archivos de los protestos globales
Colombia Solidarity - Bulletin No 7 July - September 2002
Colombia Solidarity - Bulletin of the Colombia Solidarity
Campaign No 7 July - September 2002
JOIN the DEMOCRATIC RESISTANCE to STATE TERRORISM and MULTINATIONAL
TAKEOVER
CONTENIDO VERSIÓN ESPAÑOL pp 1 - 6
I. ¿Por que fracasaron los diálogos de paz?
II. Cuando la Democracia es Dictadura
III. Guerrillas, Drogas y Derechos Humanos en la Política Colombiana
de Estados Unidos, 1988-2002
CONTENTS ENGLISH VERSION pp 7 - 42
I. Why Peace Talks Fail
II. When Democracy is Dictatorship
III. SINTRAEMCALI PREVENTATIVE ACTION
IV. DEATH THREATS TO NATIONAL PRESIDENT OF USO, OILWORKERS UNION
V. 85 TRADE UNIONISTS ASSASSINATED SO FAR THIS YEAR
VI. WILSON BORJA
VII. BELLAVISTA TRAGEDY
VIII. State Assault in Medellín
IX. Human Rights Violations
X. HIGHER EDUCATION - HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND PRIVATISATION
XI. TELECOM WORKERS IN SECOND WAVE OF OCCUPATIONS - NO SELL OFF!
XII. Beware Free Trade Area of the Americas
XIII. THE BP CAMPAIGN
Protests at BP AGM
'Outrageous' Sutherland
Concern for Lawyers
Solidarity News
XIV. 'A DEATH FORETOLD ONE THOUSAND TIMES'
XV. NESTLÉ'S TERROR
XVI. Things Getting Worse for Coke
XVII. TABACO CAMPAIGN GOES FORWARD
XVIII. Britain's favourite fruit, the banana,
stained with banana workers' blood
XIX. VENEZUELA SINCE THE COUP
XX. Guerrillas, Drugs and Human Rights in U.S. Colombia Policy,
1988-2002
XXI. PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT and the US's TERROR WAR IN COLOMBIA
XXII. Colombian Trade Unionists Make Deep Impression
XXIII. No Evidence to Convict Irishmen
XXIV. Collateral Damage
XXV. ACTIVITIES
XXVI. BP COLOMBIA PIPELINE VICTIMS DEFENCE FUND
XXVII. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES
VERSIÓN ESPAÑOL
===============
I. ¿Por que fracasaron los diálogos de paz?
----------------------------------------
Existe un problema fundamental en Colombia que se encuentra en el
transfondo de todos los acontecimientos políticos: la exclusión de la
mayoría de la población de toda participación real en el poder político.
Este hecho se articula a través de dos conflictos: el conflicto armado y
la lucha social.
El conflicto armado se encuentra profundamente enraizado en el país. Los
movimientos guerrilleros FARC y ELN han combatido al estado durante los
últimos 40 años.
Colombia detenta los peores índices de violaciones de los Derechos
Humanos del hemisferio occidental. Los grupos paramilitares colombianos,
auspiciados por el estado, cometen entre 5.000 y 8.000 asesinatos
anualmente.
La lucha social incluye la resistencia de los movimientos sociales y
sindicatos, que mantienen una respuesta combativa a pesar del régimen de
terror promovido por el estado contra ellos. La sociedad colombiana se
encuentra tan profundamente dividida, con índices record de desigualdad,
desempleo y pobreza gracias al capitalismo neoliberal, que la
continuidad de la resistencia es inevitable como único modo de asegurar
la supervivencia.
Colombia se encuentra en un estado de guerra civil. Para que una
propuesta de paz sea viable es imprescindible que sea incluyente, debe
abarcar tanto el conflicto armado como la lucha social, debe ofrecer
reconciliación y debe asumir el ideal de justicia social para los
colombianos.
Desgraciadamente los dos procesos de diálogo entre el gobierno del
presidente saliente Andrés Pastrana y las FARC por un lado y el ELN por
otro se han roto. Este hecho no es nada nuevo en la historia de
Colombia, pero el grado de propaganda generado para perfilar la opinión
pública internacional no tiene precedente. Es por ello especialmente
importante tener una idea clara de lo que ha estado en cuestión durante
el proceso, tanto en términos tácticos como estratégicos. El periódico
liberal The Guardian por ejemplo cometía el error de culpar a la linea
'tradicionalista' de las FARC por la ruptura de los diálogos. De hecho
las FARC habían realizado concesiones considerables, pero no estaban
dispuestas a transigir en un punto central: no aceptarían un cese el
fuego mientras el gobierno permitiera a los grupos paramilitares operar
con plena impunidad. Fué claramente Andrés Pastrana quien, cada vez más
presionado por los Estados Unidos, rompió unilateralmente los diálogos,
invadiendo el 'área de diálogos', con un aviso previo de menos de tres
horas. Los Estados Unidos y las fuerzas armadas colombianas creen contar
con ventaja táctica y quieren aprovecharla.
The Observer en un artículo por el ex-director de las Fuerzas de Paz de
EE.UU, de contenido incluso más derechista, en el que afirmaba que el
presidente electo Uribe Vélez 'necesitará mucha ayuda'. Exactamente éso
es lo que Bush le está ya ofreciendo. La embajadora de EE.UU en
Colombia, Ann Patterson, felicitaba a Uribe Vélez incluso antes de que
los resultados fueran anunciados a los colombianos. El Sub-Secretario de
Estado para el Hemisferio Occidental, Otto Reich, quién previamente
trabajó para Reagan en la política de 'contra' en Centroamérica, se
apresuró a acudir a Bogotá. Unos pocos días después, Estados Unidos ha
prometido 50 millones de dólares adicionales para la adquisición de
nuevos helicópteros armados. Funcionarios de la Casa Blanca han estado
urgiendo a Colombia para que doble sus gastos de guerra. Los 'ejes del
mal' están empezando a rodar. Uribe Vélez visistará a Bush el 20 de
junio, para después viajar a Canada, Francia, Gran Bretaña y España.
Antes de dejarnos llevar por las llamadas a aumentar más aún las ayudas
al estado colombiano, complementadas por presiones para una implicación
directa de Naciones Unidas, deberíamos analizar estratégicamente por qué
los diálogos de paz han fracasado. Existen dos razones internas.
Sucesivos gobiernos han iniciado los procesos de diálogo con la creencia
de que su enemigo era mucho más débil de lo que realmente es, así los
diálogos serían una simple negociación de los términos de rendición de
las guerillas, sin que ninguna concesión significativa por parte del
gobierno fuera necesaria. Esta actitud es consecuencia de la lógica de
guerra y la psicología de las fuerzas armadas, pero está lejos de la
realidad. Las FARC en particular operan en todo el país, con bases en
muchas áreas rurales.
El segundo obstáculo consiste en que los movimientos guerrilleros
incluyen en su agenda demandas sociales y económicas de carácter
popular, que el gobierno no está preparado o es incapaz de conceder. Los
recientes diálogos entre el ELN y el gobierno colombiano en Cuba son un
claro ejemplo. El ELN ofreció el fín de las hostilidades con la
condición de que el gobierno abriera de nuevo las escuelas y hospitales
que había cerrado en los últimos dos años y que procediera a congelar
los precios de los servicios públicos por 6 meses. Pero es justamente el
tijeretazo a los gastos públicos lo que Pastrana había acordado con el
FMI en diciembre de 1999. De esta forma, Pastrana tendría que romper con
el FMI para satisfacer las demandas del ELN y las necesidades de la
mayoria pobre de Colombia. Pastrana ni tan siquiera respondió y los
diálogos se rompieron.
El error más grave de todos sería creer que Estados Unidos quiere la paz
en Colombia. Al contrario, en el nombre del contraterrorismo, Bush está
empujando al país más profundamente en el abismo de la guerra. La
política de Estados Unidos se basa en la necesidad de quebrar toda
resistencia a su proyecto geo-estratégico del Área de Libre Comercio de
las Américas; es una política agresiva de pacificación no de paz.
Parafraseando al cantante chileno asesinado Víctor Jara, los Estados
Unidos no dejarán a los colombianos vivir en paz.
La verdadera opción para todos aquellos que queremos ver una Colombia en
paz es por lo tanto el anti-imperialismo. Los diálogos de paz han
fracasado una vez más, sin embargo al movilizarnos contra el
imperialismo de Estados Unidos y sus aliados estamos trabajando por un
proceso de paz real.
Index
II. Cuando la Democracia es Dictadura
-----------------------------------------
Las elecciones presidenciales en Colombia tienen lugar cada cuatro años.
A pesar de que el presidente de turno no puede presentarse a la re-
elección, en la práctica los dos principales partidos de la derecha, los
Liberales y los Conservadores, han mantenido un estricto control sobre
el proceso, alternando la presidencia entre ellos. Esta tenaza
bipartidista sobre la política oficial ha estado sostenida en una
dinámica de terrorismo de estado. En los últimos cincuenta años, todos
los candidatos de izquierda que han tenido alguna posibilidad de ser
elegidos han sido llanamente asesinados, junto a sus oficiales de
campaña. Para los trabajadores y movimientos populares colombianos, lo
que se presenta como democracia no es más que un arma para silenciarlos.
La violenta exclusión política que vive Colombia ha imposibilitado su
representación en el proceso. Las elecciones han sido sólo otro
mecanismo de afirmación del poder de clase de los ricos sobre los
pobres. Es por ello que el abstencionismo es tan elevado ente la clase
obrera y el campesinado, para la mayoría de los cuales el votar es dotar
de legitimación a una perversión corrupta y despreciable de la
democracia.
El 26 de mayo, Álvaro Uribe Vélez ganó con rotundidad en la primera
vuelta con el 53% de los votos, siendo ésta la primera vez que un
candidato lo consigue. Es importante analizar en detalle los datos, para
ver que representa realmente la 'victoria arrolladora' de Uribe. El dato
más significativo fué la elevada abstención, la más alta de toda la
historia. De un total de 24.208.150 votantes registrados, 13.216.619 (un
54.6%) no votó. Los votantes fueron así una minoría de la población. En
los departamentos del Sur colombiano, los más afectados por el Plan
Colombia, los índices de abstención fueron superiores al 70%. Aún más,
un 9% de los votos emitidos fueron votos en blanco, nulos o marcados en
la casilla de 'ningún candidato'. Sólo un 41.3% de los votantes
registrados emitieron un voto positivo por algún candidato.
El verdadero dato de abstención es incluso mayor si se tiene en cuenta
que entre dos y cinco millones de colombianos adultos no están
registrados, debido a encontrarse desplazados o a formar parte de los
movimientos guerrilleros o encontrarse en zonas controladas por éstos o,
simplemente, a no haber entrado en el sistema de registro.
Uribe Vélez consiguió el apoyo de un 24% de los votantes potenciales o,
más realisticamente, no más de una quinta parte de la población adulta.
De hecho, lo que la victoria de Uribe Vélez representa no es un mandato
electoral del pueblo colombiano, si no un mandato de las clases
adineradas del país.
Después de todo es su voto el que cuenta en las elecciones colombianas y
últimamente han endurecido seriamente su actitud. Uribe representa su
voluntad colectiva de acabar de una vez con toda resistencia al modelo
neoliberal: habrá un mayor impulso del Plan Colombia, con nuevas
solicitudes para más ayuda militar de Estados Unidos y de otros paises
ricos; las fuerzas armadas doblarán su número; existe el objetivo de
reclutar un millon de civiles para integrar una fuerza de 'vigilantes';
los poderes ejecutivos del presidente se verán reforzados y el Congreso
será disuelto; no habrán diálogos de paz con los movimientos
guerrilleros a menos que sean para negociar su rendición efectiva.
Uribe Vélez es la figura central de un proyecto de extrema derecha que
porta en su seno todos los rasgos para convertirse en el modelo
colombiano del fascismo, con la connivencia activa y plena del
imperialismo norteamericano.
La campaña electoral tuvo tres fases. Horacio Serpa, ex-ministro del
narco-financiado gobierno de Ernesto Samper y candidato oficial del
Partido Liberal comenzó como destacado favorito. Una encuesta de opinión
realizada en septiembre del 2001 situaba a Serpa claramente en cabeza
con un 43% de intención de voto, con el liberal disidente de derechas
Uribe Vélez (23.4%) disputando el segundo puesto con la liberal
reformista Noemi Sanín (16.2%). A primera vista parecería que la vieja
estructura bipartidista se estuviera desmoronando. En realidad lo que
estaba ocurriendo, tal y como se vió a lo largo de la campaña, no era el
fin de la exclusión política y el bipartidismo, si no un reajuste en la
política de lealtades dentro de esa estructura. La carrera por la
segunda plaza iba a ser importante. Colombia tiene un proceso electoral
similar al francés, ésto es, una primera vuelta abierta a todos los
candidatos, seguida de una segunda vuelta que se lleva a cabo unas
semanas después, entre los dos candidatos más votaos, siempre y cuando
no exista mayoría absoluta en la primera vuelta. El único candidato
progresista que se presentó, con un programa opuesto al modelo
neoliberal y a la depredación de las multinacionales, fué Lucho Garzón,
ex-Presidente de la Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT),
representando al recientemente formado Frente Social y Político. En
septiembre del 2001, de acuerdo a las encuesta de opinión, el apoyo
electoral a Garzón era marginal, con un 1.4% de las intenciones de voto.
El momento decisivo de la campaña se dió a finales de enero. Para
entonces el saliente presidente conservador Andrés Pastrana había
adoptado claramente una opción de guerra total contra los movimientos
guerrilleros. Los diálogos de su gobierno con las FARC fueron solamente
rescatados por una intervención en el último minuto del grupo de paises
amigos, y continuaron renqueantes por otras tres semanas.
Ambas partes sabían que el final de la zona desmilitarizada era
inminente, especialmente desde que el embajador de Estados Unidos
comenzó una campaña de exaltación del sentimiento 'antiterrorista',
amplificada por los medios de comunicación colombianos. El Partido
Conservador descubrió en Uribe Vélez el hombre que habían estado
anhelando, un hombre para la guerra. La burguesía se unificó en torno al
candidato de extrema derecha. La popularidad de Uribe Vélez medida en
las encuestas se disparó hasta el 39% y siguió aumentando. En marzo,
Uribe Vélez había alcanzado el 54% de las intenciones de voto.
Entonces se dió el segundo punto de inflexión de la campaña. Garzón se
encontraba en enero con una intención de voto del 0.9%. La preocupante
perspectiva de un Uribe Vélez como presidente inquietaba seríamente a la
izquierda. El Frente Social y Político ganó ímpetu con las elecciones al
Congreso que se llevaron a cabo el 10 de marzo. A pesar de que éstas
constituyeron una decisiva victoria para la extrema derecha, claramente
liderada para entonces por Uribe Vélez, hasta el punto de que los
paramilitares afirmaron tener el apoyo de un 35% del nuevo Congreso; el
Frente consiguió así mismo cinco escaños. Incluso más significativo fué
el proceso que se inició por el cual el Frente se dió a un debate real
con las masas populares sobre táctica electoral. Tal y como informamos
en nuestro previo boletín, Alexánder López dimitió como presidente de
SINTRAEMCALI, para poder presentarse y fué elegido para el Congreso.
