www.agp.org | archivos | Colombia Solidarity Bulletin No 9

Colombia Solidarity Bulletin of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign Nº 9 January - March 2003
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003

Editorial: ¡PARE AL FASCISMO EN COLOMBIA!

¡Unámonos para derrotar el fascismo uribista! ¡Movilicémonos contra la intervención imperialista!

Una escueta noticia de diez líneas en la esquina de una página interior del único periódico que circula en Colombia anuncia que el Consejo Nacional Electoral, en su leguleya sabiduría, acaba de retirarle la personería jurídica a la Unión Patriótica. Le faltan votos, dicen. Puede ser. Pero ¿el Consejo Superior Electoral, o como se llame esa cosa, no tiene en cuenta que todos los votantes de la Unión Patriótica fueron asesinados? ¿Y sus candidatos también?

Al mismo tiempo, páginas y páginas del único periódico que circula en Colombia se dedican a explicar por qué las AUC, las autodefensas paramilitares, pueden y deben legítimamente negociar con el gobierno, con la ONU, con los Estados Unidos, con la Unicef, con la Organización Mundial del Comercio, con la Iglesia Católica, y también, por supuesto, con el Consejo Jurídico Electoral, o como se llame esa cosa. Y nadie, ni en el único periódico de circulación nacional que circula en Colombia, ni en las revistas semanales, empezando por esta en la que escribo, señala que fueron esos mismos para-militares, en colaboración con las Fuerzas Armadas y ante la pasividad benévola de varios gobiernos sucesivos, quienes asesinaron uno tras otro a todos los candidatos de la Unión Patriótica, a todos sus militantes elegidos a algún cargo público -alcaldes, concejales, diputados, representantes, su único senador, sus candidatos presidenciales-, y a la mayoría de sus votantes. De los cuales, por consiguiente, no quedan suficientes para cumplir los topes mínimos exigidos por el Consejo Politiquero Electoral, o como se llame esa cosa.

Y no es sólo que nadie se escandalice ante semejante desvergüenza: es que a nadie se le ocurre ni siquiera registrarla. Sólo he visto al respecto una columna de opinión, en la revista Cambio, firmada por Lucho Garzón, el ex candidato presidencial del Polo Democrático, que fue (no sé si lo sigue siendo) miembro de esa Unión Patriótica minuciosamente exterminada y ahora ilegalizada por causa de su exterminio. Garzón es uno de sus pocos supervivientes, y no faltará quien diga con cinismo: "Claro: se queja porque la medida lo afecta directamente". Pero ¿es que ustedes creen que el exterminio de un partido político no nos afecta a todos directamente? Con su columna, Lucho Garzón salva el honor de los políticos, o por lo menos el suyo propio. Tal vez esta columna mía de protesta y de asco ayude a salvar el de los periodistas. Pero ¿quién salva el honor del Estado, representado por esa cosa que se llama no sé bien cómo, si Consejo o lo contrario de Consejo, si Superior o Inferior, si Electoral o Fraudulento, Fraudyuvante, Frau??

Así no se puede

Llevamos cincuenta años, desde que en este país se prohibió por plebiscito la existencia de la oposición política, escuchando a los voceros del Establecimiento, a los periódicos de circulación nacional, cuando había varios, a las revistas, a los políticos, a los gobiernos, a los Consejos del Fraude Electoral, llevamos cincuenta años oyéndoles decir que la oposición al sistema, si es que la hay pese a estar prohibida, debe manifestarse de manera civilizada, mediante la utilización razonable y discreta de los mecanismos democráticos. Los votos. No las censurables marchas de protesta, ni las huelgas irresponsables, ni las condenables pedreas universitarias. Y al que no vota como toca, o se presenta a elecciones para que voten por él en representación de intereses distintos de los del Establecimiento, ¡pum!, lo matan. Y, para castigarlo por estar muerto, lo privan de su personería jurídica. Sinceramente ¿ustedes creen que así se puede? ¿Usted, señor presidente Uribe? ¿Usted, señor ministro Londoño? ¿Usted, señor procurador Maya? ¿Usted, señor fiscal Osorio? ¿Ustedes, señores de El Tiempo, de Cambio, de SEMANA?

No. Así no se puede. Y es por eso que la oposición política ha quedado exclusivamente en manos de la guerilla. Y la guerilla, exclusivamente en manos de los secuestradores. Con sus métodos, la han secuestrado a ella misma.

Hago preguntas, pero no me hago ilusiones. Estoy seguro de que el gobierno del presidente Uribe, que se inmiscuyó con tanto ímpetu en la esfera del Poder Judicial para evitar que fueran liberados unos narcotraficantes que habían pagado sus penas fijadas por la ley, en este caso no va a decir ni mú. Respetará ahora sí, escrupulosamente, la independencia del Poder Electoral, representado por esa cosa que no sé bien cómo se llama.

Antonio Caballero

Entre lungos y señoritos

En la refinería de petróleo de Barrancabermeja llaman "lungos" a los obreros rasos, cuyo destino el trabajo manual duro. Son muchos y ganan muy poco; casi todos son temporales y viven en los barrios bajos. Cuando los lungos hacen huelga, los sistemas automáticos garantizan una producción mínima, así la mayoría de los obreros calificados se unan a la protesta, porque mientras no se apague la planta, gerentes, ingenieros y supervisores mantiene la operación por algunas semanas, mediante "planes de contingencia".

En estos momentos el sindicato de trabajadores petroleros de Colombia, USO, prepara una huelga para responder a la ofensiva del gobierno de Uribe y de Isaac Yanovich, el banquero de inversiones privadas nombrado presidente de la empresa estatal. Los obreros, que mediante su lucha obligaron a crear la empresa nacional Ecopetrol, durante los últimos 25 años han resistido su privatización, con un costo muy alto: 100 dirigentes y activistas sindicales asesinados (4 durante el 2002, año en el cual han sido asesinados 160 sindicalistas en Colombia), 2 desaparecidos, 10 secuestrados, 31 detenidos (6 de ellos aun en prisión) y 250 despedidos (11 de ellos hace pocos días).

En tan difíciles condiciones los petroleros colombianos preparan su huelga para comienzos del 2003. La victoria del movimiento depende de si la producción para. Por lo mismo la actividad del sindicato y el gobierno para ganar a su lado a los ingenieros y supervisores es inmensa. Si ellos no paran los obreros no tendrían más alternativa que parar las plantas, cosa que implica enfrentar la represión militar que en 1971 -todos lo recuerdan- eliminó de un balazo al obrero Fermín Amaya cuando iba a apagar la refinería de Barranca.

