COLOMBIAN LABOR ANALYST DETAILS
HORRIFYING SITUATION FOR WORKERS

The labor situation in Colombia is extremely horrifying and goes beyond the murder of more than 2,500 unionists there since 1991, the Latin American nation’s top labor analyst says.

Speaking in Spanish through interpreters on Feb. 27 at the Economic Policy Institute, Luciano Vasquez, Director General of Colombia’s Escuela Nacional Sindical--an institution combining union training and economic research--said in the same period some 9,000 unionists have been victimized, almost all by Right Wing paramilitaries.

The victimization includes not just the deaths, but kidnappings, death threats against workers and their families, beatings and other violence, he said.

Worse, the number of prosecutions of murders of unionists during the last two years is zero, under the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Anti-worker U.S. President George W. Bush (R) has made congressional passage of legislation implementing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement his top trade priority for this year. The pact, which lacks labor rights, cannot be amended. That, and the murders, leads to strong union opposition to Bush’s demand.

Vasquez said Colombia’s overall labor record--which he laid out in detail--and the pact’s overall negative impact on his country also justify rejection of the FTA and the implementing legislation. His specifics about the situation in Colombia include:

• After all the murders and other intimidation, Colombian unions are reduced to representing only 4% of the nation’s workforce. The number of union contracts has declined by 50% in the last four years, to approximately 500. The violence and intimidation have completely ousted unions in several large sectors, including ports.
  
  
• Though AFL-CIO pressure “allowed us to put labor rights on the table” in trade talks, both Uribe and the Bush regime refused to listen to evidence, Vasquez said.
  
  
• Uribe’s government and businesses are imposing new “associated cooper-atives” on the 18-million-person workforce, worker by worker and firm by firm. “In a work ‘cooperative,’ there are no labor rights, no minimum wage and no benefits,” said Vasquez. Workers in the cooperatives earn 50%-70% less than colleagues in the same industries covered by collective bargaining agreements. Colombian negotiators “called this ‘dumping,’” he commented. There are at least 3,000 co-ops with 500,000 workers.
  
  
• The U.S.-Colombia free trade pact strips the Colombian government of “its control of economic life.” That’s because the pact’s dispute resolution provisions are tilted in favor of multinationals and against the government and people of Colombia. “We would be annexing our economy to the American economy,” Vasquez said.
  
  
• Several U.S.-based multinationals, notably the Drummond Co., and United Fruit, paid off the paramilitaries for “protection” even as the paramilitaries murdered unionists. “We have also begun to see evidence appearing of links between Dole and Del Monte”--two other U.S. fruit companies--“and paramilitary groups,” Vasquez added.

“The Colombian state and government have an enormous capacity to pretend. They try to show things are changing” on labor rights and protecting unionists from violence “when they’re not changing at all,” Vasquez warned.

Vasquez said there is one positive recent development in Colombia’s bleak labor landscape: Creation of a special prosecution unit “to pursue anti-union violence, and a special judges unit to hear the cases.” But the judges serve only 6-month terms, he noted. Nevertheless, one judge already issued an order, in one case to investigate who ordered murders of unionists and who paid for the killings.

“There is a serious and profound need for an investigation, which would be the main guarantee for putting an end to this violence” against unionists “so it does not repeat itself in the future,” Vasquez concluded.