Continúa habiendo serias divisiones en la izquierda colombiana respecto
a la presentación de candidatura en elecciones. ¿Para qué presentarse y
legitimar un proceso corrupto? De acuerdo al columnista Héctor
Mondragón, 3 meses después de las elecciones de marzo, el 42% de las
mesas electorales no han corregido todavía las irregularidades que se
dieron en el proceso, al mismo tiempo que diversas formas de fraude
electoral han acabado sin castigo. Aquellos que amenazan con exponer los
casos de corrupción corren riesgos graves. Cabe recordar que el
arzobispo de Cali fué asesinado días después de haber denunciado la
financiación por parte del narcotráfico de la campaña electoral.
Colombia está gobernada por una clase política impregnada de
criminalidad, clientelismo y corrupción. Nunca ha permitido elecciones
libres y justas.
Lo que ha ocurrido ciertamente es que la campaña electoral del Frente se
ha beneficiado y ha reflejado luchas reales que se estaban dando desde
abajo. De repente miles de personas empezaron a llenar los mítines
electorales de Lucho Garzón. Los últimos dos meses de la campaña se
caracterizaron por un rápido crecimiento de la intervención popular, que
empezó a rebasar los confines impuestos por la farsa electoral
colombiana. A Garzón se le unió la ex-guerrillera del M19, Vera Grave,
como su candidata para la vice-presidencia y, finalmente, el Frente,
ahora llamado Polo Democrático, consiguió un 6.2% de los votos, quedando
en tercer lugar después de Serpa (31.7%) y delante de Noemi Sanín
(5.8%).
No hay duda de que el ganador el 26 de mayo fué Uribe Vélez. Pero en las
circunstancias actuales en Colombia, ¿que significa éso? Lucho Garzón
también ganó, simplemente por que es un candidato democrático de
izquierdas, que se presentó a unas elecciones y consiguió salir vivo.
Ganar también significa construir una organización que pueda al menos
representar la voluntad de la mayoría y sobrevivir.
Entonces, ¿es Colombia una democracia o una dictadura? Muchos paises
latinoamericanos han conocido gobiernos militares intercalados con
periodos de democracia formal limitada. Colombia no es muy diferente,
excepto por el hecho de que las formas de gobierno democráticas y
dictatoriales son administradas simultaneamente en paralelo y no en
serie.
Tu experiencia del estado como democracia o dictadura depende
fundamentalmente de tu clase. Ciertamente las campañas electorales han
demostrado que las clases adineradas son capaces de cambiar sus alianzas
con total libertad. En cambio no existe esa libertad de organización
para el 70% de la población que vive en la pobreza. Quien quiera que sea
elegido, son los escuadrones de la muerte los que gobiernan. Nueve
miembros del Frente Social y Político fueron asesinados durante la
campaña. Más aún, desde que Uribe Vélez se ha convertido en el nuevo
presidente electo, el índice de asesinatos ha aumentado sustancialmente.
Como representantes del movimiento popular AlexánderLópez, Wilson Borja
y los demás miembros del Frente en el Congreso corren un riesgo muy
alto. Los paramilitares campan ya a sus anchas. Hay que defender la
democracia y los derechos humanos enfrentando a Uribe Vélez y sus apoyos
imperialistas.
Andy Higginbottom
Index
III. Guerrillas, Drogas y Derechos Humanos en la Política Colombiana de
------------------------------------------------------------------
Estados Unidos, 1988-2002
-------------------------
Archivo de Seguridad Nacional, 3 de Mayo, 2002 "Guerra en Colombia".
En los últimos quince años, el Congreso de Estados Unidos ha mantenido
insistentemente que la asistencia militar a Colombia debía verse
restringida a la lucha contra el narcotráfico y no a la larga guerra
civil que vive el país, debido pricipalmente a su preocupación por la
situación de Derechos Humanos. Ahora, el gobierno de Bush está
presionando para que se levanten estas restricciones y se permita que
toda la ayuda, pretérita, presente y futura, pueda ser utilizada en
operaciones contra las fuerzas guerrilleras.
Sin embargo, documentos oficiales de EE.UU, recientemente
desclasificados, muestran que, a pesar de los límites legales y las
repetidas garantías públicas ofrecidas por diversos miembros del
gobierno, la ayuda de Estados Unidos ha desdibujado la linea de
separación entre la lucha contrainsurgente y la lucha contra el
narcotráfico, , hasta el punto en que EE.UU se encuentra en plena
confrontación con las guerillas y al borde de una implicación aún mayor
en el aparentemente intratable conflicto civil colombiano.
Los nuevos documentos, obtenidos mediante la Ley de Libertad de
Información, han sido publicados en la página web del Projecto de
Documentación sobre Colombia del Archivo de Seguridad Nacional. Estos
documentos cubren el periodo que va desde 1988 hasta la actualidad y se
centran particularmente en los temas relativos a la provisión de
asistencia militar. Estos son algunos de los puntos clave que se
incluyen entre otros:
- Ya desde la primera administración Bush, la Estrategia Andina de
EE.UU se desarrolló en base a acuerdos con los gobiernos andinos para
proveerles de ayuda contra el narcotráfico, que pudiera al mismo tiempo
ser utilizada contra sus principales adversarios: los movimientos
guerrilleros.
- Contrariamente a los repetidos pronunciamientos oficiales respecto a
la existencia de narcoguerillas, los análisis de los servicios de
inteligencia de EE.UU sobre la implicación de la guerilla en el
narcotráfico han sido decididamente variados. Un informe excéptico de la
CIA conluye que, si los gobiernos de Lima y Bogotá recibieran ayuda
antinarcóticos para propósitos de lucha contrainsurgente, éstos la
utilizarían para operaciones puramente antiguerrilleras, con pobres
resultados en la lucha contra el narcotráfico.
- Dos brigadas del ejército colombiano, a las que se había retirado la
ayuda de EE.UU en septiembre del 2000, por violaciones de los Derechos
Humanos, trabajan en la actualidad formando parte de una fuerza de
choque conjunta con batallones antidroga, específicamente creados para
ser destinatarios de los fondos de ayuda de Estados Unidos. Estas nuevas
unidades, de acuerdo a uno de los documentos, se encuentran en estrecha
unión con un batallón antiguerilla, conocido por su colaboración con
grupos paramilitares ilegales.
- La finalidad establecida en el acuerdo entre EE.UU y Colombia, que
pretende garantizar que la ayuda antidroga sea utilizada en áreas de
producción de droga y sólo para operaciones antinarcóticos, se ha venido
interpretando de forma altamente difusa; tanto es así que las
disposiciones del acuerdo han quedado virtualmente sin sentido. Diversos
documentos indican que EE.UU ha redefinido el área en la que la ayuda
puede ser utilizada para abarcar todo el territorio nacional de
Colombia.
- Al mismo tiempo que el acuerdo estaba siendo negociado con el ministro
de defensa colombiano, una delegación congresual, dirigida por Dennis
Hastert (republicano), actualmente Presidente de la Cámara de
Representantes y quien fué portavoz del Subcomité de Seguridad Nacional,
animaba secretamente a los militares colombianos a que ignoraran las
disposiciones de la ayuda de EE.UU relativas a los Derechos Humanos.
- Varios informes de la CIA y otras agencias de inteligencia sobre los
grupos paramilitares colombianos, presentados en los últimos años,
sugieren que al gobierno colombiano le falta la voluntad de luchar
contra estos grupos. Un informe de la CIA de 1998 indica que los lazos
de comunicación y las instancias de coordinación activa entre los
militares y los paramilitares continuarán seguramente e, incluso, es
posible que se vean incrementados.
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69
Index
ENGLISH VERSION
===============
I. Why Peace Talks Fail
----------------------------
There is one fundamental problem underpinning everything in Colombia,
the exclusion of the majority from any real participation in political
power. This is in turn articulated through two conflicts, the armed
conflict and the social conflict.
The armed conflict is deeply rooted. The guerilla movements the FARC and
the ELN have fought against the state for nearly 40 years. Colombia has
the worst human rights violations in the Western hemisphere, with state
sponsored paramilitary death squads assassinating between 5,000 and
8,000 victims annually. The social conflict includes the resistance of
social movements and trade unions, that continue to fight back despite
the state sponsored terrorism against them. Colombian society is deeply
divided, with record levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty,
further resistance is inevitable.
Colombia is in a state of civil war. For any peace proposal to work it
has to be inclusive, it has to extend across both the armed conflict and
the social conflict, it has to offer reconciliation and it has to
embrace the ideal of social justice for the majority of Colombians.
Sadly the two separate talks between Colombia's outgoing President
Pastrana and the FARC and the ELN have both broken down. This is not
new, although the degree of propaganda shaping international opinion is
unprecedented. It is therefore all the more important to be clear what
is at issue, both tactically and strategically. The Guardian, for
example, is quite mistaken to blame FARC's 'traditionalists' for
breaking the talks. The FARC had made considerable concessions, but the
point it did not concede was to agree a ceasefire while the government
allows the paramilitaries to operate with impunity. It was Pastrana,
under pressure from the USA, who unilaterally broke the talks, launching
an invasion of the 'zone for dialogue' . The US and the Colombian
armed forces believe they have the tactical advantage, and they want to
make the most of it.
The Observer carried a comment from a former Director of the US Peace
Corps, arguing that president elect Uribe Vélez 'will need a lot of
help'. Indeed, that is exactly what Bush is already giving him. US
Ambassador Ann Patterson congratulated Uribe even before the result had
been announced to the Colombian people. Assistant Secretary of State for
the Western Hemisphere Otto Reich, Reagan's man on contra policy in
Central America, rushed to Bogotá. Within days the US promised another
$50 million for more helicopter gunships. Senior White House officials
have been urging Colombia to double its spending on the war. The axis
of evil is beginning to turn. Uribe will visit Bush on 20th June,
followed by visits to Canada, France, Britain and Spain.
Before supporting calls for yet more aid to the Colombia state,
complemented by pressure for direct UN involvement, we should think more
deeply and strategically about why peace talks have failed. There are
two key domestic reasons.
Successive Colombian governments have entered into talks believing their
enemy to be much weaker than it is, that the talks are about negotiating
a surrender of the guerillas without any significant concessions on the
government side being necessary. This is wrapped in the logic of war and
psychology of the armed forces, but is far from the truth. The FARC in
particular operates across the country, with bases in many countryside
areas.
The second stumbling block: the guerillas include popular social and
economic demands that the government is not prepared to, or is unable
to, concede. The recent ELN - government talks in Cuba are a clear
example of this. The ELN offered to end hostilities on the condition
that the government would reopen schools and hospitals that have been
closed in the last two years, and that it would pledge a 6 month freeze
on prices for public utilities. But the demand to slash state
expenditure is exactly what Pastrana agreed with the IMF in December
1999. Pastrana would have to break with the IMF to meet the guerillas'
demands, and the needs of Colombia's poor majority, so the talks have
broken down.
But the greatest mistake of all would be to believe that USA wants peace
in Colombia. On the contrary, in the name of counter terrorism Bush is
pushing the country ever deeper into war. US policy is driven by the
need to break all resistance to its geo-strategic project of the Free
Trade Area of the Americas, it is a policy of aggressive pacification,
not peace. To paraphrase murdered Chilean singer Victor Jara, the USA
will not let the Colombian people live in peace.
The issue for all of us who want to see peace in Colombia is therefore
anti-imperialism. The peace talks have failed once again, but by
mobilising against the imperialism of the USA and its allies we will
help the real peace process.
Index
II. When Democracy is Dictatorship
----------------------------------
Colombia's presidential elections take place every four years. Although
a sitting president cannot stand for re-election in practice the two
main right wing parties, Liberals and Conservatives, have kept a very
tight control on the process, alternating the presidency between them.
This bi-partisan grip on official politics has been backed by state
terror. For the last fifty years every left wing candidate with any
prospect of winning at the polls has simply been assassinated, along
with their election workers. For the workers and popular movements what
is claimed as democracy is simply a weapon that is to silence them.
Violent political exclusion has prevented their representation within
the process. Elections were just another naked assertion of class power
of the rich against the poor. That is why abstentionism is so strong
amongst the working class and peasantry, most of whom see voting as
providing legitimacy to a corrupt and contemptible perversion of
democracy.
On 26th May Alvaro Uribe Vélez won the first round outright with 53% of
votes returned, the first time this has been achieved. It is important
it analyse the figures in some detail to see what Uribe's 'landslide'
really represents. Most significant of all was the low turnout, the
lowest ever. There were 24,208,150 registered voters of which
13,216,619, that is 54.6%, did not vote. The voters were a minority of
the population. In the southern departments hardest hit by Plan Colombia
abstention rates were over 70%. Even then, 9% of those who did actually
cast their vote returned either a blank or spoilt voting card, or marked
the 'no candidate' box. Only 41.3% of all registered voters cast a
positive vote for one of the candidates.
The true abstention rate is yet higher, since there are anywhere between
2 and 5 million Colombian adults who are not registered, either because
they are displaced, are guerillas or in zones controlled by the
guerilla movements, or simply have not entered into the registration
system. Uribe Vélez got support from 24% of all potential voters, or
more realistically no more than one fifth of the adult population.
In fact what the Uribe Vélez victory represents is not an election
mandate from the Colombian people, but a mandate from the country's
propertied classes. After all it is their vote that counts in Colombia's
elections and they have seriously hardened their attitude. Uribe
asserts their collective will to finish off all resistance to neo-
liberalism:
Plan Colombia will be pushed further with more military aid sought from
the USA and other rich countries; spending on the armed forces is to be
doubled; the aim is to recruit 1 million men into a vigilante force; the
executive powers of the president will be strengthened and Congress will
be disbanded; there will be no peace talks with the guerilla movements
unless it is to negotiate their surrender.
Uribe is the focal point of an extreme right-wing project which carries
every indication of carrying through to become the Colombian form of
fascism, with the full and active connivance of US imperialism.
The election campaign was in three phases. Horacio Serpa, a former
minister in Ernesto Samper's drug funded administration, and the
official candidate of the Liberal Party started as the clear favourite.
An opinion poll taken in September 2001 had Serpa well ahead with 42% of
intended votes, with right wing Liberal dissident Uribe Vélez (23.4%)
vying with the more reformist Liberal Noemi Sanín (16.2%) for second
place.
At first sight the old bi-partisan structure seemed to be breaking down.
But in fact what was happening, and what unfolded through the campaign,
was a not the end of political exclusion and bipartidismo, but the
shifting of loyalties within this structure. The race for second place
was going to be important. Colombia has a presidential electoral process
similar to France, that is a first round open to all candidates,
followed by a second round run off several weeks later between the top
two candidates, so long as there is no absolute majority in the first
round.
The only progressive candidate to show up with a programme opposed to
neo-liberalism and the depredations of the multinationals was former
President of the CUT union federation Lucho Garzon, standing on behalf
of the newly announced Social and Political Front. In September last
year, according to the opinion polls electoral support for Garzon was
marginal at 1.4% of those intending to vote.
The campaign's decisive turning point came at the end of January, by
which time outgoing Conservative president Pastrana had clearly opted
for all out war on the guerilla movements. His government's talks with
the FARC were only rescued by the last minute intervention of the group
of friendly countries, and were to limp on for a further three weeks.
Both sides knew that the end of FARC's demilitarised zone was imminent,
especially since in the meantime the US ambassador was whipping up
"anti-terrorist" sentiment, amplified in the Colombian media. The
Conservatives found in Uribe the man they have yearned for, a man for
war. The bourgeoisie united around the hard right 'Colombia First'
candidate. Uribe's poll popularity shot up 20 points, to 39% and
rising. By March Uribe had reached 54% of intended votes.