El mundo al revés se vive en el país vecino, en Venezuela. Allá los lungos trabajan intensamente mientras el llamado a la huelga es seguido con fervor y sin vacilar por los gerentes. El 2 de diciembre El cuerpo gerencial de la Refinería de PDVSA, desde muy tempranas horas obstaculizó el portón de entrada de la refinería impidiendo con vehículos el paso de trabajadores, de los lungos, quienes masivamente se presentaron a sus puestos de trabajo. El mismo gerente general de la refinería y personal ejecutivo de relaciones laborarles, pretendieron impedir el paso.

Pero la fortaleza de la huelga en Venezuela ha estado en las computadoras que controlan la gigante y automatizada industria petrolera. Aunque PDVSA es nominalmente del estado, estas computadoras están en manos de la empresa mixta, Intesa, donde la parte dura del conocimiento está en manos de la socia privada, la Science Aplications International Corporation S.A.I.C. transnacional informática que cuenta entre sus administradores a los exsecretarios de Defensa de Estados Unidos William Perry y Melvin Laird, a los exdirectores de la CIA John Deutch, Robert Gates y el Almirante Boby Ray Inman (exdirector de la National Security Agency) y a militares retirados como los generales Wayne Downing (antiguo comandante en jefe de las fuerzas especiales de USA) y Jasper Welch (excoordinador del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad).

Desde los centros de cómputo se dirigió el atraco de buque-tanques petroleros, que varios Capitanes de buque acogieron, pero que de todos modos obligaba a los barcos a atracar, puesto que ninguno se mueve si no es dirigido desde los centros de cómputo. Computadoras detenían operaciones claves de las refinerías y de las entregas de gas vitales para la industria metalúrgica del oriente. Lungos de la Guayana tuvieron que recuperar el gas

Los altos sueldos, privilegios y comisiones de los gerentes, jefes de relaciones laborales, ingenieros de sistemas y Capitanes de buque se convirtieron en arma eficaz de control político de las transnacionales que quieren privatizar la industria petrolera de Venezuela (y Colombia y Ecuador y Brasil...).

Una clase "media" así, con capacidad de consumo es hoy la base de la derecha en Colombia y Venezuela (y vota por Bush, por Aznar o Berlusconi). Es la fuerza electoral de Uribe Vélez y del golpe de Fedecámaras. Si Washington exige mano dura en Colombia y guante de seda en

Venezuela tiene su eco en esa clase "media", que como Bush es sorda para oír de los asesinatos de sindicalistas en Colombia, pero grita si le tocan un pelo a un gerente o a un capitán de Altura venezolano, que calla si le quitan la tierra dos millones de desplazados en Colombia, pero grita si la ley de tierras amenaza los las fincas improductivas de los terratenientes venezolanos.

El 16 de septiembre los campesinos colombianos fueron cruelmente tratados cuando desarrollaban una protesta al lado de las carreteras, su comida quemada, el agua potable negada, la gente cercada por militares, líderes detenidos, tres desaparecidos, delegados internacionales solidarios deportados. Siete de los dirigentes de la protesta han sido asesinados posteriormente, otro desaparecido y varios apresados o más amenazados de muerte. La acusación "bloquear las vías". En Venezuela han respetado los "trancazos" hechos con sus Mercedes Benz y BMW por "piqueteros" señoritos de los barrios de clase "alta" y "media".

En Cali (Colombia) han sido atacadas incesante y brutalmente las marchas y manifestaciones de los trabajadores de las empresas de servicios públicos contra la privatización y de los jóvenes trabajadores aprendices del SENA que exigen que se mantenga este instituto estatal de calificación obrera sostenido con cotizaciones de los patronos. Nada dicen de esto los grandes medios de comunicación internacional que tampoco muestran los diarios enfrentamientos que en todas las poblaciones de la costa Caribe colombiana se producen, cuando la empresa eléctrica privatizada trata de cortar la electricidad de miles de deudores morosos. Ni la protesta popular ni la represión estatal son noticia internacional si ocurren en Colombia, donde la imagen que los medios proyectan solo permite hablar de terrorismo y droga.

A la clase "media", que cree y hace creíble a Bush y a los medios, frecuentemente le llega el turno de ser víctima de sus héroes. Fue el caso del corralito en Argentina. Entonces todo el pueblo se moviliza unido contra los banqueros. Pero mientras esto no ocurra, veremos a los señoritos del este de Caracas, del Chicó de Bogotá y de Miami, copar el corazón de los medios.

Editorial: Stop Fascism in Colombia!

The son of a landlord narco-trafficker, friend of dodgy businessmen and a long time promoter of right-wing paramilitary death squads, Uribe was elected by less than a quarter of all Colombians. He is doubling the size of the armed forces, recruiting hundreds of thousands of village guards and aims to build a network of one million informers to defeat the social movements and the guerillas, the FARC and the ELN. At the same time, US military involvement is rapidly expanding, with the planned insertion of US troops creating the very real possibility of a Latin American front to the so-called War on Terror.

Militarisation goes hand in hand with authoritarian rule. Government ministers openly state that they must curtail democratic rights. Uribe immediately declared a 'State of Internal Unrest' allowing him to rule by presidential decree, by passing Congress. All the social movements live in fear for their lives. Armed police raid international NGOs accusing them of being guerillas. Uribe's government clearly regards trade unionists as legitimate targets for assassination. He has brought Colombia to the brink of fascism.

There is continued grass roots resistance, but it needs a sea change in international solidarity if it is to survive Uribe's offensive. While Bush has given Uribe the green light for state terrorism, who will stand by the Colombian people?

A ray of hope has come from the Polo Democrát-ico, a group of independent and socialist Senators and Congress representatives who managed to get elected despite the intimidation. At this juncture they have pivotal role in expressing the needs of the excluded majority. These deputies live under constant threat of assassination. Should their voice be silenced then fascism will have not only arrived but taken over.

Just as Latin America is seeking a way out of neo-liberal capitalism, Uribe throws Colombia further into its depths. Uribe is plunging into debt to finance military expansion. Before long the Colombian people will have to pay, right now it means that Uribe does whatever Bush wants.

