THE BLOODY PRICE OF COLOMBIA'S FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
By David Bacon
September 28, 2011
Truthout News Analysis
http://truth-out.org/news/item/11817-blood-gold-and-coke-the-price-of-free-trade-in-columbia
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos
has restarted talks with the country's main
guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), for which he's received
laudatory press outside of the country, and a
more cautious response inside it. The government
and FARC representatives hold their first meeting
October 8 in Oslo. London's Financial Times
called Santos "a strategic thinker with canny
political antennas"' and praised him for
establishing "business friendly policies" leading
to economic growth fueled by rising foreign
investment.
Colombia's key business friendly policy
has been the negotiation of a free trade
agreement with the United States, begun by
Santos' predecessor, Alvaro Uribe. In May, U.S.
President Barack Obama gave Colombia a clean bill
of health, and allowed the U.S.-Colombia Free
Trade Agreement to go into effect. Opening
Colombia to foreign corporations and investment,
however, has had a bloody price, paid by its
union leaders, farmers and social movement
activists. Uribe and Santos promised the treaty
signalled an end to the killings, but attacks on
movement leaders continue nonetheless.
Before it was signed, businesses
operating in Colombia (including such U.S.
corporations as Exxon and Drummond Coal) already
had duty-free access to the U.S. market for most
goods. When the agreement went into effect, U.S.
exporters of manufactured goods and agricultural
products gained duty-free access to the market in
Colombia. U.S. miners lost jobs when Drummond
Coal began supplying the generating stations of
Alabama Power with Colombian coal. Now Colombian
farmers and workers are suffering the same
displacing fate as U.S. exports flood Colombia.
In addition to opening the Colombian market, the
agreement also facilitates investment in large
mines and other mega projects, leading to the
uprooting of rural communities, and the
privatization of public services.
The consequences of these neoliberal
policies have been devastating for many sections
of Colombian society, from AfroColombian
communities to trade unionists. In January three
Afro-Colombian organizations joined with the
Washington Office on Latin America to write to
the U.S. Congress, outlining the dangers their
communities face in the province of Cauca.
In an effort to convince Congress that
the guerilla war in Colombia was winding down,
and thereby set the stage for negotiating the
FTA, former President Uribe announced the
"demobilization" of rightwing paramilitary groups
that have terrorized community activists and
trade unionists for over two decades. In their
letter, the three AfroColombian leaders call the
demobilization a sham. "In 2004 and 2005," they
say, "paramilitaries operating in this area
participated in a deeply flawed demobilization
process with the government. The demobilization
and reintegration process did not put an end to
the violence. Many of these men left the AUC
paramilitaries to create new groups with a very
similar modus operandi and agenda, such as the
Black Eagles and Rastrojos. ... In many cases,
locals identify these men as the same ones who
demobilized..."
In this area of Colombia, settled by
fleeing African slaves centuries ago, foreign
corporations have begun to develop industrial
gold mines and hydroelectric power projects.
"Companies interested in exploiting natural
resources in northern Cauca took advantage of the
conflict and insecurity to expand their
operations," the letter continues. "By 2009,
there were 35 mining concessions in the
municipalities of Suarez and Buenos Aires." In
addition, the Spanish company Union Fenosa was
involved in developing a huge dam project in the
same region.
Paramilitaries then began terrorizing
community leaders in Suarez, Buenos Aires and La
Toma, to force people to give up their land. The
letter signers -- Clemencia Carabali of ASOM,
Francia Marquez of the Community Council of La
Toma, Charo Mina Rojas of the Black Communities'
Process International Working Group, joined by
Gimena Sanchez and Anthony Dest of the Washington
Office on Latin America -- say paramilitary
violence is connected to these corporate mega
projects. Undermining the historical rights of
AfroColombian communities, and displacing their
residents, creates the space for investors to
move in. "The violation of Afro-Colombians
constitutional rights will be exacerbated with
the implementation of the U.S.-Colombia FTA,"
they warned.
In an interview, Carabali recalled the
impact of dam construction. "My family was
affected just like hundreds of other families
living in that community," she recalled, "because
many lost their farms, which was their main
source of sustenance. Their strong sense of
community was lost along with loved ones who were
either murdered or were displaced. It was a huge
loss."
Carabali says the military and
paramilitaries cooperated with the same goal -
making people leave. "They were forced to leave
because they were threatened," she charged. "The
multinacional company told hundreds of families
who lived within eighteen kilometers, which is
the amount of land needed in order to build the
dam that if they didn't leave their homes would
be flooded with all of their belongings. In some
cases, community leaders were also killed. The
military came in and would cart off people to
never be seen again. This put fear in many
people and they gathered their belonging and
left." The company, she said, was the Regional
Corporation of the Caoca River Valley, which had
stock from Union Fenosa.