Then came the second turn in the campaign. Garzon was down at 0.9% at
the end of January. The looming prospect of Uribe Vélez as president
seriously worried the left. The impetus for the Social and Political
Front came through the Congressional elections held on 10th March.
Although these were a victory for the hard right, by now clearly led by
Uribe Vélez, the paramilitaries claimed the loyalty of 35% of Congress,
nonetheless the Front also managed to win 5 seats. More significantly
the political forces in the Front began to engage with the popular
masses in a real debate about election tactics. As reported in our
previous bulletin, Alexander Lopez resigned as president of SINTRAEMCALI
in order to stand and was elected to Congress.
There remain serious divisions on the Colombian left about standing in
elections. Why stand and legitimise a corrupt process? Indeed, according
to columnist Hector Mondragon, 3 months after the 10 March elections 42%
of the polling stations had still not corrected irregularities, as well
as various forms of electoral fraud that went unpunished. Those who
threaten to expose the corruption run high risks. Remember that Cali's
Catholic archbishop was assassinated days after he denounced funding
>from narco-trafficking going into election campaigns. Colombia is ruled
by a political class steeped in criminality, clientelism and corruption.
It has never allowed a free and fair election.
What certainly has happened is that the Front's campaign benefited from
and reflected real struggles from below. All of a sudden thousands began
flocking to Lucho Garzon's election meetings. The last two months of the
campaign were characterised by a rapidly growing popular intervention
beginning to overflow the confines of Colombia's electoral farce. Garzon
was joined by a former M19 guerilla Vera Grave as his vice-presidential
candidate and the Front, now renamed the Democratic Pole, managed to get
6.2% of the votes, coming third behind Serpa on 31.7%, and just ahead of
Noemi Sanín on 5.8%.
There is no doubt that it was Uribe who won on 26th May. But in the
conditions of Colombia today what does winning mean? Lucho Garzon has
also won, simply because he is a democratic, left wing candidate who has
stood in an election and came out alive. Winning means building an
organisation that can at least represent the wishes of the majority and
survive intact.
So is Colombia a democracy or a dictatorship? Many Latin American
countries have seen military rule interspersed with periods of limited
formal democracy. Colombia is not so different, except that its
democratic and dictatorial forms of government are administered
simultaneously, in parallel rather than in series. Whether you
experience the state as democracy or dictatorship depends fundamentally
on your class. Certainly the election campaigns have shown that the
propertied classes can switch around their allegiances freely enough.
But there is no such freedom of organisation for the 70% of Colombia's
population living in poverty. Whoever is voted in, the death squads
rule. Nine members of the Social and Political Front were assassinated
during the campaign.
Moreover, since Uribe Vélez became president-elect the murder rate has
been cranked up. As representatives of the popular movement Alexander
Lopez, Wilson Borja and the other members of the front in Congress are
at very high risk. The paramilitaries are already off the leash. Defend
democracy, defend human rights, fight Uribe Vélez and his imperialist
backers.
Andy Higginbottom
Index
III. SINTRAEMCALI PREVENTATIVE ACTION
----------------------------------------
During a Security Council meeting of the military in the second week of
April there was a decision made to attempt to try members of the Board
of Directors of SINTRAEMCALI trade union for affecting negatively the
provision of public services and for defaming flags and patriotic
symbols, and also for terrorism.
In the subsequent few weeks two SINTRAEMCALI leaders, LUIS HERNÁNDEZ
MONROY President and ROBINSÓN MASSO observed suspicious vehicles and
people travelling on high velocity motorbikes permanently following
them, and were forced to move houses.
On 11th April 2002, late at night the porter in the office of Alexander
Lopez Maya, ex-president of SINTRAEMCALI and now member of Congress,
received a telephone call saying " With bodyguards and everyone we are
going to blow up this building." The following morning the secretary of
the office received a new call saying "Don't you understand, we are
going to put a bomb there. " Due to this the office has remained
permanently closed.
On 18th April, the president of NOMADESC and co-ordinator of the Human
Rights Department of SINTRAEMCALI BERENICE CELEYTA and a student were
followed by a four door White Toyota truck with polarised windows.
Several minutes later a motorbike arrived with two men on it. One man
entered the restaurant, carrying a small rucksack and sat facing them.
They immediately called the Human Rights Co-ordinator of the CUT, and
left the premises, managing to lose the people following them.
On 27th April, 2002, the sister of SINTRAEMCALI activist DANIEL VALENCIA
VILLEGAS, worker in the EMCALI Water and Sewerage Plant, received a
telephone call where she was asked for Daniel, and when she said he was
not there the caller left the following message: "Tell him to stop
hanging around with members of the board of directors of the union."
Another phobe call to his father said " Tell that son of a bitch to
leave the union or if not buy a coffin".
Military Intelligence Involved
On 1st May during the International Workers Day march several suspicious
people were identified filming and taking photos. The infiltrators
attempted to escape and workers prevented them, calling on the police to
identify and detain them. The police reaction was violent. Several
trade union leaders and human rights defenders were beaten. The worst
injuries were inflicted on JESÚS GONZALEZ, who had serious wounds to the
back of his head, a 1.5 cm gash on the top of his head all caused by a
wooden police baton. During these events JHON WEINER GONZÁLEZ,
bodyguard of Jesús González, was given a death threat by one of the
police who said "Remember my face, because you are going to die you son
of a bitch", and he was beaten with a wooden police baton in different
parts of his body.
Assassination
On Saturday 18th May 2002 at approximately 11.00pm ORLANDO ARENAS MARIN
was in a public place in the Municipality of Florida when a Yellow
Daewoo Taxis arrived carrying 4 armed men. Two of the men entered the
establishment and attempted to forcibly take Oscar with them. Oscar
attempted to resist and managed to hit one of the men. The man then
assassinated him, and upon seeing this another men go out of the taxi
and shot him again.
Added to these events are the forced detentions, telephone threats, the
sending of death threat letters (sufragios), forced disappearance,
physical aggression, and assassinations; which have affected another 50
other workers.
We call on all of you to prevent further human rights violations:
- Make statements to the United Nations, the Organisation of American
States, the diplomatic corps who have a presence in Colombia, the
International Labour Organisation in an attempt to guarantee the human
rights of the threatened people and call on the Colombian government to
carry out an Immediate Preventative Action to prevent any further
attacks.
- Demand that the Colombian government and the appropriate authorities
provide sufficient and necessary guarantees so that Constitutional
Rights, such as the right to life, security, freedom of opinion,
information, mobilisation, trade union activity and protest are
respected.
- Co-ordinate an International delegation made up of International
Organisations that can gather information on the situation and the
denouncements, and also carry out a process of overseeing the agreements
signed on the 29th of January between SINTRAEMCALI, the Cali community
and the Colombian Government.
- Lobby national and international authorities through letters,
statements by organisations and Members of Parliament, but above all,
with the presence of a delegation of Canadian, North American and
British we could organise meetings with government authorities, both
national and regional to demand a peaceful solution to this social
conflict.
- Demand that the Colombian government carries out an exhaustive
investigation to punish those responsible both materially and
intellectually for the events outlined above.
- Finally, and in line with the evidence that members of the Public
Forces are following our members, photographing, filming and threatening
workers, as was seen during the 1st May demonstration we hold
responsible the Colombian Government for any attempt against the
integrity of leaders, trade unionists and human right workers.
National and International Human Rights Campaign Against Corruption,
Privatisation and the Criminalisation of Social Protest
SEND MESSAGES OR LETTERS TO:
ANDRÉS PASTRANA ARANGO
Presidente de la República,
Carrera 8 No. 7-26 Palacio de Nariño,
Santa Fe de Bogotá
Fax +(57)1 - 286 74 34 - 286, 68 42 -284 21 86
Mailto: rdh@presidencia.gov.co
Index
IV. DEATH THREATS TO NATIONAL PRESIDENT OF USO, OILWORKERS UNION
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Through its Human Rights Department, the United Workers Federation of
Colombia, the CUT, denounces to the national and international
community the serious situation of state terrorism to which the trade
union leadership is submitted in Colombia. From 30th May death threats
have increased against comrade Hernando Hernández Pardo, President of
the Oil Industry Union USO.
Comrade Hernando Hernández has received a leaflet at his home in Bogotá,
and a condolence card at his trade union office. Today the situation
worsened, and his family who live in the city of Bucaramanga have been
involved. Note that these threats are occurring just as the workers, in
a National Assembly, agreed the carrying out of a strike against the
government's proposed pension and labour reforms.
We call for continuing solidarity with the Colombian trade union
movement and for demands on the government and state oil corporation
ECOPETROL that they provide guarantees to allow the free exercise of
trade union activity ...
Bogotá, D.C., 31 May 2002
RECOMMENDED ACTION
Send messages urging action to defend the life of Hernando Hernández to:
ANDRES PASTRANA ARANGO
Presidente de la Republica,
Carrera 8 n. 7-26 Palacio de Nariño,
Santa Fe de Bogota
Telefono. +57.1.5629300 ext. 3550 (571 ) 284 33 00
Fax (571 ) 286 74 34 - 286, 68 42 -284 21 86
Mailto: pastrana@presidencia.gov.co and rdh@presidencia.gov.co
With copies to:
CUT Departmento Derechos Humanos E-mail: cutcol@col3.telecom.com.co
and Colombia Solidarity Campaign E-mail: colombia_sc@hotmail.com
Index
V. 85 TRADE UNIONISTS ASSASSINATED SO FAR THIS YEAR
--------------------------------------------------------
On 5 June 2002, in the Municipality of Rionegro, Department of
Antioquia, JHON JAIRO ALVAREZ CARDONA, member of the National Executive
Committee of the Textile Industry Workers of Colombia SINTRATEXTIL, was
the victim of an attack at 7 in the evening when he was with his family.
He was seriously injured and taken to the regional hospital of San Juan
de Dios, where he died on 6 June 2002 at 5am.
On 4 June 2002, in the city of Medellin, Antioquia Department, teacher,
ISANAS GOMEZ JARAMILLO, was found dead. He was a member of the Antioquia
Teachers' Association ADIDA.
On 4 June 2002, in the city of Santa Martha, Magdalena Department,
EDUARDO VASQUEZ JIMENEZ was assassinated. The murder took place at 12
midday in the market place when men travelling on a motorbike shot him
three times in the head. The comrade was the treasurer of the Magdalena
branch of the Electricity Workers Union of Colombia SINTRAELECOL.
On 1 June 2002, in the Municipality of Tuquerres, Narino Department,
JAIRO RAMOS was assassinated by a group of men who identified themselves
as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). He was a member of the
Tuquerres branch of the Electricity Workers Union of Colombia
SINTRAELECO and had worked for 12 years for the Central Electrical
Company of Narino (CENENARESP).
On 1 June 2002, in the city of Villavicencio, Meta Department, ADALBERTO
TUKAMOTO PALOMINO was assassinated. He was an activist in the Meta
branch of the Electricity Workers Union of Colombia SINTRAELECOL. He was
in the company of his brother, Alvaro Rafael Tukamoto, and his friend,
Claribeth Urrea Mendez, who were also killed. The comrade was
outstanding for his tireless work in defence of human rights.
The barbaric events mentioned above depict the real situation in
Colombia, where there is no respect for human rights and where the
State, with the government led by President Andres Pastrana Arango, is
ultimately responsible for a savagery which continues with 100 per cent
impunity and more than 3,800 unpunished assassinations of trade
unionists in the 15 years that our federation has existed.
This deadly situation within the trade union movement brings us to call
for solidarity from the national and international community, human
rights NGOs, trade unions and other organisations, calling on them to
condemn these crimes and call on the Colombian government to provide
real guarantees for us to continue our trade union activities.
With all due respect, we call on Dr Juan Somavia, governments, employers
and workers with representation in the International Labour Organisation
(ILO) to take careful note of the GENOCIDE being perpetrated against the
United Workers Federation of Colombia (CUT), and that if the government
led by President Pastrana does not implement the policies we need to
carry out our trade union activities, that the ILO, at its International
Labour Conference in this month of June, agrees to undertake a special
Investigative Commission to force the Colombian State and its government
to focus on the need to stop this genocide against the CUT and the
systematic, massive and serious violations of our human rights, which
have resulted to date this year in 85 assassinations, 11 assassination
attempts and 9 kidnappings, 4 of whom have been released and 7
disappeared.
Jesus Antonio Gonzalez Luna
Director, Human Rights Department
Domingo Rafael Tovar Arrieta
Director, Coordination
Bogota, 6 June 2002
CENTRAL UNITARIA DE TRABAJADORES DE COLOMBIA CUT
Index
VI. WILSON BORJA
--------------------
"The army is behind my attempted assassination"
Wilson Borja, Congress Representative and president of state sector
workers union Fenaltrase, has complained that Major César Alonso
Maldonado -the highest ranked officer charged with planning and
executing the attempted assassination on Borja in December 2000 - has
been released from detention. This will put Borja's life in danger,
beside demonstrating once again that the perpetrators of Borja's
assassination attempt will be granted impunity as a matter of state
policy.
Borja is very suspicious that the removal from office of Attorney Fiscal
Luis Augusto Sepúlveda was immediately followed by Major Maldonado's
release from custody.
Sepúlveda was dealing with Borja's case and had ordered a criminal
investigation against Generals Jorge Enrique Mora Rangel and Reynaldo
Castellanos Trujillo for their links with the attempt on his life.
Borja has also named Army Counterintelligence Officer Julio César
Bustamante who has detailed how several senior offices were involved in
the assassination attempt.
Index
VII. BELLAVISTA TRAGEDY
--------------------------
ALL RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS PRESENT IN THE VIGIA DEL FUERTE AREA
ASK FOR A SUSPENSION OF AERIAL MILITARY ACTIONS AND A TEMPORARY
CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES.
Today, Tuesday 7th May, at 14:00 hours there was knowledge of a flyover
by a 'Mirage' plane which dropped nine bombs on the area of Napipi,
Bojaya, in the Choco Department. Since 6th May the IV Army Brigade has
prohibited national and international news journalists from entering the
zone of the recent events. According to the journalists, the FARC-EP
would have communicated them to enter the zone in order to verify what
is happening.
On 6th May the Life, Justice and Peace Commission, the Diocese of
Quibdo, gave information to national and international human rights
organizations about the grave situations of insecurity in which the
residents of Bellavista, Vigia del Fuerte, Napipi and Murindo live,
owing to the military offense with aerial attacks.
The indiscriminate aerial actions produced yesterday irreparable damages
in the Afrocolombian communities, which were forcibly displaced. In the
case of Napipi, two Afrocolombians were wounded, and the young MARIA
UBERTINA MENA (21 years old) was killed, as a result of the aerial
operations carried out since past Saturday. In accordance with the
reports the number of victims could be higher, as the official aerial
attacks are indiscriminate against around 3,000 inhabitants of this
zone.
It is feared that the air and river operations will extend their radius
of action ... with the same methods and mechanisms over the basin towns
of the Jiguamiando, Truando, Salaqui and Cacarica, as in some of these
towns flyovers were heard in the early morning hours since past
Saturday.
In Bellavista and Vigia del Fuerte, state humanitarian response has not
arrived, in spite of official announcements expressed via news media
indicating that there had, in fact, already been a response. Until the
present, humanitarian aid of blankets, medicine and food has been
carried out by the Colombian Red Cross and the Diocese of Quibdo.
Last Saturday the Peace Commission of the Diocese of Quibdo,
communicated that in Vigia del Fuerte state military actions were being
carried out that impeded humanitarian proceedings and search actions for
those possibly assassinated and disappeared. Owing to intervention by
the Air Force and the Navy, more victims from the civilian population
have been predicted. This call and request was not looked into by the
Colombian state.