As in the Middle East and Asia, Bush has made clear his readiness to go to war. While most of Latin America is shaping resistance to US domination, and its peoples struggle for a new economic model that is oriented to their needs, the Colombian government is ever more in Bush's pocket. Uribe is not only selling off his own country, but threatens to betray a whole continent.

Nor is Uribe just Bush's man in Latin America, he is a favourite of the Blair government too. The multinationals are the driving force behind Blair's love-in with Uribe. That famous revolving door with BP has been in full swing.

On 10 December David Taylor MP asked government minister Bill Rammell to "make a statement on the political situation in Colombia." Rammell's response? "The new democratically elected Colombian Government face enormous challenges, particularly in their fight against terrorism and the illegal drugs trade, as well as over human rights and Colombia's humanitarian crisis. We support their efforts to tackle all those issues."

Nowhere does Rammell acknowledge the Colombian government and state's own responsibility for terrorism, drugs and human rights violations.

A broad political campaign is needed to tackle the British government's shameful position, which is a cover-up for fascism.

Our challenge is to mobilise international solidarity delegations, to unmask the multinationals' agenda, to tell the public what is really going on in Colombia and to defend human rights.

The Colombia Solidarity Campaign supports Colombians who are in danger of persecution. We support humanitarian efforts to assist Colombians seeking temporary refuge, or full asylum should they require it.

We call for a common front based on action to defeat fascism and imperialist intervention in Colombia.

Unite to Stop Uribe Fascism! Mobilise Against Imperialist Intervention!

'What use am I to anyone dead?' MARTA HINESTROZA

Lawyer Marta Hinestroza acts for farmers who say their livelihoods were ruined by a pipeline part-owned by BP. After death threats from paramilitaries, she's had to flee Colombia.

Jeremy Lennard reports *

Sitting at a table strewn with paperwork, Marta Hinestroza pulls the collar of her jacket up around her chin and shivers. The 37-year-old lawyer is a recent arrival from northwest Colombia, and looks mortified when she is told that London may get colder still as the winter drags on.

Hinestroza never imagined she would leave Colombia, but then she never imagined that her legal battles with British Petroleum, on behalf of peasant farmers who claim their livelihoods had been ruined by the construction of an oil pipeline, would lead, however indirectly, to death threats from paramilitary organisations. Nor did she imagine that these threats - which a spokesman in BP's London office yesterday described as "a disgrace" - would eventually drive her out of her home country.

"When your work might make all the difference for more than 200 helpless and impoverished families, it is difficult to walk away," she says. "But in the end you have to ask, 'What use am I to anyone dead?'"

The final straw came when, on a recent trip to visit her clients, she was told that her name had appeared on a paramilitary hit list. Hinestroza packed her bags, and her files, and with help from the London-based Colombia Solidarity Campaign, arrived in Britain last month with her 14-year-old daughter Mayra. While their asylum claim is being processed, they feel disorientated, wrenched from all that is familiar and, above all, cold; but they do at least feel safe.

Hinestroza's decision to leave Colombia was not taken lightly. "I'd already had to move my office in the city because the people I shared with were frightened by the vile phone calls I was receiving," she says. "I'd only been in the new place a few days when they began again, and then a couple of very dodgy characters turned up on the doorstep."

The daughter of a miner and a seamstress, Hinestroza grew up in El Bagre, in the state of Antioquia. At the age of 12 she moved to the city of Medellin to complete her secondary education and stayed there to study law at university. Then, in 1991, just around the time she graduated, came an event that would have an untold effect on her life, and those of thousands of others.

Hundreds of kilometres away to the east, BP struck oil. More precisely, the company found itself sitting on reserves of about two billion barrels of high-grade crude. It was initially pumped through the Oleoducto de Colombia (ODC) pipeline, the construction of which had wreaked havoc with local eco-systems and made many farms along its route unworkable. Then, in 1995, a new company called Ocensa was set up - in which BP took a 15% stake - to construct and operate an 800km pipeline passing from the Cusiana-Cupiagua fields through four states, 40 municipalities and 192 villages to the port of Covenas in northwest Colombia. Following the original ODC route, the new pipeline passed through the municipality of Zaragosa, not far from Hinestroza's hometown of El Bagre, and where she was employed as the local ombudsman.

It had been BP's responsibility to obtain environmental licences for the pipeline, and to compensate farmers along its route for the loss of a 12-metre strip of land at a price of 400 Colombian pesos (at today's exchange rate, about 10 pence) per square metre. But in Zaragosa alone, farmers claim, the construction of the pipeline destroyed hundreds of water sources and brought on landslides that ruined local farmers. Security was brought in to protect the pipeline from the guerillas, who were angry at the fact that, far from improving the lot of local people, construction of the pipeline was making their lives a misery. An exclusion zone was enforced 100m either side of the pipeline. The farmers lost more land.

Hinestroza began to hear complaints from the likes of farmer Horacio Gaviria, who claims his land became unworkable without water sources and, because of its proximity to the pipeline, heavily militarised. He told her that 25 members of his family eventually abandoned their land and fled to Moravia, a shanty town built on a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Medellin. They now live in abject poverty, the children selling sweets and cigarettes on buses and at traffic lights instead of attending school.

As she investigated, it became clear that there were hundreds in Zaragosa and neighbouring Segovia who were unhappy. But Hinestroza did not stay long in her job. The construction of the Ocensa pipeline coincided with a surge of paramilitary activity in the region under the governorship of Alvaro Uribe, now the Colombian president. During 1995 and 1996, the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) went on the rampage, torturing and massacring civilians it accused of collaboration with the guerillas.

Four of her colleagues - ombudsmen in neighbouring municipalities - were assassinated, and Hinestroza began to receive threats. The AUC turned up at the home of her aunt. They dragged her out, tied her hands behind her back and made her kneel down. Then, in front of the villagers, they shot her through the back of the head.

Hinestroza resigned, but continued to represent her clients. BP refused to pay further compensation. She says a Ocensa employee offered her £7,000 to drop her cases. The paramilitaries also had an offer - they would back off if she quietened down.

BP has since paid out £180,000 to 17 families affected by the ODC pipeline. But its offer of compensation of less than £100 per person to other claimants is rejected by virtually all those whom Hinestroza represents. A few have accepted, but most - and there are some 1,600 people involved - are holding out for claims worth a total around £20m. BP is defending the claim and believes its offer is fair and reasonable.

