers, landowners, and drug barons who were frequent targets of
the guerrillas decided to fund a private army of vigilantes to defend
themselves, giving rise to the paramilitary movement in Colombia. For several
years, the Colombian Armed Forces openly trained, equipped, and operated
alongside the paramilitaries. Together, they waged war not only on the
guerrillas, but on anyone suspected of supporting them, which led to widespread
atrocities. Ultimately, in 1989, the Colombian government, facing international
condemnation because of the paramilitaries' escalating human-rights violations,
declared them to be illegal.
Throughout the 1990s, profits from the drug trade (derived mostly from the sale
of cocaine) fueled the growth of both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas.
The paramilitaries also benefited from US military aid to the Colombian
government, which they accessed through their military connections. Despite the
1989 ruling against the right-wing death squads, they continued to collude with
the Colombian Armed Forces against the guerrilla insurgency. In reality, far
from shunning the paramilitaries, the military simply shifted its dirty work --
the assassination of trade unionists, human-rights workers, outspoken
professors, radical students, or anyone who questioned the status quo -- to the
paramilitaries. According to Andrew Miller, the former advocacy director for
the Americas at Amnesty International USA, "these missions have been outsourced
to paramilitary groups that operate in heavily militarized areas and coordinate
their operations with the army. The proportion of abuses directly attributable
to the armed forces has declined in recent years, while abuses by their
paramilitary allies have escalated dramatically." Although Colombia
consistently had the worst human-rights record in the hemisphere, military aid
continued to flow from the US -- with a sudden and dramatic shift toward the
end of the decade.
The US government spent close to a billion dollars in the last two years arming
and training the Colombian Armed Forces, purportedly to stem the flow of
cocaine and heroin into the US, which consumes more than 90 percent of
Colombia's illicit drugs. "Plan Colombia," signed into law by President Clinton
on January 11, 2000, is a military-aid package that made Colombia the
third-largest recipient of American military aid on the planet, behind Israel
and Egypt. At the time of its proposal, human-rights organizations such as
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch opposed the plan because of the
high incidence of human-rights abuses by members of the Colombian military, in
addition to their continuing involvement with the paramilitaries. But lawmakers
faced intense lobbying pressure by corporations with interests in Colombia,
including weapons manufacturers and oil and coal companies. Congress passed the
plan, and Clinton waived the human-rights conditions that would normally have
blocked the aid, citing "national-security interests." Already, the Colombian
military has received $816 million in the form of arms, training, and
helicopters to fight the "War on Drugs." Another $399 million was approved
for this fiscal year, with the Bush administration broadening "Plan Colombia"
into the "Andean Regional Initiative."
Colombian labor leaders and their allies look askance at the US government's
claim that the money flowing to Colombia is for drug interdiction. They foresee
the relentless militarization of their country's armed conflict resulting in a
military state that will, conveniently enough, impose the kind of stability
foreign investors require, and set an example for those who might otherwise
balk at Washington's economic agenda for the region. They claim that
transnational corporations, whose lawyers drafted the "free-trade agreements"
(such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas) for much of Latin America
with the countries' finance ministers, want to eliminate organized labor's
influence so they can extract maximum profits. William Mendoza, a leader in
Colombia's food and beverage workers' union, SINALTRAINAL, puts it bluntly:
"The motivation behind Plan Colombia is for the US to assure the best control
of these countries and drown people in their own blood if they attempt to
resist." Mendoza's union has joined the United Steelworkers of America and the
International Labor Rights Fund in a federal lawsuit against one of the US's
best-known corporations, Coca-Cola, charging it and two Colombian subsidiaries
with complicity in the murder of union leader Isidro Segundo Gil.
On December 5, 1996, Gil, a member of his union's executive board, was shot
down by paramilitaries at the entrance to a Coke bottling plant in Carepa. The
union was involved in contract negotiations at the time, and the following day,
the AUC reappeared and demanded that all union members resign. They also
destroyed the workers' union hall, which was subsequently rebuilt and occupied
by the paramilitaries. Mendoza, who is the human-rights chair of SINALTRAINAL,
says that the US embassy and Coke's headquarters in both Colombia and the US
were informed about the incident. To date, however, no formal charges have been
brought in the killings. "Unfortunately," he explains, "impunity in this
country is 100 percent." Labor leaders are commonly assassinated in broad
daylight, says Mendoza, who himself lives under threat of death by the
paramilitaries: "The state says nothing about the killing of union leaders.