On 21st April, the Peace Commission and other entities of the Catholic
church and human rights organizations, gave reports of the military
incursion inside of the paramilitary strategy at Vigia del Fuerte, after
crossing over the Atrato river, in particular through the municipality
of Riosucio, where military units have developed a strict control over
the circulation of goods and of fluvial transport since 20th December
1996.
Since then to 1st May paramilitaries extended their proceedings to
Bellavista, with threats and intimidation, at the behest of a commander
nicknamed 'Camilo'. In spite of the repeatedly reiterated reports
turned into government and state entities there was no reaction from the
Public Forces against the behaviour of this group of close to 200
camouflaged and heavily armed men.
On 1st May, battles developed that made possible military monopolization
by FARC-EP in Vigia del Fuerte, while confrontations worsened in
Bellavista. On 2nd May, between 8:00 and 10:00 am there was maintained a
confrontation between FARC-EP and paramilitaries. Out of that, at 10:15
am came the explosion of a cylinder that affected the chapel-temple
where the town hid in refuge, provoking more than a hundred civilian
casualties and dozens of injured.
In spite of the request and the call by the Church Diocese to cease
aerial and fluvial operations, and of the requests in the same vein
raised to the national government by the international community, there
continue to be military deployments and military proceedings, which not
only create fear in the Afrocolombian population and impede humanitarian
aid but which are resulting in serious and systematic human rights
violations, and grave breaches of international humanitarian law on the
part of the State in the intent of confronting the FARC-EP with illicit
methods and objectives of war.
We ask of national and international human rights organizations, of
humanitarian agencies, of solidarity groups, to exhort the Colombian
State headed by the President of the Republic Andres Pastrana, Supreme
Chief of Military Forces, to:
1. Suspend aerial, fluvial and terrestrial military operations that are
taking place in the mid and lower Atrato that are going on with his
knowledge.
2. Temporarily declare a bilateral suspension of armed hostilities and a
cease-fire in to allow humanitarian aid by the Catholic church and human
rights groups on behalf of the civilian population.
3. To immediately give a response to the humanitarian crisis ... in
respect of food, health and housing owed to the affected population via
the Network of Social Solidarity, and to expedite with urgency a
Humanitarian Order-in respect to institutional response of civilian
character.
4. To authorise entrance to both national and international news media
into the zone in order to collect testimonies and reports of what is
going on.
To the humanitarian agencies, solidarity groups and churches to support
a humanitarian aid in coordination with the Life, Justice and Peace
Commission of the Diocese of Quibdo, in respect to humanitarian support
required via medical and technical support, and of emergency goods to
attend to the affected population.
Life, Justice and Peace Commission, Diocese of Quibdo
Intercongregational Commission of Justice and Peace
Index
VIII. State Assault in Medellín
---------------------------------
State and paramilitary forces launched a combined assault on the popular
barrios of Comuna 13 in the mid-west of Medellín from 3 a.m. on 21st
May 2002. The Permanent Assembly of Civil Society for Peace states that
more than 34,000 people live in the area where various state units
entered to confront the popular militia. Intense fighting followed,
including assault on family homes which, according to the Permanent
Assembly, left 9 civilians dead, including an 11 year old girl and a 6
month baby boy, 37 injured and thousands displaced. The state captured
30 people and took 5 firearms.
Another source comments this was the biggest urban battle since the
military/paramilitary takeover of Barrancabermeja in early 2001, "The
militias fought back. Dozens were killed, perhaps as many as 200
wounded - most of the casualties apparently were civilians. The army
withdrew. A large demonstration of several thousand protested the
military and police action after the event."
Index
IX. Human Rights Violations
-------------------------------
Indigenous Leader Disappeared
Elderly indigenous leader José Agustín Poloche was detained by the
paramilitary Autodefensas Unids de Colombia (AUC) on 12th May. The
Chenche Zaragoza community in Coyaima, Tolima department, lives in
exterme poverty. They waited 10 days for José's return, and then put
out an alert seeking whereabouts as a 'disappeared' person.
Peasants Abducted and Shot
Amnesty International is concerned for the safety of Nidia Correa
Velasquez and members of the forcibly displaced community of Tulua,
department of Valle del Cauca. She was reportedly abducted on 16th May
by five unidentified individuals, who are thought to be members of an
army-backed paramilitary group operating in the area.
Two days after her abduction, Andres Robledo, President of the
Asociacion Campesina de Base "Los Yarumos", "Los Yarumos" Peasant
Association was reportedly shot dead by army-backed paramilitaries.
Members of the Association have reportedly been threatened by
paramilitaries since July 1999.
Ref: UA 156/02 27th May 2002
Paramilitaries Massacre 15 Campesinos and Rape A Woman
On Saturday 18th May, a group of more than 100 men , dressed in military
uniforms and bearing the distinctive trademarks of the AUC, entered the
villages of San Juan Ito and La Congoja in the municipality of Yondo,
Antioquia department.
The paramilitaries detained an undetermined number of campesinos and
stopped the transit of vehicles on the road which leads from Yondo to
this rural area and suspended all telephone services. 15 rural workers
were assassinated and a woman raped, accused of helping the FARC, and
the rest of the inhabitants of these villages have been threatened with
the same fate if they do not abandon the region in the next 24 hours.
The Valle del Rio Cimitarra Campesino Association
Index
X. HIGHER EDUCATION - HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND PRIVATISATION
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Higher education in Colombia is governed by Law 30 of 1992, which was
established to ingratiate Colombia into the neo-liberal process of
'opening' the economy and privatisation. Law 30 reaffirmed the tendency
in higher education that has continued since such that 72% of all
university education is now private, with only 28% remaining in the
public domain.
The different actors within the university community have carried out
various organisational forms to resist the policy of privatisation, and
so there exist organisations of lecturers, students, of the non teaching
staff (workers and administrative employees) and of retired staff, so
that each constituency fought to counteract the total elimination of the
public, state university.
The most organised sector within the universities in trade union terms
is SINTRAUNICOL -Sindicato de Trabajadores Universitarios de Colombia -
the University Workers Union of Colombia - which has branches in the
country's 29 state universities; there is also the national federation
of university teachers and three student associations.
Human Rights Violations
Everyone in the university community has been subject to human rights
violations The education sector has suffered the most from
assassinations, disappearances, displacement, assassination attempts and
threats. The majority of universities in the country have been the scene
of murders and attempted murders, producing an exodus or forced
displacement of important teachers and researchers, as well as student
and trade union leaders. The common factor is action by the
paramilitaries, who have formed fronts for operation inside the
universities. These already exist in the universities of Antioquia,
Córdoba, Cesar and Huila and which are in the process of being formed in
the universities of Valle, National in Bogotá, Santander and Nariño.
This is consistent with the vision laid out by Carlos Castaño - one of
the paramilitary chiefs - who in his extensive book on Colombia's
various problems addressed, in a chapter entitled "The turn in the U",
the issue of public universities in a simplistic manner. Castaño
affirmed that universities are full of leftists, communists and
anarchists that have to be dealt with severely or eliminated should they
resist. The turn proposed for the university in the class rooms is away
>from the academic areas that are supposedly a space for left-wing
marxism, and that union, student and professional organisations may only
exist if they do not oppose what has been legally established by the
state and the Colombian government. If not then they, the
paramilitaries, are ready to discipline or eliminate those who do not
pay heed to their directions.
Privatisation Methods
On the other hand there is the imposition of yet more privatisation. The
"Alma Mater" project is the materialisation of this, it consists of a
private entity in Colombia's coffee region which was created to weaken
the zone's five state universities (the universities of Caldas, Quindío,
National in Manizales, Technological University of Pereira and Tolima
University). Alma Mater, with permission from the national education
minister and the approval of the rectors of the state universities is a
foundation that can draw to itself, in the character of a loan,
teachers, auxiliaries, secretaries, students, projects and budgets to
develop programmes, investigations and teaching and those universities
are obliged to provide it with facilities.
Another form of privatisation is taking place in other universities
where due to lack of state funding for their budgets they are
permanently indebted to private finance. The situation at the University
of Valle is of this type. This University has never budgeted for the
welfare of employees once they are retired, generating a pension
liability. In 1993 the Social Security Law 100 the government committed
to put right this pension liability, something that it has
systematically failed to do. Nevertheless the University continued
making monthly payments to its pensioners and to cover the costs took
recourse to costly bank loans, building up an immense debt.
In 1998 a crisis exploded on the University, its debt had passed more
than 60 thousand million pesos, some £17 million, a debt which after a
long process of negotiations reached more than 73 thousand million
pesos (or £22 million - that is nearly £5 million more afte three
years). It was finally agreed that this debt must be paid back over 12
years, by the end of which the University will have paid more than 230
thousand million pesos (£69 million). These payments are guaranteed in a
Performance Agreement, that is the University subject itself to the
administrative, academic as well as financial dictates of its creditor
banks, reducing university autonomy to a caricature. In this form of
privatisation there is no doubt that the only areas taught, researched
and developed are whatever is deemed appropriate by the banks, in the
service of the multinational companies and the Free Trade of Americas
Agreement FTAA strategic project.
>>From the above context, what is most common is that universities are in
an inexorable slow process of cuts, deteriorating and dismantling
university welfare (sports centres, health, food subsidies, library
services etc.) generating high additional costs, more than in the course
fee itself. This rise in costs of being at university does not appear in
the course fees, but nonetheless each student has to assume the costs
individually.
Recent Attacks
Besides all of this, the Colombian government continues launching sharp
attacks on the state universities. On the 24th and 31st of December
2001, two decrees were sent out to strike at university workers, both
times in the middle of the night. Decree 2980 of 24th December denied
the right of collective bargaining. That is to say it ruled that the
associative demands of university employees and workers are not able to
include seeking wage increases or improved terms of service. This is a
decree from the executive, that is the President of the Republic, who is
getting into issues of University Autonomy that under the National
Constitution he is forbidden to do, as has been upheld in many High
Court rulings.
Decree 2912 of 31st December is yet more serious. The decree redefines
elements of public policy against the interests of the state university
according to agreements with the World Bank. A state university
teacher's career has been regulated by law 1444 of 1992, in which the
incentives and compensations for academic excellence, research and
intellectual production are established. That is to say law 1444
motivates both university production and excellence, two elements that
inevitably impinge on and positively affect the students. That is why
state universities have had a high level within higher education
(remembering that more than 70% of the sector is private). We have
places that are internationally recognised in different scenarios. The
state university in Colombia is the site of the best science and
technology, because this system under law 1444 stimulates and rewards
efforts to produce knowledge. But with the signing of the "Extended
Agreement by Colombia with the International Monetary Fund" on 3rd
December 1999 by the then Treasury Minister and by Miguel Urrutia
director of the central bank, the government committed itself to reduce
transfers to health and education, cutting spending "excluding the
payment of interest on the external debt". The new decree 2912 of 31st
December is an application that on the one hand meets the IMF
conditions, and on the other weakens the quality and excellence of the
state university to discourage the production of knowledge, handing this
over to the private institutions.
Against this attack the state university sector developed a series of
strikes, permanent assemblies, meetings, and forums in a national
mobilisation. After four months of pressure the most that government has
conceded is to revise some aspects of decree 2912.
Carlos Gonzalez
[On going to press SINTRAUNICOL is once again on strike, against wage
cuts totalling 69% over the last 8 years. For more information and
messages of support, write to E-mail: sintraunicolcali@yahoo.com]
Index
XI. TELECOM WORKERS IN SECOND WAVE OF OCCUPATIONS - NO SELL OFF!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Colombian governments have been trying to privatise the state
corporation Telecom and its network of local phone companies for the
last 10 years. Telecom signed joint venture 'Shared Risk' contracts with
foreign multinationals Alcatel (Spain), Nortel (US), Ericcson (Sweden),
Siemens (Germany), and Itochu and NEC from Japan to install 1,800,000
telephone lines. The multinationals' investment would be paid back with
sales and call income.
At first sight this seemed an attractive deal, the state corporation
would get new services without investing public funds. But with
1,590,000 lines installed, 413,000 of them still unsold, the
multinationals started demanding US $2,088 million compensation, on top
of bills for US $926 million, which works out at over two thousand
dollars per line. So much for shared risk.
Telecom negotiated with the Pastrana government to take out a $600
million loan to pay to the multinationals to keep them at bay, and in
the meantime proposing a new holding company. The Communication Workers
Union USTC objected, presenting demands in February 2002 denouncing the
one sided joint venture contracts. The union argued that the loan should
be blocked, and that the equipment installed by the multinationals be
taken over. The union was very concerned that conceding to the
multinationals' demand would mean a de facto privatisation, with dire
consequences for workers rights as well as for services to the
community. But it was not listened to.
The multinationals mounted political pressure. Nortel's senators in the
US Congress blocked extension of the ATPA trade agreement, under which
Colombia and its Andean neighbours exports certain commodities to US
markets with lower import duties. The US applied trade protection as a
weapon to pressurise the Colombian government to concede to the
multinationals - who stand to gain a profit of 55% over their original
investment.
The USTC got nowhere with negotiation and decided to take action. The
workers launched a wave of occupations across the country on 14th May,
risking their lives to fight back against neo-liberalism. A series of
confrontations ensued.
At 9am on 17th May an army colonel arrived at the workers occupation in
Buenaventura threatening to dislodge them by force of arms. The workers
contacted the Campaign Against Privatisation, Corruption and the
Criminalisation of Social Protest who immediately put out an
international alert to protect them from a massacre.
The state refined its tactics. The police went into the Bucaramanga
occupation at 3.30am on 20th May, ejecting the workers by force and
arresting 85 of them. On 22nd May the union, the national Telecom
corporation, and Minister of labour Angelino Garzon signed an agreement
in which the employer committed not to take reprisals against workers
involved in the protests, and the union committed to return to normal
working.
But the very next day 58 of the workers were named in criminal
investigations in Floridablanca and Bucaramanga with charges of
violation of the right to work, illegal constraint and sabotage.
Telecom managers argued that only the first of these charges was covered
by their agreement, and they would press charges of illegal constraint
and sabotage.
Faced with escalating criminalisation of its members, the union decided
once again to go into occupation of various work sites of Telecom and
its network of companies.
On 13th June the police, in co-ordinatination with Telecoms security
chief, carried out an attack on the workers in Bogotá. They launched
tear gas into a demonstration of the Communications Workers Union and
stared hitting the workers, 8 were injured and 3 had to stay in
hospital.
The fight to save Colombia's telecommunications is not over, and needs
international support.
Send messages of solidarity to USTC at:
att@col1.telecom.com.co and attmedios@yahoo.com
Index
XII. Beware Free Trade Area of the Americas
----------------------------------------------
The big multinationals and governments of the continent have since 1994
been actively pushing for the implementation of the biggest commercial
creation worldwide, the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas). In
this pact, 34 countries will be represented that cover an area from
Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: all countries from Central America, South
America and the Carribean, Cuba excepted.
In its essence the FTAA is an extension of the NAFTA (the free trade
agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico from 1994) to the whole of
the American continent. We have already seen the consequences of NAFTA
for workers, society and the environment: 1 million more Mexicans earn
less than the minimum wage, with another 8 million families living in
poverty. The industrial zone of the maquiladoras concentrated along the
border of Mexico and the US has suffered a dramatic increase increase of
pollution and toxic waste, a direct consequence of the dominance of
commercial interests in the NAFTA agreement, causing dramatic increases
in cases of hepatitis and deformations at birth.