The farmers received a further setback last week when the their appeal was thrown out of court - the result, according to BP's spokesman in Bogota, Pablo Urrutia, of farmers' lawyers failing to turn up to a conciliation hearing.

Hinestroza waves a resigned hand over the piles of paperwork around her. She has no intention of giving up her fight. "It's frustrating," she says. "Everyone knows that security is a headache for multinationals operating in war-torn countries like Colombia, but had the company settled with these people in a decent and prompt manner, it might have helped to defuse rather than inflame an already tense situation."

A pause, and then she adds with a wistful smile: "And perhaps I wouldn't have to be sitting here wearing an overcoat indoors."

How much or how little responsibility BP should bear for any of this is, as is the way of things, unclear. "If such threats have been made, we utterly condemn them," its London spokesman said yesterday, but he would not comment on other aspects of the case.

Good News!

Marta Hinestroza has won her asylum application. She thanks everyone who has helped.

Marta is available to speak on the situation of the pipeline victims. If you want Marta to address your organisation contact her through the Colombia Solidarity Campaign at e-mail: colombia_schotmail.com or by post at PO Box 8446, London N17 6NZ

Interview with ALEXANDER LOPEZ

This interview was carried out in the Colombian Congress on the same day that US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Alvaro Uribe Vélez in Bogotá. Uribe has quickly established himself as Washington's favourite in Latin America.

Alexander Lopez is one of the national leaders speaking out against the Uribe and Powell war machine. Alexander, known for his leadership of the SINTRAEMCALI occupation, was elected in March as the Social and Political Front candidate for the Valle del Cauca. He is a member of the Polo Democrático grouping of opposition Congress deputies and Senators, and he is the chair of the Sixth Commission of the Congress responsible for overviewing all public services.

"Two issues demonstrate the lack of security guarantees that we have as a democratic opposition. The National Attorney General sacked 16 attorneys who were investigating massacres by paramilitaries linked with the military. All of these investigations have been stopped. And then there are the threats against us. A plan by Carlos Castaño, [the leader of the paramilitary AUC] to assassinate Gustavo Pedro, a comrade deputy in Polo Democrático, came into the hands of the Attorney General. We, the opposition MPs who are trying to defend Gustavo, are now in conflict with the Attorney General. The army's 13th Brigade, which is responsible for Bogotá, has taken the decision to assassinate Wilson and me, Alexander Lopez.

The social problems are more generalised than just the issue of privatisation. All the laws passing through Congress fit under Uribe's themes of 'democratic security' and the 'communitarian state'. In fact his policies are all pre-programmed. They are not dealing with the conjunctural situation, they were prepared several years ago in Washington.

The government declared a State of Internal Commotion and passed Decree 2002. The whole of Colombia is now a 'zone of rehabilitation and consolidation', but the zones specifically designated for special measures have the richest natural resources. The army has imposed curfews, from 8 in the morning until 4 at night. The population is unable to mobilise. In Arauca more than 500 people were corralled into a stadium and marked with ink. The army or the police, any state official, can on their own suspicion capture, process and imprison citizens for supposed terrorism. We have two comrades from SINTRAEMCALI detained right now because of this situation, and there are 46 comrades, brought from Arauca to prison in Bogotá, including three trade union leaders on the CUT Regional Committee and others from all the social movements.

The government is pushing through drastic state reforms. 300 state bodies will be either privatised or shut down, affecting of 150,000 workers. Their purpose is to get some short term funds to finance government repression.

There is a Public Order Law, law 418, that delegates to the president the powers of Congress to negotiate with armed actors, hold peace talks and grant them pardon or amnesty. Through this dispensation Uribe is preparing to legalise the paramilitaries. Another law in progress is the Security Statute, very similar to the Statute of [President] Turbay [of the early 1980s]. This is very serious. It threatens a profound reform of the criminal justice system. While democratic and civil rights are curtailed under Decree 2002, the new law will criminalise the entire social movement by labeling all forms of protest as terrorism.

The proposed labour reform will reduce work contracts down to just one hour, and it will remove all protection for the workers. The proposed pension law puts two conditions for receiving a state pension; that you are 62 years old, and that you have completed 1,300 weeks of paid up work. Very few people will be able to get a pension. On average the Colombian worker has just 16 weeks of work in a year, at that rate it would take over 80 years of work to qualify!

The people are going to react to this type of pressure. They will wake up and rise up against what is happening. The state knows this, and they are very busily building the structures to deal with it. They are building prisons, they are increasing the armed forces, they are preparing for the social resistance to their project.

The first phase of globalisation was implemented in Colombia by the Gavíria administration (1990-94). They now want to implement the second phase. In a lot of countries in Latin America even the governments are resisting the implementation of this - in Brazil, in Uruguay, in Ecuador and even in Argentina. What they have done in Argentina is what they want to do here. Except that there is a lot more repression here.

The US is trying to use Colombia as a contrast to Venezuela. If they get away with introducing another wave of neo-liberalism in Colombia then it will open up that possibility across the whole of Latin America. On the other hand it will be impossible for them to generalise the offensive if they do not succeed here. The IMF, the World Bank etc all have policies which are pushing in this direction. Uribe is being counterposed to Chavez.

We are inside Congress, but the solution is not really here. However being here gives a measure of legality and a certain authority. It allows us to speak to people and represent people that we otherwise couldn't do. So although we are here, we are with the people.

The conflict here in Colombia is without precedent in the history of Latin America. It's not strictly speaking just a civil war, it is a direct confrontation with neo-liberalism and with the US empire. In these circumstances the solidarity from outside is not only extremely important, it is essential, quite possibly it is the key. Those who are resisting neo-liberalism anywhere in the world are on our side too."

DEMOCRATS OPPOSE REFERENDUM FARCE

In an attempt to gain legitimacy for his authoritarian and neoliberal programme, Uribe Vélez has arranged a referendum to take place in May. The referendum has no less than 18 issues to vote on, drafts of the voting sheet run to 11 pages. There are two main categories of question, those dealing with constitutional reform and those dealing with economic measures. The referendum will not be an exercise in democracy but in manipulation. No modern democracy has such a complicated arrangement, which is not surprising for there is considerable scope for confusion and misunderstanding in the voting.