The armed organizations of supposedly
demobilized paramilitaries have also taken aim at
the country's trade unionists. Two leaders of
the union for workers at Coca Cola bottling
plants, SINALTRAINAL, have not only been targets
in the past, but are now threatened with prison
by prosecutors who have recruited these
paramilitaries to give testimony against them.
Juan Carlos Galvis and William Mendoza have been
charged with "terrorism," allegedly as a result
of a bomb blast in the local bottling plant
fourteen years ago. The witnesses lined up by
the prosecutor are paramilitaries, now in prison
for the murders of labor and social movement
activists.
"Once the free trade agreement was
signed, the government wasn't afraid anymore that
a vote in the U.S. Congress might go against
them," Mendoza says. "We've denounced the
paramilitaries and the killings for years, and
charged [former Colombian President] Uribe with
illegal connections to them. And the Colombian
government has tried to use false accusations
against us before too. But if they can put us in
jail this time, it will be a death sentence.
We'll never come out alive."
Three men accuse Galvis and Mendoza.
One, Rodrigo Perez Alzate, is the commander of a
paramilitary group called the "Central Bolivar
Bloc," referring to its control over the
geographic area around Barrancabermeja. He's in
prison because he confessed to 45 murders. Perez
says Galvis is a sympathizer with armed
guerillas, an accusation historically used
against unionists and social movement activists
to make them targets.
The second, Wilfred Martinez Giraldo, was
in charge of paramilitaries in Barrancabermeja
and reported to Perez, while the third, Saul
Rincon, who worked as a guard at the bottling
plant and was nicknamed "Coca Cola," reported to
Martinez. He's in prison for murdering Rafael
Jaimes Torra, the treasurer of the Oil Workers
Union (USO) local in Barrancabermeja.
"They say," Mendoza explains, "that a
bomb blast, which was probably set off by the EPL
[one of Colombia's guerrilla groups], was used by
the union to pressure the company into making
concessions. But that year we actually had to
give the company concessions to keep them from
closing the plant. We had no connection to the
bombing, and had nothing to gain from it. The
whole accusation against us was fabricated years
later, and doesn't even make sense."
In November of 2011, six months before
the FTA took effect, paramilitaries invaded the
Galvis home in Barrancabermeja. Two black-clad
individuals, their faces hidden by motorcycle
helmets, held a gun to the head of Mayra Rojas
Vargas, Galvis' daughter, and told her mother
they'd kill her if she screamed. Another child
was bound and gagged. Then the pair demanded to
know where Galvis and his son were. When the
family couldn't tell them, they spray painted
slogans on the walls, and even on the face and
hair of Galvis' wife, Mary Jackeline Rojas
Casteñada, an activist in the Popular Women's
Movement.
Both Galvis and Mendoza have been
threatened and attacked for years, because they
are leaders of SINALTRAINAL, the union for
workers in Coca Cola's Colombian bottling plants.
In 2003 Galvis' car was shot up after he got a
threat from a paramilitary group called "Death to
Unionists." Mendoza's wife foiled an attempt to
kidnap his young daughter in a public park the
year before. After that, Mendoza moved his
family away from the city, as Galvis did
following the home invasion. But they will not
leave Barrancabermeja themselves.
On August 17 of this year, the Magdalena
Medio Bloc of the Rastrojos distributed a leaflet
in Barrancabermeja that announced: "We are not
playing around. It is our last warning to
guerrilla organizations that hide behind the
rhetoric of defenders of human rights." It
identifies SINALTRAINAL by name, and goes on to
say, "We declare our objective to be a death
sentence... We have William Mendoza, the
guerrilla leader, well identified."
The Observatory for Protection of the
Defenders of Human Rights, a cooperative program
of the World Organization Against Torture and the
International Human Rights Federation, says,
"Criminalization of the unionists' activities is
part of a systematic policy of persecution
against members of SINALTRAINAL, who have been
repeatedly victims of assassinations, attempts on
their lives, torture, death threats,
displacement, exile, the burning of union offices
and attempts to kidnap members of their families,
and that they continue to be threatened."
In 1996, Isidro Segundo Gil was shot by
paramilitaries outside the Coca Cola bottling
plant in Carepa. Afterwards, they were given
access to the plant by managers. They called the
workers together and told them that if they
didn't resign from the union, the same thing
would happen to them. SINALTRAINAL was at the
time in contract negotiations with Bebidas y
Alimentos, Coca Cola's contract bottler in
Colombia.
Two SINALTRAINAL activists had been
murdered in Carepa two years earlier. In 1989,
Jose Avelino Chicano was killed in the Pasto
plant. In 2001, 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, Jose Alejo Aponte, charged its leaders
with terrorism and rebellion. Five were arrested
and jailed for six months. At the
Barrancabermeja plant graffiti was scrawled on
the walls -- "Get Out Galvis From Coca Cola,
Signed AUC [the initials of the paramilitary Self
Defense Forces]."