The FTAA will mean the liberalisation of all environmental and labour
norms, to the advantage of the big multinationals: the privatisation of
social services, health care and education, but also water-sources and
the distribution of it, post services, telecommunication and the
prisons. The FTAA will put an end to small local agriculture, to the
advantage of large-scale production for export like palm oil and cacao.
It will steal the knowledge of indigenous population and patent it,
together with the natural resources of their territory. If these won't
already be flooded by hydroelectric dams of European and American
companies. The patents on medicines will cause a rise in prices, which
means they will become unaffordable for a big part of the population,
stuck in situation of deprivation and hunger.
FTAA condemns the Latin American countries to the use of cheap labour,
with the result the emergence of true 'repúblicas maquiladoras', or
Export Processing Zones on a national scale. It condemns these countries
to change themselves into a dump of toxic waste from the US, it condemns
them to sell out their natural resources, genetic as well as energetic,
and in the end it will lead to the destruction of their indigenous
peoples.
And if the population dares to resist this future of misery and
depression, then the interests of big business will be defended. They
will be defended by the army and the paramilitaries, financed and
trained by the US, as well as private security companies (like DynCorp).
And this will take place by means of the most brute repression, even if
to the detriment of half of the Latin American population. In clearing
the road to the FTAA, these plans seem to be of central importance:
Plan Colombia
A plan of war, presented by the US as a plan to combat drugs and to
develop the area, socially and economically (the humanitarian side,
financed by the EU). Recently, this plan has transformed itself into 'La
Iniciativa Regional Andina' (the regional initiative of the Andes),
which also targets the neighbouring countries of Colombia.
Plan Puebla Panama
A plan with the goal of 'developing' the Central American region,
including all the niceties of the FTAA. Part of this plan are, among
others, the construction of more than 70 hydro-electric dams in Central
America, the creation of maquiladoras in the whole of Chiapas and so on.
The military component of this plan is being presented as 'Nuevo
Horizontes' (new horizons). Another part, the 'Corredor Biológico
Mesoamericano' means factually that the genetical and natural resources
of the region are handed (privatization) over to the hands of the
multinationals. The cultural heritage of the local peoples will be
'protected' by multinationals that will focus on 'ecological tourism'.
Campaign Against FTAA and The Regional Intervention Plans in Latin
America (Netherlands)
There will be a full analysis of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in
the next bulletin.
FTAA | Index
XIII. THE BP CAMPAIGN
---------------
Protests at BP AGM
------------------
Three visiting lawyers, members of the Colombian community and activists
from the Colombian Solidarity Campaign and the Campaign Against The Arms
Trade all worked together to put BP on the spot. Before the AGM started
we put BP on trial, with three questions concerning damage caused by
BP's pipeline, its operations in Cusiana and its lack of co-operation
into the investigation into the murder of Carlos Vargas (see next page).
These same questions were put inside the AGM, with no substantive answer
from BP chair Peter Sutherland, who grew increasingly belligerent.
Our intervention was covered by the Sunday Times, the Independent, the
Financial Times, the Guardian, the Morning Star and Socialist Worker.
BP makes very high claims in its corporate literature for respect of
human rights, the environment and the communities where it operates.
None of these claims have been honoured in Colombia. And so far we have
just received a short note from BP, they have refused to meet either the
lawyers or the Campaign. Having returned to Colombia, one of the lawyers
is now being threatened by the paramilitaries. Many organisations,
including the International Association of Democratic Lawyers have
written to express their concern.
We will continue to campaign for justice for BP's pipeline victims. We
have a lot more to do to raise this issue. The public should know that
Britain's biggest company is acting shamefully in Colombia.
If you would like to help, contact us at e-mail: colombia_sc@hotmail.com
'Outrageous' Sutherland
-----------------------
"An Irish political leader has refused to explain what his associates
have been up to in Colombia or to spell out the relationship between
his organisation and one of the groups involved in violence in that
country. The man is Peter Sutherland, former Irish Attorney General,
then chairman of Allied Irish Banks, later European Commissioner for
Competition, subsequently director general of the World Trade
Organisation, currently on the board of the multinational Ericsson
company and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Oh, and chairman of British
Petroleum.
Sutherland became embroiled in what the Times described as a 'shouting
match' at BP's AGM when a shareholder put questions about the company's
use in Colombia of a security firm with links to right wing
paramilitaries. Sutherland was having none of it. The allegations were
'outrageous'. He ordered the shareholder to 'sit down now!'. When the
persistent chap continued to demand answers, Sutherland, according to
press reports, "finally cracked" and declared, "This AGM is not going to
be allowed to become a pantomime". Apart from his generalised dismissal
of the allegations as 'outrageous', Sutherland refused point blank to
respond.. "We on the board and...most of the shareholders are not
concerned with these matters."
Has Sutherland been denounced by any mainstream politician or media
commentator in Ireland for refusing even to attempt to rebut the serious
changes laid against his subordinates? No. Why then should Gerry Adams
be pursued for an explanation of what three Republicans were doing in
Colombia?
We cannot say for certain that Adams even knew that the three had
travelled to Colombia. But we do know that Sutherland will have had
full access to all information about BP's operations in the country.
Why aren't TV interviewers giving him the third degree? Where are the
editorials in the daily 'papers? The reason has to do with the scabrous
nature of a political systerm whose malign priorities are reflected in
the operations of both BP and the mainstream media."
(From Hot Press, 23rd May)
Concern for Lawyers
-------------------
A lawyer and peasants who are suing BP's oil pipeline company have
received death threats from paramilitaries in Colombia. Please urgently
fax BP's pipeline company, Ocensa, and the governor of Antioquia,
expressing your concern. Use the proposed text below or write your own.
The lawyer, Marta Hinestroza, visited England in April 2002 to publicise
the case against BP. Many of your will have met her while she was here.
The trip has made her a more high profile target and we are extremely
concerned for her safety. She and her colleague are representing 200
peasant families whose land has been destroyed by BP's oil line and now
live in abject poverty.
PROPOSED TEXT:
We are extremely concerned to hear that paramilitaries have made death
threats against peasants in Zaragoza municipality (Antioquia) and their
lawyer Marta Hinestroza who has lodged civil suits against the pipeline
companies OLEODUCTO CENTRAL S.A "OCENSA" and OLEODUCTO COLOMBIA "ODC".
We urgently ask the civil and military authorities to take measures to
protect their lives.
Hemos tenido conocimiento de amenazas de muerte por parte de
paramilitares contra las vidas de campesinos del Municipio de Zaragoza
Antioquia y su apoderada MARTA HINESTROZA quien adelanta demandas
civiles contra las sociedades OLEODUCTO CENTRAL S.A "OCENSA" y
OLEODUCTO COLOMBIA "ODC", por los daños y perjuicios que fueron
ocasionados con la construcción de tales oleoductos, por lo que
solicitamos enèrgicamente que las autoridades civiles y militares les
brinden las medidas de seguridad pertinentes para la protección de sus
vidas.
Ocensa General Manager, Bogota:
MANUEL CASTRO BLANCO
Ocensa, Calle 78 No 11-17 Bogotà. Colombia
Tel: (571) 3250345 Fax: (571)2174815
E-mail: m_castro@ocensa.com.co.
DR. DENIS MACSHANE MP
Under-Secretary of State, The Foreign Office Whitehall, London SW1
E-mail: macshaned@parliament.uk
Solidarity News
---------------
- On 22nd May, the international federation for workers in the
extractive industries ICEM, the Belgian trade union federation the FGTB,
USO (Colombian oil workers' union) and the ICFTU organised a
demonstration in front of the Colombia in Brussels.
- Gilberto Torres, the oil worker from Casanare who works on the BP
pipeline, and a regional leader of USO, was detained by the
paramilitaries for 6 weeks, and then released after a campaign of
international pressure. He will be speaking Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival,
the annual celebration of trade unionism over the weekend of Saturday
20th July and Sunday 21st July 2002. (How to get there: Tolpuddle near
Dorchester, Dorset The A35 by-passes Tolpuddle Village. Signs to the
Festival site).
- USO are calling for an international delegation to visit their
headquarters in Barrancabermeja this November.
Index
XIV. 'A DEATH FORETOLD ONE THOUSAND TIMES'
--------------------------------------------
Chilling Colombian police and court documents implicate BP, Britain's
biggest company, in the murder of an environmental regulator who was
about to blow the whistle on corruption.
A paramilitary death squad in Eastern Colombia, where BP operates a
massive oil field, assassinated Carlos Vargas in 1998.
However, government investigators have gathered evidence alleging
someone in BP's controversial security department contracted out the hit
to the death squad. They have also linked that death squad to the local
army brigade set up to protect the oil company's sprawling
installations.
Now BP, which is close to the Blair government, is under pressure from
dissident Labour MPs to honour its policy of "radical openness" and
reveal the names of their security personnel in Colombia at the time of
the murder.
So far it has not done so despite requests from the Colombian attorney
general's respected human right unit, which is handling the criminal
investigation.
A lawyer for the Vargas family said he has been waiting two years to
call the British and local security personnel to give evidence about the
murder, as part of a two million dollar compensation claim against the
Colombian government.
BP security in Colombia is trained and directed by the shadowy
Anglo-American corporate mercenary firm, Defence Systems Limited. DSL
has in the past repeatedly refused to co-operate with any Colombian
government inquiry into its activities on behalf of BP.
Campaigners, some dressed as Colombian paramilitaries, raised Vargas's
murder during BP's tumultuous annual general meeting in London last
April.
BP chairman, Peter Sutherland, told shareholders in the Royal Festival
Hall there was "no truth" in the "outrageous" allegations linking them
to the killing. Chief executive, Lord Browne, had previously reassured
the meeting that BP does not tolerate "bribery."
On 2 December 1998, two assassins on a white motorbike shot dead Carlos
Vargas as he was being driven to his sister's home for lunch in Yopal,
the regional capital of Casanare. He was 49 and married with a daughter.
The killers, who did not wear helmets, were identified by witnesses as
they fled to a nearby safehouse where a third member of the death squad
hid the motorbike. Vargas was elected director of the environmental
regulator, Corporinoquia, in January 1998. He was not the establishment
candidate and won by just one vote.
Vargas was responsible for a huge area of south-east Colombia dominated
by BP and other oil companies. He awarded environmental licences,
monitored compliance and, when necessary, imposed fines and shut down
oil wells.
A report by the Colombian secret police, DAS, one week after Vargas's
murder, suggested he could have been killed by left-wing guerillas,
fighting a 38 year-old civil war, or even by his political enemies. But
DAS appeared more convinced that the oil companies were behind the
assassination.
The DAS report said Vargas was due to meet government officials in
Bogota on 4th December to discuss non-payment of reparations for
environmental damage caused by the oil companies. Court documents also
reveal Vargas was about to go public with a dossier on corruption
between local officials and oil companies, including BP, over the
awarding of environmental licences.
The DAS report says Vargas's enforcement of environmental regulations
had cost oil companies millions of dollars. It claimed "the oil industry
was interested in removing [the regulator] from his post" and "could
have put a contract on him."
Vargas's wife, Nelly, later testified to the Attorney General's human
rights unit that her husband had always refused to do "deals under the
table" with the oil companies.
Four months before his murder, Vargas organised a filmed public meeting
to oppose BP's application to the Environment Ministry for one all-
encompassing exploration licence which would bypass Corporinoquia's
oversight.
Vargas was concerned about the reaction of the oil companies to his
opposition, his official advisor, Alfredo Suarez, told the criminal
investigation. Suarez said his boss believed these companies had
financial links to paramilitaries operating in the oil region of
Casanare. BP has always denied such links.
However, the most damaging evidence of a plot to kill Carlos Vargas
comes from the wife of the third member of the death squad. She is
called Dilia and her husband, Gabino Ortiz Granados, was the man who
provided a safehouse in Yopal for the killers immediately after the hit.
Dilia only spoke to a local police officer when Gabino was shot in the
head just two months after Vargas. She believes her husband was killed
because he knew too much about the plot.
Dilia told the officer: "[Gabino] said to me a BP official spoke with
commandante Chubazco, who at the time was head of the paramilitary in
Casanare, and asked him to do a job. He was referring to getting rid of
the director of Corporinoquia because he was going to revitalise a
complaint about contamination or reforestation which would cost the
[oil] company a lot of money." Today Dilia and the police officer that
interviewed her are in hiding.
Gabino's death was part of an extraordinary sequence of three murders,
which effectively stymied the criminal investigation into Vargas's
assassination. Chubazco, the paramilitary leader, was assassinated ten
days after Vargas.
Two months later Gabino was dead. In February 2000 police finally caught
one of Vargas's killers, a young paramilitary called Rodys Cuevas, but
he was murdered in prison eight weeks later, before he could testify.
Both the assassins, Rodys Cuevas and Jorge Reinoso, who is still at
large, plus two other local paramilitaries named in the criminal
investigation were former members of the Colombian army's 16th Brigade
in Casanare.
This 5000-strong brigade was set up and is now indirectly funded by BP
and its consortium partners - Total of France, US oil giant Triton and
Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company - to protect installations
and staff from leftwing guerillas who regard BP as a military target.
The rebels have killed and kidnapped its workers.
In April 2000, government investigators asked BP and two other oil
companies to provide the names of its security personnel, including
those who left the country soon after Vargas's murder.
The other two oil companies - Occidental and Petrobras - complied
immediately but BP refused. Instead it approached the Attorney General
who assured them the request was legitimate.
At BP's AGM in April, an irate Peter Sutherland told bemused
shareholders that the company had offered the Attorney General "full co-
operation" and dismissed the allegation of complicity in the murder as
"ludicrous."
However a BP spokesman could not confirm that the names of its security
personnel have now been provided, some two years after the oil giant was
first asked by the murder inquiry.
This lack of co-operation contradicts BP's much-vaunted commitment to
"radical openness" outlined in their business policies.
The links between the death squad that killed Vargas and the 16th
Brigade also undermine BP's belief it can have military protection "free
of human rights violations." Prior to the Vargas murder, two retired
Colombian army officers working for BP security in Casanare had left
because their past links to paramilitary death squads were exposed.
Nor is this the first time that the Attorney General's human rights unit
has investigated BP's security arrangements in Colombia. BP's security
advisers, DSL, refused to co-operate over claims it had run
"intelligence cells", brought in weapons and was secretly training the
police in counter-insurgency tactics. Nevertheless BP renewed its
lucrative contract.
At the AGM Peter Sutherland refused to answer one insistent campaigner
who asked why BP would not terminate DSL's contract.
DSL is the type of firm that foreign secretary Jack Straw is considering
regulating in the recent green paper on the use of private military
companies to replace British troops in conflict zones.
Two dissident Labour MPs, Dr Ian Gibson and Jeremy Corbyn, have written
to Lord Browne expressing concern over BP's activities in Colombia.
Dr Gibson also met one of the environmental lawyers who helped Carlos
Vargas develop his corruption dossier. The MP heard about four murders
in 1997 of a campesino family who brought a legal action against BP for
environmental contamination caused by gas flaring at the central
processing facility. Gibson said he would raise these issues in the
Commons.
The compensation claim by the Vargas family contains a chilling line
which sums up the price paid by those who speak out in Colombia. It
simply says:
"The death of Carlos Vargas was a death foretold one thousand times and
the authorities were deaf and blind."
BP is not a defendant in the compensation claim but is named as a
possible intellectual author. The family is claiming moral and material
damages and just over half a million dollars for various local
environmental programmes. They also want a public apology by the
Colombian government.