It's out in the open, the link between the paramilitaries and the military
authorities." Coke has denied the charges, and Mendoza says that the company
has countersued the workers.
Charges of collusion with Colombia's right-wing death squads have also been
leveled at the Alabama-based Drummond Coal Company. At a January 21, 2002,
meeting with the president of the energy-workers union FUNTRAENERGETICA, more
allegations of corporations' targeting unionists came to light. The union's
leader, who does not want to be identified by name, says that paramilitaries
took part in the 2001 assassinations of three union leaders, and that the
company did nothing to respond to workers' repeated requests for protection.
The union leaders were involved in negotiations at the time. The story is
depressingly familiar. In March, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo
Orcasita, the president and vice-president of the coal-miners union
SINTRAMIENERGETICA, were traveling by bus from their jobs at the Drummond mine
in La Loma. The bus was stopped by a group of armed men, who searched the
passengers until they found Locarno and Orcasita, who were promptly removed
from the bus. Locarno was shot immediately in the face, and Orcasita was taken
away. He was later found dead, and his body showed signs of torture. "The
paramilitaries attack any worker who speaks out against what the owners want,"
the unionist says. "Anyone who dares to speak out, asks for social justice, or
refuses to conform is declared a military target." Six months later, the
president who succeeded Locarno, Gustavo Soler, was also killed by
paramilitaries. No charges have been brought in the murders.
THE SPECTER of violence is nearly invisible outside the offices of the Regional
Corporation for Human Rights, or Corporación Regional para la Defensa de
los Derechos Humanos (CREDHOS), located in Barrancabermeja, an oil town in the
heart of Colombia that is home to USO, the country's biggest union. The streets
below, viewed from the second-story balcony that juts out above a triangular
intersection known as the Eighth Diagonal, buzz with the kinds of activity seen
in any medium-size South American city. Taxis, minibuses, mopeds, and bicycles
flow in opposite directions through the fork where the roads meet. Dozens of
fruit carts, brightly hand-painted all the way down to their wheel hubs, squat
side by side under two shade trees, which the small concrete island
miraculously supports. An elderly man in a yellow hat steps from behind his
cart, pours water on a rag, and starts to polish his oranges. Even the two
young soldiers chatting with a young female vendor of scarves and handbags seem
benign. But there are signs of the danger.
The thick steel grates and bulletproof glass that span the front of CREDHOS'
office are only the most obvious indicators of the danger there. Of the 130
community activists killed in the city of Barrancabermeja since the
human-rights group was founded in 1987, five have been its own members. A
member of Peace Brigades International, a non-governmental organization whose
unarmed volunteers accompany threatened civilians in war zones, is on hand to
make sure no one walks the streets below alone. A military-troop transport
rumbles through the intersection, with half a dozen heavily armed men riding in
the back. And off in the distance, rising above the street scene with mute
indifference, are the smokestacks and gas flares of the state's Ecopetrol
refinery, whose entrance is 500 yards and a world away from the bulletproof
doors of CREDHOS.
While union workers and the human-rights advocates who defend them live under
constant threat of death with little or no protection from the state, Ecopetrol
has not one, but two full battalions of the Colombian Armed Forces dedicated to
ensuring the safety of its operations. In this regard, the Colombian state oil
company is an appropriate symbol for the country as a whole -- offering
protection for profitable businesses while the domestic population suffers.
German Plata is a project director for the Program for Peace and Development of
the Middle Magdalena Region, named after the river that runs through
Barrancabermeja. He lists the enormous natural wealth of his homeland,
including Ecopetrol's oil, and poses a rhetorical question: "For an area with
so many natural resources, there is great poverty. Seventy percent of the
people have unsatisfied basic needs. Why?" With little hesitation, he provides
the answer. "Because this is an extractive and exclusive economy. They extract
our resources and the benefits stay in the hands of a few." Of the
$2 billion in oil wealth that Barrancabermeja generates each year, only
$90 million stays in the local economy through Ecopetrol. The rest goes to
foreign companies, such as the US's Occidental Petroleum and Chevron/Texaco or
England's British Petroleum. Few realize that Colombia today is the 10th
largest supplier of petroleum to the US. The numbers are similar for the
cattle-ranching and African-palm-tree cultivation that mostly drive the rest of
the local economy -- the overwhelming majority of the money generated leaves
Colombia.