Supporters of Uribe have presented his reforms as dealing with corruption and trimming off wasteful branches of the state. But the opposition point out that all the political changes will leave the executive with more power, and the economic changes are disguised cuts in state responsibility for welfare provision.

The rules of the game are that so long as at least 6 million vote, then Uribe's false consultation with the people will be endorsed constitutionally. Even though he may lose the vote on any individual point this would be a propaganda victory for Uribe. That is why the Polo Democratico political opposition is saying that to simply vote No is not the right tactic, they are calling for active abstention as the best way to counter Uribe's plan.

The three trade union centres (CUT, CGTD and CTC) have all joined the call for people not to go to the polls, and are convening a national conference on 30 and 31 January to plan mobilisations against the referendum in May.

The stage is set for a confrontation between the two sides. Uribe's forces, official and unofficial, and the mass media will be doing everything they can to get people to the polls. In this referendum, supposedly against corruption, the potential for intimidation and corruption is enormous. It is vital that the international community stands with the opposition and accompanies the process.

Green Light and Total Impunity for Military Abuses and Human Rights Violations

Inhabitants of the two zones of Rehabilitation and Consolidation, set up by the Uribe government in September last year, covering Arauca and in Sucre/Bolivar, have found their civil liberties superseded by de facto military rule.

However the Constitutional Court has ruled that most provisions of Uribe's decree are unconstitutional. Under Law 2002, military forces had been given the power to make arrests, search premises and use wiretaps without a warrant, issue special identity cards, force anybody travelling within the zones to report to the military authorities, and carry out a census of all inhabitants and their possessions. Foreigners were specifically targeted making it illegal to enter the zones without special permission from the military, a move which promoted protests from international media organisations about press freedom. The activities of international NGOs was also severely handicapped by this measure.

Despite the Court's ruling, military authorities have been reluctant to give up their new powers. Witnesses testify that joint military/paramilitary patrols in the zones have been assassinating people who cannot explain their presence in the zone to the satisfaction of their captors. In Saravenna (Arauca) 2,000 townspeople were herded by the army into the municipal sports stadium, where they were filmed, photographed and marked with indelible ink. The majority of the prisoners were released the following day, but 91 remained in detention. At the time of publication, 48 of those arrested under this operation ( codenamed 'Operation Heroica') are still in detention. They include a large number of trade unionists, social activists and campesino organisers.

Similar operations have been carried out throughout the zones, many acting on the information of paid civilian informers. There have been reports of army officers attempting to pay children to inform on their parents. 60 civilians were arrested in various municipaities in Sucre, as part of "operation scorpion" where the army went from house to house arresting people on the information of a child informer accompanying the soldiers. The detainees were held for a total of 50 days and released only after signing a document certifying the good treatment that they had received.

In the Sucre/Bolivar zone, the 1st Brigade of Marine Infantry are responsible for the enforcement of the new regulations, despite overwhelming evidence of their complicity in the massacre of 26 people in Chengue in January 2001. Witnesses testify that this brigade allowed heavily armed paramilitary forces to pass through a military check point at the edge of the town, where they then killed 26 peasant farmers, crushing their heads with sledgehammers and heavy rocks. Subsequently, Marine infantry Officer Ruben Rojas was charged with providing weapons to the paramilitaries and helping to coordinate the attack. General Rodrigo Quinones, the commander of the 1st Brigade, and five of his officers were investigated by the Attorney Generals Office, for failing to act on prior and detailed information about paramilitary activities around Chengue. However, Quinones was later promoted. Luis Alejandro Parra Riveras, Quinones' successor as commander of the 1st Brigade, and the man now ultimately responsible for the whole zone, was accused by the Attorney Generals Office of obstructing the investigation, by withholding records and documents, and denying access to evidence.

Such examples of impunity in the face of complicity with human rights violations and paramilitary activity have been highlighted by the Uribe government's concerted campaign to discredit not only the NGOs but also their own Attorney Generals human rights department. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Londono's claim that NGOs are part of the insurgency, is echoed by the Attorney Generals own stated views, that his department show "excessive attention to human rights violations involving the army." Since coming to office, Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio, has fired at least nine investigators working on high profile human rights cases, and forced a further fifteen to resign. He has openly criticised a case against General Rito Alejo del Rio, accused of forming paramilitary groups, international terrorism and drug trafficking, despite evidence from soldiers, a mayor, a former bodyguard and the General's own chief of staff. The two investigators working on the case have both been sacked, the case has been closed, and rumour has it that Alejo del Rio is currently being groomed as the next head of military intelligence. Another investigator was sacked by Osorio after uncovering the involvement of an army major in the attempted assassination of Wilson Borja, a former trade union leader and current member of Congress. A further four investigators were dismissed after assisting in the arrest of a paramilitary commander and relation of AUC chief Carlos Castano. Similarly, a former Colombian Ambassador to the EU was released and exonified following his arrest and extradition from Spain, charged with paying paramilitaries for the forced displacement of 280 farmers from some of his land, that resulted in torture and many killings. According to one Attorney Generals employee, "Osorio has effectively finished with human rights work."

The thorough handicapping of the Attorney Generals human rights department, is of particular significance to the human rights conditions imposed on the Colombian army as a prerequisite to receiving US military aid. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Colombia has failed to meet any of these conditions, yet on 9 September 2002, the US released a further $70 million in aid to units of the Colombian military with proven records of serious rights abuses.

In another particularly worrying case, Gustavo Petro, member of Congress for Bogotá and member of the Polo Democratico, is currently facing charges of abuse of authority and revealing state secrets, after making public a list and detailed evidence of collaboration between the Attorney Generals office and the paramilitaries. The evidence had been compiled by a former investigator from the Attorney Generals office, since forced into exile after receiving death threats. For his part, Gustavo Petro is facing the sack from his elected position, and up to 3 years in prison. Anyone in the future who is tempted to shed some light on the illegal activities of the Colombian state, will surely now think twice.

The Uribe government's active disregard for human rights, and for all the national and international laws and structures, is exemplified by Colombia's supposed ratification of the International Criminal Court. The government ratified the treaty, but negotiated an exemption for Colombian and US military personnel in matters of intentional attacks on the civilian population, summary executions and torture. This exemption will last seven years. According to Colombia's Ambassador to the UN, the Colombian Congress, "probably didn't know about the government's plans."