The different security arms of the Colombian state directly named in the
claim - the army and the police - are all key players in protecting the
Colombian oil industry. BP has individual contracts with both these
security forces. Family lawyer Eduardo Carreño said by eliminating the
death squad members it is now almost impossible to discover who ordered
Vargas's death.
A spokeswoman for the Attorney General's human rights unit said the
criminal investigation is still open. But the government investigators
who originally asked BP to comply with the names of its security
personnel are now in exile. They received death threats after their
legal pursuit of the notorious 'Butcher of Uraba' General Rito Alejo Del
Rio, whose links to paramilitary groups in Colombia's dirty war are
well-documented.
by MICHAEL GILLARD and MELISSA JONES
An edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times on 21st
April 2002.
Index
XV. NESTLÉ'S TERROR
-----------------------
We repudiate the repression and persecution unleashed by the
transnational corporation NESTLÉ in Colombia against its workers and the
National Union of Food Industry Workers SINALTRAINAL in the Cicolac
factory, in Valledupar, Cesar department and in its milk reception
plants.
NESTLÉ de Colombia S.A. has not only denied any solution to the demands
presented by SINALTRAINAL on 28th January 2002, but on the contrary it
show an intent to get rid of the collective agreement, leaving 400
workers and their families without rights that they have acquired over
50 years of permanent struggle. In the last 15 years, 7 trade union
leaders working for NESTLÉ have been assassinated.
NESTLÉ has responded to the workers fighting for their welfare and lives
with violence and terror. The corporation has tried to leave 96
provisional workers and their families without daily sustenance, while
breaking the contracts of another 58 workers so that there jobs can be
sub-contacted as cheap labour through agencies - casualisation.
This arbitrary approach by NESTLÉ attacks the human rights of the
workers and their right of association, and is a form of terror to
destabilise their trade union organisation, strike against labour
stability and respond aggressively to the demands presented by the trade
union. NESTLÉ's intention is to snatch away our acquired rights and to
destroy the trade union But NESTLÉ is not only attacking the workers; it
is also attacking the communities, against food security, against
regional development and against the national economy. NESTLÉ is
contributing to the impoverishment of our people and to the Colombian
conflict.
NESTLÉ is in large measure responsible for the difficult situation being
experienced by the coffee and milk sectors in Colombia. In 2001 it
imported 25,125 tonnes of powdered milk - equivalent to 200 million
litres of fresh milk- to use as a raw material. NESTLÉ moreover is one
of the beneficiaries of the elimination of the World Coffee Agreement
which has led to the lowering of wholesale prices to just US 64 cents
(per kilo). In the first quarter of 2002 powdered milk imports produced
losses in the domestic milk sector 63,000 millions of pesos (£18
million). This policy has generated misery for small and medium dairy
farmers and for peasants in the coffee growing zone.
For SINALTRAINAL this conflict with NESTLÉ represents the struggle for
the defence of our rights, for national food sovereignty for the welfare
of the population and for peace with social justice. That is why we
demand that the Colombian state immediately stops the importation of
milk supplies and food products.
NESTLÉ 's production is located on Colombia's northern coast, a zone of
great social confrontation. The corporation maintains that the union and
the workers are responsible for the conflict, causing management to
reduce purchases of fresh milk (the real cause was the powdered milk
imports). Several union leaders are being threatened by the
paramilitaries in the area. We make NESTLÉ responsible for the life and
security of our comrades.
Globalisation has deepened the degree of misery of our communities and
has placed our natural resources and our working abilities of our people
at the disposal of the transnationals. Globalisation of the struggle
against the transnationals would be an act of sovereignty, of justice,
of welfare and of life. We ask you to help us realise these noble
ideals.
Please send messages of protest and solidarity to:
CESAR DE LOS RIOS
Presidente NESTLE DE COLOMBIA S.A.
E-mail, delosrioscesar@co.nestle.com, ana.arboleda@co.nestle.com
NESTLE SUIZA
Fax. 41-21-9211885; 41-21- 9211720; 41-22-9216488; 41-22-9244800
E-mail, enviarlos a través de la www.nestle.com/
ANGELINO GARZON
Ministro de Trabajo - Colombia
E-mail, despachomt@mintrabajo.gov.co
"SINALTRAINAL" - Colombia
E-mail, sinaltrainaldinal@hotmail.com,
JAVIER CORREA S. EDGAR PAEZ M.
Presidente Dirección Nacional
Index
XVI. Things Getting Worse for Coke
-------------------------------------
GROWING INTERNATIONAL UNITY
In April the International Teamsters organised a tour inside the USA of
trade unionists fighting Coca Cola's vicious policies around the globe.
Luis Javier Correa Suarez, President of Colombia's food and beverage
union Sinaltrainal, described the vicious attacks on union workers in
his country. Seven Colombian Coca-Cola workers have been brutally
assaulted and murdered during periods of negotiations with their
employer.
Jose Francisco Argueta de la Cruz, General Secretary of Guatemala's
Central Bottling Company's Workers Union -Coca-Cola. "Since Coke fired
all its union leaders, conditions in Guatemalan Coke facilities are
deteriorating".
Farayi Makanda, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Transport and General
Workers Union, Andrew Casino, National President of the Alliance of
Coca-Cola Unions - Philippines and Bruce Amidon, former Teamsters Local
79 shop steward, reported a host of human and workers' rights violations
at their facilities. Coke has denied all the above claims.
Harvard students called on Coca-Cola to take responsibility for the
safety of workers at its production, bottling and distribution centers
and to protect workers' rights around the globe.
The group of international union representatives travelled to Coca-
Cola's annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday in New York City, where
they met African American Coca-Cola workers still angry because
conditions have not improved at the Atlanta based company since it
agreed in November 2000 to pay $192.5 million to settle a class-action
race-discrimination lawsuit and promised to change the way it manages,
promotes and treats minority employees.
INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL
SINALTRAINAL have decided to convene an International Public Hearing on
assassinations of its members in Coca Cola plants. It divided into 3
sessions:
· 1st session July 22, 2002 in Atlanta, USA.
· 2nd October 12, 2002 in Brussels, Belgium.
· 3rd December 5, 2002 in Bogota.
Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos
SINALTRAINAL Carrera 15 No. 35-18. Telephone: 2 45 53 25 and 2 32 46 26.
Bogota, Colombia
E-mail: sinaltrainaldinal@hotmail.com
audpubcoka@hotmail.com
Index
XVII. TABACO CAMPAIGN GOES FORWARD
------------------------------------
The people of Tabaco, in La Guajira, have won a victory which may be
unprecedented for a rural community in Colombia. On May 9th, 2002, the
Supreme Court of Colombia ruled that the village, demolished last year
by mining company Intercor, must be reconstructed on a new site, as the
villagers have been demanding. A meeting between local residents and
civil authorities was scheduled to take place on 14th June to discuss
the resourcing of the relocation arrangements.
The community was displaced because of the expansion of the world's
largest coal strip mine at El Cerrejon Norte in the northern province of
La Guajira. The mine affects both African Colombian communities like
Tabaco and Indigenous Wayuu communities. Mine operator Intercor (100%
owned by US multinational ExxonMobil, also known as Esso) demolished
most of the houses in the village in August 2001; continued the
demolitions in December; and completed the task in January, 2002, when
the village's school, clinic and communications centre were finally
destroyed and the cemetery desecrated and bulldozed despite the fact
that it still contained the remains of villagers' ancestors. The
community's lawyer, Armando Perez, spent 37 days during December and
January under house arrest for denouncing the complicity of a local
judge in the company's actions.
Although Intercor operated the mine at El Cerrejon Norte, it only owned
50% of it. The other 50% was owned by a Consortium consisting of three
of the world's biggest mining companies, Anglo-American, BHP-Billiton
and Glencore. Anglo-American is largely financed from South Africa,
where its roots go deep into the soil of the apartheid era, but its head
office is now in London. BHP-Billiton was formed last year through the
merger of Billiton (also financed largely from South Africa but with its
head office in London) and Australian mining giant BHP, which has a
scandalous history of environmental destruction and disregard for
Indigenous Peoples' rights. Glencore is a private but hugely significant
mining investment house based in Switzerland. In February, 2002, this
Consortium bought out ExxonMobil so as to achieve 100% ownership and
operating control of El Cerrejon Norte. The final destruction of Tabaco
was ExxonMobil's self-interested parting gift to its colleagues. It
means that the Consortium can try to deny responsibility for the
demolition while ExxonMobil can say that it is no longer involved.
This is exactly what happened at the ExxonMobil Annual Shareholders'
Meeting in Dallas, Texas, on 28th May. Earlier, the London AGM of Anglo-
American, held on 10th May, was leafleted by members of the Colombia
Solidarity Campaign. Anglo-American's Public Relations Officer Edward
Bickham told the CSC members that the company was "looking at the whole
issue of relocation".
The new Consortium had retained as its President Hernan Martinez, who
managed operations at El Cerrejon during the demolitions. After an
international campaign for his dismissal, he has now been replaced.
Remedios Fajardo, President of the Wayuu Indigenous organisation Yanama,
reports that the Constitutional Court has now decreed that no mining
projects in Indigenous areas can go ahead without prior consultation
with the Indigenous Peoples affected. She and Armando Perez attended
the Exxon AGM and meetings with supporters in Seattle, Washington and
Salem, Massachusetts where electricity is provided by a power station
owned by PG&E and uses coal from El Cerrejon Norte.
TAKE ACTION
It is necessary to maintain pressure on local and national government
and on the corporations involved if this legal decision is to be carried
out. If you have time, please write to me, care of the Colombia
Solidarity Campaign, and we will provide you with model letters to:
· the Mayor of Hatonuevo, the Municipality in which Tabaco is situated
· the President of Colombia and the Public Defender, Dr Luis Eduardo
Cifuentes
· Anglo American and BHP Billiton in London.
Richard Solly
Index
XVIII. Britain's favourite fruit, the banana, stained with banana
workers' blood
------------------------------------------------------------------
At 2:00 a.m. on the morning of 16th May 2002, around 400 hooded men
violently attacked banana workers on the Los Alamos plantations, owned
by the Noboa company in Ecuador. These workers have been organising for
proper working conditions and their rights under Ecuadorian law. The
workers have been on a legal and non-violent strike since 6th May.
Preliminary reports are that a dozen or more workers were wounded, at
least two seriously by gunshot wounds, that women were abused and that
the workers' few possessions looted.
The Ecuadorian banana workers' struggle is being watched very carefully
by banana workers' unions throughout Latin America, whose wages and
benefits are threatened by the dominance of non-union, low-wage banana
exports from Ecuador, the world's biggest banana exporting country.
Ecuador is leading the race to the bottom in labour and environmental
conditions.
The unions representing the Los Alamos workers have just been registered
by the Minister of Labour. They are the first new unions in Ecuador for
many years. This is significant in a country where all but a handful of
the 300,000+ banana workers are unionised, where wages are low and where
conditions are some of the worst in the Latin American banana industry.
However, this violence threatens this unionisation process.
It became apparent that some of the workers had been wounded, one man
lay on the ground having been shot in the stomach. (We thought that he
was dead as he was immobile). He was lying behind the police car but the
police didn't help him. We quickly got him onto the back of a pickup
along with another injured man and some other workers. We drove
immediately to the clinic where they got some medical attention.
While we were in the clinic another worker arrived. He had a bullet in
his forehead but miraculously, although he still has the bullet in his
head, the wound was superficial.'
The workers are on strike to demand that they are paid overtime, as
inscribed in the Social Security system, and provided with healthcare
facilities, fair wages and job security.
Threats have been made on another plantation, Rio Culebra, with a
different owner where there are also striking workers. The water and
electricity supplies were cut off at the beginning of the strike to the
workers' living quarters in the plantation. A visiting delegation of
trade union members from Britain (GMB, TGWU and USDAW), and Ireland
(MANDATE), along with UK organisations War On Want and Banana Link
witnessed the appalling living conditions faced by the workers on this
other plantation, Rio Culebra, at the end of April. In spite of the
delegation's pleas, the water and electricity supplies have not been
restored.
Ecuador produces about 35% of world banana exports. The owner of the
Noboa Corporation is Alvaro Noboa Pontón, candidate to the Presidency
and one of the richest men in Latin America. Noboa is the fourth biggest
banana company in the world (after Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte).
Jan Nimmo, Banana Link Scottish Worker
Banana Link: 38-40 Exchange Street,
Norwich NR2 1AX
Tel: 01603 765670 Fax: 01603 761645
Email: blink@gn.apc.org
Website: www.bananalink.org.uk
FENACLE: Small farmers, indigenous peoples organisation and banana
workers' union federation
Email: fenacle@easy.pacifictel.net
Background
Ecuadorean bananas are grown on 5,000 farms covering over 320,000 acres
of a country where 85% of people live below the poverty line.
Over 300,000 workers - at least two million people if their families are
counted - depend on waged labour in these plantations. Most workers earn
around £3 a day, whilst it is calculated that they need at least double
that to cover their most basic needs. 12-14 hour days are common; child
labour and lower wages for women are widespread. Most employers flout
the law and fail to register workers with the national social security
institution.
Until around 1980 there was a reasonably high level of unionisation in
the industry, but employers conspired to completely rid their farms of
unions, in some cases by violence.
In 2001 there were just 1200 union members organised in a few
plantations. Workers feared instant reprisals if they as much as
mentioned the word 'union'.
US-based Human Rights Watch released a report on the Ecuadorian banana
industry on 25th April. This found wide-spread violations of worker
rights, including extensive anti-union behaviour which has effectively
blocked the formation of banana unions in Ecuador for the past twenty
years
(http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/ecuador/).
The Los Alamos strike
Monday 25th February saw the first major strike action by Ecuadorian
banana workers in over 20 years. More than 1400 workers at the Los
Alamos plantation producing for the Noboa corporation (Alamos Division)
went on strike in support of basic labour rights, established under
Ecuadorian law.
Management initially responded to the strike action by firing eight
union leaders. After legal advice, the rest of the workers went back to
work the next day, since their strike was technically illegal. Union
supporters subsequently began signing up hundreds of members and filed
an application for legal registration of a union covering all workers.
In the first week, 500 workers signed up for the union.
The workers also applied to register three unions, one for each of the
contracting companies, which manage the plantation labour, which are
their direct employers. (On the 26th April 2002 the Ecuadorian Labour
Minister officially approved the new trade unions in Cliades, Beducor
and Nenro (Alamos Division).)
On 11th March 123 workers were fired, with another 180 workers being
laid off that same day 'for lack of work'. Workers were prevented from
entering the plantation by private security backed up by state police.
The application to register a general Los Alamos workers' union was
turned down by the Labour Ministry on 27th March, on the grounds that
the named leaders no longer worked for the company.
On 5th May, at a general assembly of the union, the workers decided to
go on indefinite strike from Monday the 6th May. The decision was made
following the firing of three union activists the week before, following
the approval of the new unions on 26th April.
Index
XIX. VENEZUELA SINCE THE COUP
--------------------------------
Since the failure of the reactionary coup of 11-13 April and the return
to power of President Hugo Chávez, it has become apparent that there are
still serious tensions in Venezuela. The right-wing opposition which
backed the coup continues to show vigorous hostility to Chávez and to
call for a referendum or early elections to force him out of office, and
the US continues to push for a neo-liberal reorientation of Venezuelan
policy; but the popular base of support for 'chavismo', organised in the
Círculos Bolivarianos, is pressing for a radicalisation of the
revolutionary process and warning of the danger of a new coup attempt.