The leaders of the oil-workers union believe that one of the goals of the
global economic system, at least as far as the corporations are concerned, is
the elimination of organized labor. "A death penalty has been declared against
union workers here," says Mendoza. "When you kill a union leader, you destroy
the union." As international scrutiny has intensified, paramilitaries have been
forced to focus more on union leaders, as opposed to indiscriminate mass
executions of workers. "Globalization is trying to deny us our human rights,"
says one of USO's national-level leaders, whose life has been threatened and
who also asks that his name not be published. "We have a very revolutionary
history, and our union, especially, has been very hard hit by the state and the
groups that operate outside `the law.' " He makes sure that the
translation from Spanish reflects his belief that the paramilitaries threaten
him and his colleagues with the blessing of the Colombian government. "The
political project being carried out here by the ultra-right is a state policy.
This is why you see so much complicity on the part of the state with those who
carry out the assassinations." He refers to the high level of paramilitary
violence in the region, which fell under the control of the right-wing squads
just over a year ago. In addition to the presence in Barrancabermeja of the
military battalions that protect Ecopetrol, there are two police stations and
an attorney general's office. Yet the paramilitaries "control the life of this
place," according to CREDHOS executive director Regulo Modero.
"They have a permanent presence, permanent roadblocks," he explains. "But the
public forces haven't done anything about it. There's no logical explanation
for the fact that the most militarized region of the country is controlled by
the paramilitaries." And they control it ruthlessly. The most infamous example
in recent history occurred on May 16, 1998, when seven people were massacred by
the paramilitaries on a soccer field. Another 25 were "disappeared" -- taken
away and never heard from again. According to Modero, they, too, were executed,
cut into pieces with electric chain saws, and thrown into the Magdalena river
that flows through the barrios on the outskirts of town. Modero insists that
state forces were involved in the massacre, and that the paramilitaries entered
and exited the neighborhood where they committed the atrocities through a
military checkpoint.
Military leaders deny any involvement between their forces and the
paramilitaries, insisting that US taxpayer dollars are funding drug
eradication, not the murder of trade unionists. Colonel Gilberto Ibarra, of
Barrancabermeja's Nueva Granada Battalion, says that "in terms of the
paramilitaries, the army commanders created a law to sanction the AUC
sympathizers in the armed forces. They're kicked out of the army." US officials
are less emphatic in their denials, indicating that while there are no links
"at the command level," there are still instances of collusion. Speaking on
condition of anonymity, a high-level US embassy officer declares that "there is
a dedication to root these people out." Others disagree. Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America issued a
report last week stating that the "Colombian government's progress against
paramilitary groups has amounted to little more than rhetoric, unsupported by
actions in the field designed either to break existing links between the
military and paramilitary groups, prosecute the officers who support these
links, or pursue those groups and their leaders effectively in the field."
Colombian economist Hector Mondragón, who risks his life by criticizing
his government's policies, said in a January 20 interview in Bogotá that
"the farce of the `War on Drugs' is reaching its conclusion." He, too, agreed
that US backing of the Colombian military is driven much more by economic
imperatives than by a desire to eradicate drugs, and that the "War on Terror"
provides a better pretext for increasing US military involvement in his native
land. It looks like he was right. On February 5, President George W. Bush,
heeding calls from his Colombian counterpart Andrés Pastrana to widen US
involvement in his country's civil war "to assure a continued flow of oil,"
announced $98 million in additional military aid to Colombia. The money
will go to train and arm soldiers to protect the 490-mile Cano Limon oil
pipeline, which carries oil to the Caribbean coast for Occidental Petroleum and
other companies, according to the Associated Press. US Under Secretary of State
for Political Affairs Marc Grossman told reporters: "We are committed to help
Colombians create a Colombia that is a peaceful, prosperous, drug-free, and
terror-free democracy." The working men and women of Colombia would say that
giving more aid to their military is helping to create just the opposite.
Patrick Keaney is a Boston-based human-rights activist and journalist who
conducted interviews in Colombia from January 17-27, 2002. He can be reached at pkeaney@netway.com..
Issue Date: February 22 - 28, 2002
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