The Union Patriotica has suffered its final indignity from the Colombian government. For many years, the political party set up by members of the Communist Party and demobilised FARC guerillas was ruthlessly persecuted by the army and their paramilitary allies, resulting in the murders of 3,500 UP activists and leaders, including senators, members of congress and numerous mayors and councillors. The National Electoral Board has now withdrawn the UP's legal status, rendering the party unable to participate in any form of election or legal political activity in Colombia. David Rhys-Jones

New Powers for the Army

New powers for the Colombian army and the National Attorney General have been approved in the latest Senate debate.

Once the vote becomes effective in law, the armed forces will have the police powers to investigate civilians, carry out raids, interecpt telephone communications, and remove bodies from the scene of a crime, amongst other powers.

However "only the attorney can grant these police powers to military forces, when the cirmcumstances of public order are such as to demand it, and under the direction of the National Attorney General", according to the draft law which today receives its presidential approval.

Thursday 12 December by Catalina Esparza, BBC correspondent in Colombia [abridged]

Uribe opens negotiations with Paras

News broke on 27 November 2002 that the Catholic Church had been facilitating secret negotiations between government envoys and the paramilitaries of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). The paramilitaries then declared a unilateral ceasefire to start on 1 December, with a view to opening direct negotiations with the government towards the end of January 2003. The Colombian press, and the US government were quick to welcome the development.

As part of their ceasefire, those paramilitary groups involved in the process (about 60-70% of the national total) have agreed to release all hostages in their power and to suspend their involvement in the drug trade, in return for a pardon, immunity from prosecution, political status, government funding to cover their losses from withdrawing from drugs trafficking, and the possible ceding to paramilitary control of a demilitarised zone, similar to that ceded to Colombia's main guerilla movement the FARC during their peace negotiations with previous president Andres Pastrana. The paramilitaries will however reserve the right to continue their operations against the guerilla and their supporters.

At first glance, this may seem a very generous offer on the part of the AUC. However, two factors combine to ensure that the paras will be able to continue with all their current activities (both repression of the social movement and civilian population, and the drug trafficking that funds this) within the framework of the ceasefire. The first is the "internal division" that AUC leaders Carlos Castaño and Salvatore Mancuso have been engineering within the paramilitary movement over the last few months, denying their own well documented links with drug trafficking, and blaming rogue elements within the AUC for carrying out this trade. Since several thousand paramilitaries under Castaño's control remain outside the ceasefire and negotiations, his organisation is perfectly able to continue as Colombia's largest drugs cartel, all within the parameters of the agreement.

Secondly, all paramilitary operations directed against the civilian population and the social movement, are justified by Castaño and his supporters in government, as part of the war against the insurgency. The tens of thousands of innocent civilians, trade unionists, human rights defenders and campesinos who have lost their lives through paramilitary violence, have all been accused by their killers of belonging to guerilla groups. As such, they will remain a legitimate target for the paramilitaries in their supposed defence of the state against the insurgency. Since many believe that the paras and the Colombian army have always enjoyed an unofficial ceasefire, it is difficult to see what Colombia will gain from these negotiations. It is also difficult to see what exactly will be negotiated, as the paras and successive Colombian governments, especially the government of Uribe, have always maintained almost complete agreement.

Pardon and Amnesty

Arguments are currently raging in Colombia as to the constitutional legality of negotiating with and pardoning the paramilitaries, a group who have no officially recognised political status, and in the eyes of the law are nothing more than delinquents. Congress, dominated by uribista representatives, is currently discussing changes to the Constitution that will allow for the omission of recognised political status as a prerequisite to a Presidential pardon. In this case, Colombia will find itself the first country to offer a blanket amnesty for drug trafficking. All crimes against humanity that the paras have committed will also be covered by any such agreement. Congressman Gustavo Petro has pointed out that an amnesty from crimes against humanity committed in defence of the state (as the paras continually claim) would also have pardoned Hitler and Pol Pot, amongst others. Until now, such pardons for such horrendous crimes have only ever been extended to the torturers and assassins of the Southern Cone.

So who is to gain from these negotiations? Certainly not the Colombian people, none of the thousands of those struggling for social justice who make up so many of the victims of the paramilitary organisations. Clearly the AUC leadership will escape the numerous arrest warrants against them, and Castaño and Mancuso will be able to avoid extradition to the US to face drug trafficking charges. Uribe will benefit from the de facto legalisation of his "clandestine wing" of the armed forces, and their probable incorporation into the 150,000 strong force of campesino soldiers, an organisation of paid and armed civilians that the government is currently setting up alongside its million strong informers network. Uribe will also benefit from the propaganda coup at international level that will greet his concerted attempts to bring peace to the country. George Bush will also gain - no more embarrassing explanations of why US tax money is ending up in the hands of drug trafficking terrorists. Perhaps a spokesperson for the FARC summed up the situation best - "the paras are the bastard children of the establishment, they have nothing to negotiate."

Reinsertion of Narcos

An interesting legal case looms over the horizon in Miami. The defence team of Fabio Ochoa, one of the leaders of the Medellin cartel currently facing drugs charges in the US, has filed a 1000 page document exposing a CIA/DEA plan of drug traffickers reinsertion.

Ochoa claims that in return for a $30 million donation to the CIA (which he refused to pay) he was offered a lenient prison term and quick release from a US gaol. The scheme was apparently set up by Colombian national and CIA operative Baruch Vega, and taken up by 114 Colombian drug traffickers. Vega, a former CIA assassin during the Pinochet coup in Chile, claims to have learned that the proceeds of the reinsertion scheme were to be used by the CIA to fund their covert operations, in a similar way to the Iran-Contra system. One alleged beneficiary was the AUC paramilitaries in Colombia. David Rhys-Jones

Impunity Stop Press: El Tiempo newspaper reported on 6 January 2003 that the Attorney General has suspended warrants for the arrest of Castaño and Mancuso, which would also include dropping any authority to deport the paramilitary leaders.

FARC and ELN * Hit Paras

In a combined action the 12th and 25th Fronts of the FARC and two ELN columns have overrun one of the three principal bases for death squads in the Magdalena Medio region. 60 paramilitaries were killed, 43 wounded and 14 captured, amongst them a good number of informants working for army intelligence.

The battle took place in the Cerro Azul (Blue Hill) mountains, near San Pablo in the south of Bolívar. For many years the AUC paramilitaries from this base had tortured, kidnapped and massacred in the surrounding areas, especially in the outskirts of Barrancabermeja. The base was like an army camp with artillery pieces, advanced technology, two helipads, a road was built nearby, two prisons and a special meeting hall.