US hostility
Immediately after his return Chávez called for reconciliation and
dialogue, but the reaction of the right-wing parties, the media and
business circles was not encouraging. Although the government has shown
commendable respect for constitutional and judicial norms in its
investigation of the coup, the conspirators have shown no signs of
repentance, and the US State Department recently had the effrontery to
ask the Venezuelan government not to issue suggestions that the US may
have been involved in the coup, since this "could raise the level of
resentment against the US, or anti-Americanism" in the country, which
would "not be in the interest" of either country. As if the real cause
of growing anti-Americanism in Venezuela was not the fact of blatant US
interference and hostility to the country's legitimate government!
The politico-military situation remains complex: Pedro Carmona, the
businessman who led the spurious 48-hour regime, was under house arrest
and subject to trial, but on 23 May he took refuge in the Colombian
ambassador's house, and six days later he was in Bogotá, probably en
route to the US. At the same time it was said that over 600 officers
were also subject to trial for involvement in the coup, and since new
military promotions have to be ratified by Congress on 5 July, Chávez
has proposed many promotions but has had to include many Colonels or
lower-rank officers, which has not gone down well in the military.
Recent weeks have seen growing tensions, with recently retired officers
planning to demonstrate in military uniform on 20 June in solidarity
with those remanded in custody, and the government declaring this to be
illegal. Right-wing civilian groups have also been demonstrating and
demanding an anti-Chávez referendum.
Although many on the left fear that Chávez' conciliatory gestures are a
sign of weakness, his political astuteness should not be underestimated.
The US, in keeping with the blatant hypocrisy of its support for the
"democratic" coup, would dearly love to find an excuse to invoke the OAS
Inter-American Democratic Charter against Venezuela, but Chávez' strict
respect for constitutional norms has made this almost impossible. Thus
on Sunday June 2nd, just before a crucial OAS meeting in Barbados,
Chávez announced that he had invited the US Congressional Black Caucus
to act as observers and mediators in his attempt to foster a national
dialogue (the black members of Congress had written to him expressing
their support and condemning the coup). In terms of international
solidarity, the revolutionary government has also received visits by the
French rural activist José Bové, who expressed his support for the land
reform struggle, and by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo headed by Hebe
de Bonafini.
In a move which many will find perplexing, Chávez recently (in the first
week of June) gave a cordial reception to an official of the World Bank,
who came away hypocritically praising the Venezuelan leader's efforts to
promote social justice and reduce poverty while maintaining fiscal
discipline. But Venezuela has not accepted World Bank or IMF diktats -
it is preserving financial stability on its own terms, knowing that an
Argentinian-type collapse would be catastrophic for the progress of the
Bolivarian Revolution. This is not Cuba in 1960 - there is no Soviet
Union to bail Chávez out if he burns his boats. In fact, Venezuela is
more like the Cuba of today, striving to defend a progressive social
policy while recognising the need to participate in a hostile world
market (with the difference that in Venezuela the revolution has just
begun, unlike Cuba which is defending a 40-year-old revolution under
siege).
In this situation, popular mobilisation and military support are
crucial, and it is clear that Chávez and his supporters are well aware
of this. The círculos bolivarianos continue to grow, and in a recent
article the President's brother, Adán Chávez, called for urgent
theoretical debate in order to "advance towards the formation of the
Party of the Bolivarian Revolution, a party which in addition to having
a solid electoral apparatus must become the organic and political force
of this new period" and which must overcome narrow group interests to
achieve the "consolidation of the Bolivarian Revolution".
This concept of a vanguard party operating in a radically democratic and
pluralist system is certainly original, and confirms the international
significance of the Venezuelan process. As for Venezuelan relations with
Colombia, following the Colombian establishment's support for the coup
and the election of Uribe Vélez, they could hardly be worse. If Uribe
hopes to solve matters by force and repression, he cannot count on
Venezuelan support.
David Raby
Venezuela | Index
XX. Guerrillas, Drugs and Human Rights in U.S. Colombia Policy,
1988-2002
---------------------------------------------------------------------
National Security Archive Update, May 3, 2002
DOCUMENTS SHOW DEPTH OF US INVOLVEMENT IN ANTI-GUERRILLA CONFLICT
Over the past 15 years, Congress has insisted that U.S. security
assistance for Colombia be restricted to combating the drug trade rather
than fighting the long-standing civil war, in large part because of
human rights concerns. Now, the Bush administration is pressing to lift
those restrictions and allow all past, present and future aid to be used
in operations against guerilla forces.
But recently declassified U.S. documents show that despite the legal
limits and repeated public assurances by government officials, U.S. aid
has blurred the lines between counterdrug and counterinsurgency to the
point where the U.S. is already in direct confrontation with the
guerillas and on the brink of ever deeper involvement in Colombia's
seemingly intractable civil conflict.
Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the new
documents, published on the web by the National Security Archive's
Colombia documentation project, cover the period from 1988 to the
present, with particular focus on issues stemming from the provision of
U.S. security assistance.
Key points include the following:
- As early as the first Bush administration, the U.S. Andean Strategy
was developed as a deal struck with Andean governments to provide them
with counterdrug aid that could also be used against their principal
adversary: the guerillas.
- Contrary to repeated official statements about narco-guerillas, U.S.
intelligence analyses of guerilla involvement in the drug trade have
been decidedly mixed. One skeptical CIA report concluded that, officials
in Lima and Bogota, if given antidrug aid for counterinsurgency
purposes, would turn it to pure antiguerilla operations with little
payoff against trafficking.
- Two Colombian brigades that lost U.S. aid in September 2000 for human
rights violations work as part of a joint strike force with antidrug
battalions specifically created to qualify for U.S. funds. The new
units, according to one document, were bedding down with a
counterguerilla battalion kown for its collaboration with illegal
paramilitary groups.
- The U.S.-Colombia end-use agreement intended to guarantee that
counterdrug aid be used only in drug producing areas and only for
counternarcotics operations came to be interpreted so broadly as to
render its provisions virtually meaningless. Documents indicate that the
U.S. eventually redefined the area in which the aid could be used as the
entire national territory of Colombia.
- As the end-use agreement was being negotiated with the Colombian
defense ministry, a congressional delegation led by Rep. Dennis Hastert
(R-IL) currently Speaker of the House of Representatives who was then
chairman of the House subcommittee on national security secretly
encouraged Colombian military officials to ignore human rights
conditions on U.S. aid.
- CIA and other intelligence reports from the late 1990s on the
notorious Colombian paramilitaries suggested that the Colombian
government lacked the will to go after these groups. A 1998 CIA report
found that, informational links and instances of active co-ordination
between the military and the paramilitaries are likely to continue and
perhaps even increase.
The documents are available at the following URL:
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69
Index
XXI. PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT AND THE US'S TERROR WAR IN COLOMBIA
-----------------------------------------------------------------
During the 1980s, US counter-insurgency took on a new form, and became
what is today known as Low Intensity Conflict (LIC). With the Vietnam
experience behind them, US military planners recognised two crucial
lessons that led to this change. First, the American public was not
prepared to tolerate heavy US casualties in its imperial wars. Second,
and more crucially, US strategists recognised that military victory is
no longer the primary objective in these new LIC. The new objective is
the political delegitimisation of the enemy and the management of public
opinion. Simply stated, destroy popular support for the enemy by
discrediting them and the victory will follow. In Colombia today, this
new form of LIC has found an active application.
Opinion polls conducted in 1987 found that 76% of all Americans thought
that the Colombian government was corrupt, and 80% wanted sanctions
imposed upon it. In response to this, the Colombian state embarked on
its own LIC to win the hearts and minds of the American people. It
employed the services of a PR company, the Sawyer/Miller Group, to
transform the perceptions of the Colombian state as a corrupt and brutal
abuser of human rights, to a staunch ally of the US in its so-called
'war on drugs'.
Sawyer/Miller explained that "the main mission is to educate the
American media about Colombia. The message is that there are 'bad' and
'good' people in Colombia and that the government is the good guy." In
1991 alone, Colombia gave over $3.1 million to an advertising campaign.
The campaign placed newspaper adds and TV commercials asking the
American people to remember the bravery of the Colombian military in its
war against drugs.
Sawyer/Miller regularly use the American press to distribute pro-
Colombian government propaganda with the routine production of
pamphlets, letters to editors and ads.
However, it is the transformation of the armed protagonists in
Colombia's conflict that has had the most effect. In recently
declassified documentation, the US Ambassador to Colombia in 1996, Myle
Frechette, admits that the perception of the FARC as narco-guerillas,
'was put together by the Colombian military, who considered it a way to
obtain U.S. assistance in the counterinsurgency'. The PR job seems to
have worked as the US has now made Colombia the third largest recipient
of US military aid in the world today.
The 'anti-terror' orientation With the election of Bush, and after
September 11th, a new 'anti-terror' orientation has occurred in US
policy toward Colombia, the US Attorney General, John Ashcroft stating
that 'the State Department has called the FARC the most dangerous
international terrorist group based in the Western Hemisphere'. US
policy was originally sold as an anti-drug campaign, but has now
switched to an anti-terror justification. In fighting their anti-drug
and anti-terror wars in Colombia, Washington has given Colombia $1.3
billion in 2001-2002 and another $700 million has been lined up for
2003. The US has instructed the Colombian military to concentrate its
war against the leftist FARC rebel insurgents in the South of Colombia.
These 'narco-terrorists' are to be targeted, presumably because these
are the primary 'terrorists' and drug-traffickers.
In 1997, James Milford, the former Deputy Administrator with the Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA), stated that Carlos Castaño, the chief of the
paramilitary AUC is a "major cocaine trafficker in his own right" and
has close links to the powerful North Valle drug syndicate. Milford went
on to say "there is little to indicate the insurgent groups are
trafficking in cocaine themselves". Donnie Marshall, the current
Administrator of the DEA, stated in 2001 that "the FARC controls certain
areas of Colombia and in those regions generate revenue by "taxing"
local drug related activities".
Marshall goes on to state categorically that "at present, there is no
corroborated information that the FARC is involved directly in the
shipment of drugs from Colombia to international markets". Like
Milford, the US's DEA Director, also stated that unlike the FARC, the
right-wing paramilitary groups "The Carlos Castano organization appears
to be directly involved in processing and exporting cocaine".
The rebels then are clearly not international drug traffickers and the
narco-guerilla myth serves a useful propaganda pretext for US
interventionism within Colombia's conflict.
More importantly however, by associating the rebels with drugs, the US
obscures the role that the drug-funded paramilitaries play in its dirty
war against Colombia's civil society. The role of the US in Colombia's
paramilitary terror is made all the more stark considering the fact that
US military advisers travelled to Colombia in 1991 to re-shape Colombian
military intelligence networks. This restructuring was supposedly
designed to aid the Colombian military in their counter-narcotics
efforts. Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the order. Nowhere within
the order is any mention made of drugs.
Instead the secret re-organisation focussed solely on combating what was
called "escalating terrorism by armed subversion". The re-organisation
solidified the secret network between the Colombian military and
paramilitary "not only for intelligence, but to carry out murder". Stan
Goff, a former US special forces trainer in Colombia stated that he was
in Tolemaida in 1992 "giving military forces training in infantry
counterinsurgency doctrine" and knew "perfectly well, as did the host-
nation commanders, that narcotics was a flimsy cover story for beefing
up the capacity of armed forces who had lost the confidence of the
population through years of abuse".
The US and the Dirty War
The US then, has clearly participated in strengthening the ties between
the leading terrorists in Colombia, the Colombian military and their
paramilitary allies, who are responsible for over 80% of all human
rights abuses committed in Colombia today. The US has been instrumental
in helping make more effective in creating what Human Rights Watch
termed a 'sophisticated mechanism' that allows the Colombian military to
fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it. During the Cold
War, the US sold its counter-insurgency campaigns as part of a global
struggle against the Soviet Union.
In the post-Cold War era, the US has switched to new PR mechanisms to
sell its imperial policy. The narco-guerilla and counter-terrorist
pretexts serves as a useful PR mechanism for conflating US 'official
enemies' with drugs and terrorism. Underlying these myths is the reality
that the Colombian state and its privatised arm, the paramilitaries,
combined with overt US support, continues to lead directly to the death
and disappearances of thousands of Colombian civilians.
Why is the US doing these things?
Underlying US policy are a number of factors which include the
importance of Colombian and Venezuelan oil to US energy needs. The
regional destabilisation that may occur as a result of a potential rebel
victory could seriously alter the balance of forces within the region
and threaten the interests of the US's big oil transnationals.
The Bush administration's new request for $98 million for a specially
trained Colombian military brigade devoted solely to protecting
Occidental Petroleum's 500-mile long Caño Limon oil pipeline in Colombia
makes this even clearer. Paul D. Coverdell, a Republican Senator
explained that the "oil picture in Latin America is strikingly similar
to that of the Middle East, except that Colombia provides us more oil
today than Kuwait did then".
The war on the rebels then, forms part of a classic counter-insurgency
strategy of destroying nationalist forces that threaten US hegemony and
elite interests throughout Latin America. The military aid strengthens
the repressive apparatus of the Colombian state and its clandestine arm,
the paramilitaries. In so doing, the Colombian state can continue to
silence and murder those who dare question the status-quo in Colombia, a
status-quo that currently sees the majority of Colombia's people in
absolute poverty. In prosecuting the war the US and Colombian elites
rely on both coercive and consensual means. For US and international
audiences there are vast PR propaganda campaigns to manage perceptions.
In Colombia however it is a very different story where to get off you
knees and stand on your feet is a risky business which all too often
leads to a bullet made in the USA.
Doug Stokes
Index
XXII. Colombian Trade Unionists Make Deep Impression
------------------------------------------------------
The three trade union leaders from Cali have won the hearts and
solidarity of the trade union movement in Britain through several weeks
of hard touring. University Workers Union leader Carlos González was
joined by public sector workers union SINTRAEMCALI leaders Luis "Lucho"
Hernandez (President) and Oscar Figueroa (Treasurer) in a tour co-
organised by Justice for Colombia (with ASLEF and the FBU leading) and
the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, with the co-operation and support of
the TUC.
No meeting was too big or too small. As a result far more people than
ever before across the country have not only heard at first hand of the
fight against privatisation in Colombia, but they have been greatly
inspired by our comrades determination to carry on resistance despite
the threats against them. The three leaders gained warm applause and
emotive standing ovations nearly everywhere they spoke.
Carlos addressed the London May Day rally, then up to Bradford NATFHE
branches and a public meeting in Sheffield. Carlos also spoke to the
three main union conferences in his sector, the Association of
University Teachers (AUT), lecturers and teachers union NATFHE and
UNISON (HE Sector). Carlos and Oscar made a tremendous impact at the PCS
conference, where a £2,000 generous donation from the union was backed
up with a bucket collection from delegates of £1,390 for SINTRAEMCALI.
Fresh from the airport Lucho Hernandez spoke at a House of Commons
meeting organised by ICTUR, and next day he addressed the annual meeting
of Prospect (a new union for technical and managerial staff), and then
on to the Fire Brigades Union conference. The FBU gave Lucho and Oscar a
deeply moving reception. The visitors struck real friendship with the
Scottish delegation in particular. Lucho then visited Glasgow at the
invitation of Globalise Resistance, whose conference he briefed
alongside Vittorio Agnoletto from the Italian social movement.