When Colombian courts wouldn't act to
identify and punish the murderers of trade
unionists, SINALTRAINAL went into U.S. courts in
Florida in 2000 with the United Steel Workers and
the International Labor Rights Fund, charging
Coca Cola with responsibility under the Alien
Tort Claims Act. The USW charged that Coke
bottlers "contracted with or otherwise directed
paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme
violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully
detained or otherwise silenced trade union
leaders." The company's functionaries have
compared union protest with guerrilla activity,
according to the Observatory.
Eventually, the Florida court declared
that Coke had no control over its Colombian
bottlers, and threw the case out. But it gained
such publicity and support in U.S. unions that
negotiators of the free trade agreement were
forced to include some concession they alleged
would stop the killings. In 2011, the year of
the Galvis home invasion, 27 union activists and
leaders were murdered, and 51 the year before,
according to Colombia's National Labor College.
Coca Cola closed its Barrancabermeja
plant in 2003, and only a small unit of employees
remains. But today another bottler, the Industria
Nacional de Gaseosas, has 8200 employees.
Workers are divided between a number of unions,
"but the company hates SINALTRAINAL since we are
the ones who protested the most and pissed them
off the most," Mendoza says. "Coca Cola wants to
get rid of SINALTRAINAL, which would allow it to
lower the conditions for workers in the plants,"
Mendoza charges. "Workers would lose all the
things they've won in the past. That would
increase profits substantially. The first thing
the company did after getting rid of the union
[in Carepa] was terminate all the permanent
workers in the plant. All the rights in the
union contract were lost, and they hired
temporary workers at much lower salaries -
minimum wage with no benefits."
Coke, Industria Nacional de Gaseosas and
other Colombian employers have another means to
attack and weaken unions as well - the
casualization of the workforce. Instead of
direct employment, workers are contracted through
"cooperatives of associated workers." Employers
then impose salaries and benefits to prevent
workers from organizing unions. Coca Cola
plants, according to Mendoza, use a firm called
Proservice Limitada.
Both the killings and the use of "labor
cooperatives" were supposed to end as a result of
the Labor Action Plan, a program put into effect
by the Colombian government to halt criticism in
the U.S. Congress and win approval of the FTA.
Instead of protecting labor and community
activists, however, the trade agreement's
implementation seems to have given the Colombian
government a free hand in resuming attacks on
them.
According to an AFL-CIO report, "Because
the Labor Action Plan is not part of the trade
agreement, some of its provisions will likely be
difficult to enforce if the government of
Colombia fails to fully comply with plan
commitments." And the LAP has no commitment to
collective bargaining in the public sector or
collective bargaining over pensions.
Nor has the LAP stopped the murders.
Jhonsson Torres, a member of the cane cutters
union SINALCORTEROS, told a hearing in Washington
DC in June that Daniel Aguirre, the union's
general secretary, was assassinated on April 27.
"After our two-month strike was able to improve
working conditions, the Colombian government
charged several of us and our allies with
conspiracy and sedition," he declared.
The union that has suffered the most
murders this year is FENSUAGRO, Colombia's
largest union for farm workers. Five of its
members in Toribio and Miranda, in Cauca state,
have been killed. The attacks on FENSUAGRO have
been so violent that Leo Girard, president of the
United Steel Workers, wrote a letter on behalf of
his union and the UK union UNITE, to the
Colombian government demanding that they stop.
FENSUAGRO's involvement in the Patriotic
March peace process, Girard says, has made it a
target "for extreme violence, including the
assassination of its leaders, because of both its
labor and peace activism. In some cases, it
appears that the Colombian military itself may be
involved in this violence against FENSUAGRO."
In one incident, union activist Gerardo
Martinez was killed just outside an army camp.
"His body was found the following day on a nearby
farm," Girard says. "He had been shot five times,
twice in the head, and his body showed signs of
having been tortured before being murdered."
Later that month Gustavo Londoño, head of the
union's human rights department, was shot as well.
To Edgar Paez, SINALTRAINAL's
international representative, "the paramilitaries
are a project of the state to protect
transnational corporations in Colombia. That
means getting rid of unions and anyone else
speaking up to protest. If you look at who the
victims are, you find leaders of social protests,
unionists, defenders of human rights, women.
Anyone who raises their voice with a different
vision is a candidate for assassination." The
objective, he says, is "a much more favorable
environment for the exploitation of our natural
resources and our labor force. But by
strengthening our ties with the Steel Workers and
the AFL-CIO, we're giving our own global answer
to the globalization of the corporations."
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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