The guerillas found several torture victims still held on the base. One 52 year old woman relayed her horror story. "I was kept in an isolated cell... People were smashed to pieces until they died". According to members of human rights organisations and local peasants "high officers of the Church came here for meetings with ranchers and the army. They said they were doing humanitarian work".

It was precisely the Cerro Azul base that was the final destination, as confessed by the army and paramilitaries, of indigenous leader Kimmy Pernia two years ago. His disappearance was at the time treated with the utmost indifference and impunity by the government, Attorney General and the army (see Colombia Solidarity No 2).

The Cerro Azul death squads, supposedly in a cease fire with the government, had in December murdered four peasants, two indigenous people three women besides disappearing seven members of an agricultural cooperative.

With this action the guerillas continue their pursuit of the paramilitaries. They claim to have killed 1,700 paras in the last year. VISUR

* FARC Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - the biggest guerilla movement. ELN National Liberation Army - the second biggest guerilla movement.

Universal Human Rights Day Commerorated by Great Mobilisation in Bogotá

Bogotá's special Anti-Mutiny Police used tear gas, batons and water jets to try and stop the popular demonstration on the Universal Day of Human Rights. The march took place in rejection of the proposed Referendum and the reforms to tax, pensions and labour law advanced by the government of Alvaro Uribe that violate the economic, social and political rights of the Colombian people.

The violent police assault did not succeed in stopping the demonstration. Thousands of demonstrators got into the Plaza de Bolívar, where they called for abstention in the Referendum. They showed their solidarity with imprisoned Human Rights defenders, and persecuted street sellers and others in conflict.

Not even the rain, which came down with great force at the end of the day, was an obstacle in the way of the combative mobilisation.: Notipaco of the Colombian Communist Party, Tuesday 10 December, 2002 at 09:02 PM

UNIVERSITY WORKERS

The Sindicato de Trabajadores Universitarios - SINTRAUNICOL (Colombian University Workers Union) is a University based national trade union that unites employees and workers from the 29 National Public Funded Universities in Colombia. The union currently has nearly 6,500 members. The workers are state employees.

One of the biggest recent problems has been the sharp reduction in university employees, leading to essential positions not being filled. Where new appointments are made it is normally on an hourly or short-term contract basis that negatively affects the quality of educational provision. Furthermore, budget reductions have drastically reduced research activities.

The South Wetsern Regional Branch of SINTRAUNICOL is located at the Universidad del Valle (Univalle), in Colombia's second city of Cali. This branch has 780 members.

Univalle is heavily in debt. By 1998 the university owed US$23 million and that increased to US$25 million due to default charges for non-repayment. During the years 2000 and 2001 the university administration began renegotiating the loan, which ultimately led to the banks becoming owners of large parts of the university as part payment. Furthermore, the University still had to pay approximately US$80 thousand per annum as part of the debt repayment. Another part of the agreement was to give the banks greater influence over the day-to-day management of the University.

These locally specific factors, coupled with the national legislation have led to increased tension in the University and resistance has taken the form of occupations, marches, and strikes. SINTRAUNICOL has developed a two pronged strategy: firstly, the defence of the State funded Public University in opposition to privatisation and corruption; and secondly, the defence of the economic, social and political rights of its members.

In the second term of 2002, the government once again issued a new decree, which this time sought to remove certain financial and social benefits awarded to civil servants. This decree should not even have applied to University employees, however, the University administration decided to implement it in order to force through yet further cutbacks. The union presented all the legal arguments to highlight the inapplicability of the decree. Despite our protestations the University administration applied the decree beginning on September 1st, 2002. We continue to develop a range of strikes, demonstrations and activities to reverse this decision.

The response to all the above activities has been yet more threats, intimidations and financial punishments. The University has withheld union dues collected directly from salaries, which has forced us to borrow heavily from banks and cooperatives. In the last 9 weeks we have had to borrow US $3,000 and in the earlier strikes of 2002 we borrowed US $2,500. All our activities have great costs, which include buying food for members, paying transport costs and these have been continuous since 1998. We have also been actively involved and supported a range of other trade union and social organisations in their struggles in recent months such as SINTRAEMCALI (successful struggle against the privatisation of water, telecommunications, and electricity in the region) and SINDISENA (partially successful struggle against cutbacks in state technical colleges - which provide one of the few avenues for working class students to enter higher education).

For all this resistance all our members are in serious danger, particularly the local leadership in Cali. SINTRAUNICOL in Cali has been given special protection measures by the Organisation of American States, which includes armed bodyguards, bulletproof cars and walkie-talkies. Despite the dangers we are determined to struggle against privatisation and corruption, and against the neoliberal economic model being implemented by the fascist government of Uribe Velez.

International Solidarity - your voice and assistance - is a vital component in the struggle of the Colombian people.

In Solidarity, Friendship and Respect

Yours Carlos Gonzalez

STUDENT STRUGGLES

SANTANDER

A student was shot dead by state forces at the Industrial University of Santander (UIS) in Bucaramanga. The notorious anti-mutiny police refused to allow access for an emergency medical team, and they stopped wounded students from being attended to at the emergency section of the University Hospital.

We Protest To be Heard, But They Kill Us

We the university students are called to protest against neoliberal policies which every day tend to make the rich richer and the poor yet poorer, and for that reason there is amoral imperative to go out and protest and to propose a more equal society.

We are up against it, now that the economic system that dominates the political system has taken the decision to unilaterally implement its plan. The plan is to destroy all possible opposition and resistance that might come from the exploited and subjected sectors - the peasants, the indigenous people, workers, rights defenders and students.

In this context, to protect the lives of the workers, teachers and students at the Industrial University of Santander, an urgent action was raised with the Inter-American Human Rights Court (CIDH), due to threats from paramilitary groups. Perhaps these threats were in retaliation for protests that we made during the first six months of 2001.

The government arranged for various measures to be taken, amongst them the establishment of a commission composed of the Vice-president, officials from the Interior Ministry, two NGOs, university leaders, workers, students and teachers whose mission was to establish a security scheme for our alma mater. But the university rector then unilaterally appointed a private guard company, in clear violation of international agreements. This generated protests, first from the workers and then from the students.