Lucho spoke to a UNISON group in York before joining the train drivers
union ASLEF's annual delegate meeting. ASLEF General Secretary Mick Rix
has been pivotal in pushing for solidarity with Colombia to be
prioritised at the highest levels of the British trade union movement,
and he chaired an impressive international platform including
representatives from South Africa, Grenada and Cuba.
Oscar spoke to bank and finance workers union UNIFI conference, where he
found special interest amongst the younger members. The intrepid three
also covered Sussex University, Middlesex University, Bristol University
and public meetings in Norwich, Plymouth and Totness. While Lucho and
Oscar flew to lobby the ILO in Geneva, Carlos travelled to Belfast and
Derry where he spoke to the trades councils in both cities. The Irish
Congress of Trade Unions, in the south as well as the north, is becoming
seriously interested in starting a campaign. Finally, Carlos returned
to Blackpool to address the last annual conference of MSF before it
merges with Amicus.
After a final round of meetings at the UNISON conference Carlos, Lucho
and Oscar will return to the front line of the struggle in Colombia. It
is vital that all of us who had the privilege to hear them dedicate
ourselves to consolidating support for them through regular contact and
active campaigning.
"With your help we will continue the fight against exploitation. Our
presence, the deaths of our members, has planted the seed, it has flown
the flag so that the people can continue in the struggle. Thank you
comrade fire-fighters." Lucho Hernandez
CARLOS GONZÁLEZ IN THE NORTH-WEST
Carlos González from Cali, regional president of the Colombian
University Workers' Union SINTRAUNICOL and a member of the CUT National
Executive, visited the North-West from 13th to 17th May and addressed
meetings of trade unionists, students and academics.
On 14th May Carlos was in Blackpool for the UNISON Higher Education
Sector Conference. It is no exaggeration to say that his 15-minute
address was the high point of the day: delegates were profoundly moved
by his eloquent denunciation of state and paramilitary terrorism against
members of his union and by their determination to resist and fight
back. "Our problems pale into insignificance by comparison", said Alison
Shepherd of the UNISON National Executive. But while there is no
comparison between the repression faced by unionists in Colombia and the
situation in Britain, delegates were able to see that many of the same
issues affect higher education workers in both countries: creeping
privatisation, imposition of neo-liberal managerial norms and
underfunding.
On 15th and 16th brother González, who is a sociologist by training,
spoke to students and academics at Liverpool John Moores University and
the University of Liverpool. He discussed the overall Colombian social
and political situation in greater detail with specialists in sociology
and Latin American studies, insisting on the importance of international
solidarity and the increased tensions facing Colombia with the prospect
of an election victory by right-wing candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez and
increased US intervention under the Bush administration.
Our visitor also had meetings on 16th and 17th May with members of the
Merseyside Trade Union and Community Centre and with Liverpool City
Councillor Steve Munby, and as a result there is a good prospect of
future visits and exchanges between activists in the North-West and
Colombia. Also there is now a basis for a new CSC branch on Merseyside
and possibly elsewhere in the North-West - over 50 copies of the
Colombia Solidarity Bulletin were sold during the four days and many
people expressed interest in future activities.
Index
XXIII. No Evidence to Convict Irishmen
---------------------------------------
The case against the three Irishmen arrested last August in Bogotá,
after returning from the demilitarised zone, is due to go to trial on
the 15th July. Despite what the Colombian and the international media
claim, there is no evidence to convict Niall Connolly, James Monaghan
and Martin McCauley of the principal charge that they face - that of
training the FARC in the use of explosives. Colombian state prosecutors
will present one piece of technical evidence and five witnesses. The
technical evidence relies on a test carried out by the US embassy in
Bogotá, that apparently found traces of explosives and drugs on the
men's clothes.
The defendants' lawyers argue that there is no precedent in Colombian
legal history of a foreign power usurping the jurisdiction of Colombian
authorities in presenting such evidence, and point out that while
professional forensic laboratories would carry out such tests up to six
times to draw their conclusions from the results, the test at the US
embassy was carried out only once. The lawyers thus claim that the
allegations are not sufficiently proved. These claims are backed up by
more sophisticated tests carried out by the Colombian Internal Security
Police (DAS) and the Institute of Legal Medicine, all of which found no
traces of either explosives or drugs on the clothing in question.
The five witnesses presented by the state are similarly weak. Three of
them actually back up the testimony of the defendants. Of the two
remaining witnesses, one, the Inspector of Police in San Vincente de
Caguan (principal town of the demilitarised zone) never actually saw any
of the Irishmen, but learned about their presence, through of all
things, the television. The final witness, a 19 year old deserter from
the FARC, who claims to have been the driver of Joaquin Gomez, one of
the FARC's chief negotiators, presents confused and contradictory
testimony.
The dates of the Irishmen's alleged visits to Colombia change with each
statement given by the witness. Similarly, his recollections of the
explosives courses that the men are alleged to have taught, are
contradictory. In some statements the witness claims to have been a
student on the courses, on others he says that he did not actually
attend himself, but merely heard about them.
This remarkably flimsy evidence should in no way be sufficient to
convict the men of the charges they face. However when defence lawyer
Pedro Mahecha from the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective who
represent one of the men, was asked how the case could possibly be lost,
he replied that the overt politicisation of the case, and the pressure
exerted by the Colombian and US governments on the judicial system to
abandon their independence, was gravely endangering the possibility of a
fair trial, and had already made a mockery of the men's right to the
presumption of innocence.
The US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee public
investigation into the alleged links between the FARC and the IRA, last
April, is a case in point. Justified as a necessary tool in the US 'war
on terror' it was in fact a case of unwarranted meddling in the affairs
of another country. Neither the FARC nor the IRA have ever carried out a
single action against the United States. It was also a dangerous pseudo
judicial process, the aim of which appeared to be to condemn the three
men in Colombia before their actual trial had taken place. Congress
heard wild allegations from 'star witness' General Fernando Tapias, head
of the Colombian armed forces, regarding the men held in Bogotá. No
representatives of the FARC, the IRA or Sinn Fein attended.
Defence lawyers in Colombia were prevented from clarifying or refuting
these allegations, by the sub judice nature of the case, that prohibits
public speculation regarding a case before it has come to trial. The
highly politicised process of condemnation at the US Congress was
completely indifferent both to the sub judice status that this case
should have enjoyed, and to the independence of the Colombian judiciary.
Further causes of concern involve the condition of the defendants'
detention and access to their legal representatives. The men are still
being held in La Picota prison, even though the Colombian government has
told their Irish counterparts that they have been moved to safer
surroundings. La Picota is a prison, which under the Colombian penal
system, houses only convicted prisoners. Defence lawyers visiting their
clients have been forced to undergo degrading and inhuman treatment in
order to meet their clients They have been forced to submit to strip
searches, and have to enter the cells barefoot. They are not allowed to
take pens or pencils into their interviews. The defendants' access to
justice has been severely compromised.
David Rhys-Jones
LAWYERS COLLECTIVE STATEMENT
The Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective wishes to make public our
concerns about the politicised nature that high levels of the Colombian
government and the United States Congress have imposed on the treatment
of the three Irish citizens who were detained by the National Army, in
Bogotá in August 2001.
As many of you will already know, today in the United States, the
Congress Foreign Affairs Committee is initiating its public
investigation of the supposed links between the FARC and the IRA.
This treatment of a purely Colombian matter by a foreign country strikes
us as completely inadequate, and we believe it is a precondemnation.
This is even more serious when we consider that since the penal process
is sub judice, the defence lawyers are prohibited from clarifying the
situation.
The Lawyers Collective also wish to express our concerns that the aims
of this investigation are unclear: without doubt it constitutes an
illegitimate pressure on Colombian justice which is solely responsible
for investigating the facts of why Irish citizens Niall Connolly, James
Monaghan and Martin McCauley were arrested.
While the Colombian government and the US Congress develop this great
campaign which violates the right of the Irish citizens to the
presumption of innocence, the National Police and the National
Penitentiary and Prisons Institute (INPEC) are impeding the access of
these citizens to their right to a defence, and to the lawyers charged
with exercising this right, they have on many occasions placed
unacceptable barriers- which are in themselves affronts to human
dignity- to interviewing their clients.
We ask that you urge the Colombian government to respect the sub judice
status of this case, and we ask that other governments, organisations
and the media refrain from issuing pronouncements of a precondemning
nature about the detained Irish citizens.
The Lawyers Collective make a national and international call requesting
that you urge
1) The Colombian government and US Congress to end the aforementioned
campaign to politicise the case of the three Irish citizens detained in
Colombia.
2) That the detained men are allowed to exercise their right to a
defence, and that their lawyers are allowed the necessary dignified
conditions to enter La Picota, where the defendants are being held.
Please address your communications to:
Anne Patterson, US ambassador to Colombia.
FAX: (0057) 1 315 2038/ 315 2197.
Andres Pastrana, President of Colombia.
apastra@presidencia.gov.co
FAX: (0057) 1 334 1323
Guillermo Fernandez de Soto, Minister of Foreign Relations. FAX: (0057)
1 566 6444
Bogotá, 24 April 2002.
Index
XXIV. Collateral Damage
-------------------------
Children are on the frontline in Colombia's escalating civil conflict
'Francisco is 13. He is so shy he cannot look at me as we talk, always
fiddling and tapping his foot. Hard to imagine how he killed a policeman
with a hand grenade a year ago. He fled the guerillas because he wanted
to see his mum. . .'
This description by the BBC's Jeremy McDermott from an article featured
recently on Newsnight offers one image of the civil conflict that has
been raging in Colombia for many decades. It is difficult to know
exactly what to make of it. For their parts, the FARC and the ELN claim
they do not use child soldiers (technically defined in International Law
as those under the age of 15), whilst in its 1998 report on the subject,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) specifically only accused them, along with the
Colombian government, of using child soldiers under the age of 18 (as do
the British and US armies).
By contrast, it reported that children as young as eight had been seen
patrolling with paramilitary units. More likely, Francisco belonged to
one of the urban militias, extensions of the gangs or bandas that have
come to dominate many of the poor barrios in Colombia's cities.
Regardless of how Francisco came to end up in the Bogotá house where he
was interviewed, his experience is one part the overall picture of
brutality and deprivation that dominate the lives of children growing up
in this war-torn country.
'Gerson was killed on May 4. He had committed a robbery using a toy gun,
but the man he robbed was a real criminal with criminal friends. Some
time later a car drew up, a man called him over to the car and stabbed
Gerson through the window. He died in the street.'
This second, equally emotive story is far more indicative of the plight
of so many of Colombia's children and illustrates a dimension of the
situation much less familiar to audiences who only know of Colombia
through drug trafficking and the guerilla war.
Gerson was one of thousands of street children or gamines who scratch a
living in the urban sprawl of Colombia's cities. It is very hard to know
how many gamines there are, as these disposable children fall through
the gaps of the statistics, but the charity Let the Children Live!
counted several hundred sleeping rough in Medellín's city centre on one
night in 1999. Children can be seen amid the pollution at every set of
traffic lights in the major cities, hawking soft drinks, begging and
displaying the amazing skills of juggling they have acquired in lieu of
education and the prospect of a brighter future.
These street children are the product of the appalling levels of poverty
and neglect that characterise the cities, conditions that grow
increasingly more acute as the slums are swelled by those displaced by
the armed conflict in the countryside. It is estimated that some 2
million internal refugees have been created over the last 15 years, with
at least 300,000 displaced in 2001. According to official figures, 52%
of those displaced are under the age of 18. Amid the squalor social
cohesion disintegrates and children are forced out of their homes.
Beside the rigors of living rough and the prevalence of solvent abuse,
these children are physically extremely vulnerable and must make up a
substantial proportion of Colombia's enormous murders rate (38,000 in
2001, up from 30,000 in 2000), 84% of which are unrelated to the armed
conflict. Many of these murders of gamines are related to the state of
virulent gang warfare that characterises the poor barrios, often carried
out by other children, but others are the result of 'social cleansing'.
This situation is so serious that HRW devoted a special report to it in
1994, in which they allege the involvement of government forces and site
community leaders who have accused police agents of selling weapons to
men who kill children with police complicity.
The situation for Colombia's poor youth is further exacerbated by the
continual withdrawal of state resources, spurred on by the dictates of
the IMF while 40% of government spending goes on servicing the country's
crippling debt burden. The cuts have generally hit education and service
provision hard. For instance, when we spoke to representatives of the
Community Mothers (featured in the last bulletin) in Cali in March, we
discovered that they had not received their minimal state payments for
three months.
These women provide care for hundreds of thousands of children beneath
primary-school age to women who desperately need to be out at work.
Their services are essential for keeping more children off the streets.
With the government's unilateral pullout from peace negotiations with
both of Colombias's main guerilla groups this year and president elect
Alvaro Uribe's call for total war, the crisis facing Colombia's children
can only become ever more extreme.
More refugees will put further pressure on a system that exceeded
breaking point long ago, while the increasing levels of violence will
echo at every level. Those working among Colombia's disposable children,
such as members of Let the Children Live!, have already noticed a
decline. A spokesperson for the charity explained that where in the past
among gang violence it was commonest to merely inflict a wound, the
intention more and more often now is to kill.
Max Fuller
Index
XXV. ACTIVITIES
------------------
Independence for Latin America from the USA Day of Action
>from 12 noon Wednesday 3rd July outside US Consulate
Queen Street, Belfast
Colombian Solidarity Campaign
Campaign against Climate Change
US INDEPENDENCE DAY
5-7.30pm THURSDAY 4th JULY
US is now too globally irresponsible to deserve independence!
Protest outside US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London W1 (nearest tube
Bond Street)
www.campaignagainstclimatechange.net
Index
XXVI. BP COLOMBIA PIPELINE VICTIMS DEFENCE FUND
-------------------------------------------------
There is an urgent need to support the victims. Their cases have been
held up for several years in Colombia's interminable legal system as the
multinational's OCENSA/ODC consortium put in one blocking move after
another. Meanwhile the victims are in need of health care, food and
welfare as well as financial support for their legal defence. All
donations will be put to supporting the victims and their claim. Make
payable to "Colombia Solidarity Campaign" and write on the back "CPV
Defence Fund" and send to our address below.
For more information contact Colombia Solidarity Campaign, e-mail
colombia_sc@hotmail.com
Index
XXVII. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES
------------------------------
The Colombia Solidarity Campaign is an anti-imperialist organisation,
campaigning for a socially just and sustainable peace in Colombia based
on respect for the human rights and diversity of the Colombian people.
The Campaign actively opposes Plan Colombia.
Our specific objectives are:
· To oppose any US, British or foreign military intervention, believing
that this will only escalate the problems in Colombia
· To oppose the policy of fumigation, and works for a solution to the
coca problem based on the real needs of the people
· To draw attention to the role that is played by Multinational
Corporations in violating workers rights and exploiting both the people
and the environment of Colombia
· To draw attention to the horrific human rights situation in Colombia,
and that the overwhelming majority of atrocities can be attributed to
the action of the army, police, Colombian state organisms and the
paramilitaries, which together constitute a policy of Colombian State
terror
· To oppose the criminalisation of social protest.
The Campaign recognises the collusion between the Colombian government,
the armed forces and the paramilitary death squads, and calls for an end
to the impunity that this creates.
We actively campaign through multiple strategies, and give a platform,
co-ordination and support to Colombian organisations and individuals
working for the above objectives.
We also support the right of Colombian refugees to asylum, and campaign
actively to defend them.
Index
--
Andy Higginbottom
Co-ordinator Colombia Solidarity Campaign
Noticias sobre Colombia | Plan Colombia | AGP