When the students went out to protest on 20 November JAIME ALFONSO ACOSTA CAMPO, who was an 18 years old from Valledupar studying Mechanical Engineering, fell assassinated by the National Police. Besides that 20 other students were wounded.

P.S. This struggle will last some time. We require resources to provide food for more than three thousand students. Term is due to start again on 16 January, but the students want to fight on. If we resolve this impasse we will emerge victorious. Please send any aid that you can.

APPRENTICES PROTEST

On 3 December protesting worker-students were violently attacked by the police in Bogotá. Twelve had serious injuries or 2nd and 3rd degree burns.

On 10 December 250 worker-students made a number of "Permanent Visits" to SENA headquarters in Bogotá and other major cities to protest against government proposals to change their apprenticeship contracts (SENA is the national apprentice training scheme - see page 16). They also drew attention to serious private sector corruption, and so the next day SENA's director general ordered the worker-students' eviction.

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CLOSED

The main Bogotá site of Colombia's biggest state university, Universidad National (UN) was closed for two weeks on 28 November. UN is near to the US embassy on the road to the international airport. And when explosions went off around the US embassy, the authorities claimed that these had been launched from mortars in UN grounds. Security police entered in force, three students were wounded. Security raids against students took place early on 29 November.

UN's closure was extended until after the visit of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, to minimise protests.

Uribe's New Year Offensive

From Washington Uribe looks good. The World Bank recently reported that "the policy orientation of the new Colombian government has been positive for investors." Uribe is seeking a $2 billion credit from the IMF, which will unlock a further $9 billion of loans. The conditions are that he reduces the fiscal deficit from 4.1% to 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and pushes through a new round of 'structural reforms'. Their common theme is obvious. Uribe has launched an offensive to force down wages.

Wage levels have still not recovered from the crash of 1998/99, the worst in Colombia's history. Since 1998 the average income per capita has fallen by 7% (30% in dollar terms). The absolute fall in the standard of living for Colombia's poor is even more drastic. The minimum wage has fallen in real terms from 41,025 pesos in 1990 to 39,298 pesos in 2002. State sector workers have lost 30% of their income in peso terms over the last ten years.

Wage settlements for all state sector workers - apart from the military - are frozen until the referendum in May. Half of Colombia's workers live on the minimum wage or less. The government has decided that for 2003 it will be 332 thousand pesos (£70.44) a month, an apparent 7.44% increase. However when it comes to real wages rather than money wages all is not what it seems. The government has also agreed 17% rise in electricity prices, to guarantee private companies profitable returns on their investment. It is estimated that prices of necessities will increase between 15% and 20%. There could be a 7-8% reduction in the real minimum wage next year.

And from 2005 sales tax will be applied to household purchases. This measure is intended to raise an extra million million pesos (£212 million) annually for the Armed Forces.

Uribe's counter-reform package includes the most regressive labour legislation in 50 years. The new labour law extends the official working day by four hours, from 6am to 10pm. Overtime rates will not be paid during these 16 hours, and overtime on Sundays and public holidays has been cut from double time to 1.75 of normal day rates. The basic working week has been set at 48 hours.

Compensation for unjustly sacked workers with less than 10 years service has been halved. Unemployment benefit has been cut to six monthly payments of 76,000 pesos.

Cesantias is a system of annual increments, or bonuses, equivalent on one month's salary that could be accumulated in a fund and then drawn on as required. Workers used this fund to save towards a home for their family, to achieve some dignity and stability in their lives. From 2004 public sector workers will lose the right to accumulate their cesantia. Uribe's reform will take 30% of the fund for unemployment benefits. Not that these benefits are at all adequate, they have been cut to six monthly payments of 76,000 pesos.

Support to the SENA apprenticeship system has been cut. SENA represented a real gain for the workers. It meant that children who had no chance of paying for university could at least gain some post-school education, with technology and skills training. Apprentices will now receive only half the minimum wage while at college, and three quarters while working. Their contract has been changed to remove their employment rights.

Uribe has attacked pensions. By 2015 workers will have to have completed 1,300 weeks employment to qualify for a pension. The only significant element that Congress blocked was his proposed increase of the retirement age. As with wages, the armed forces will be exempt from the general rules - the President will set their pensions.

Uribe's government claims that within 4 years these reforms will generate 600,000 new jobs. In fact in the last year alone there are 600,000 more unemployed. The whole point is to re-employ them, but on worse terms than before.

The attack on wages, cesantias and SENA is essential to the Uribe economic project to drive Colombian labour down market a la Mexico. A country of unorganised, casual labour destined for temporary jobs in maquiladoras run by foreign multinationals. The condition for this is the destruction of the social movements, the trade unions and any elements of political opposition offering serious resistance.: Andy Higginbottom

Colombian view of Venezuela

At the petroleum refinery of Barrancabermeja the workers who are consigned to hard manual labour are called 'lungos'. There are a lot of them and they earn very little. They are almost all temporary labourers and they live in the poor neighbourhoods. When the 'lungos' go on strike, technology guarantees that production doesn't totally stop-so even when the majority of the workers are united in protest, if they can't actually stop the plant from functioning, the engineers, supervisors, and managers can keep the refinery going under 'contingency plans'.

Right now the oil-workers union of Colombia, USO (Union Sindical Obrera), is getting ready to go on strike in response to the Uribe government's offensive. That offensive is headed by Isaac Yanovich, a businessman from the private banking sector who has been named president of the state oil company. The workers, who struggled and won the creation of a national oil company (Ecopetrol), have resisted its privatization for the past 25 years. They have paid a terrible price for their resistance: 100 union leaders and activists assassinated (4 during 2002, which saw 160 Colombian unionists killed), 2 disappeared, 10 kidnapped, 31 imprisoned (6 of whom are still in prison), and 250 fired (11 of whom were fired just a few days ago).

It is in such difficult conditions that the Colombian oil-workers are preparing their strike for the beginning of 2003. The victory of their movement will depend on their ability to halt production. For this reason the union and the government are both putting forth massive efforts to win the engineers and supervisors to their side. If the union is unable to win these over, the workers will have no option but to occupy the plant. This will mean that they will face military repression like they did in 1971. In that year, as workers in the union remember well, worker Fermin Amaya was murdered as he was about to stop production at the Barranca refinery.

Next door in Venezuela, the world is flipped entirely upside down. There, the 'lungos' are working intensely while the call to strike is followed with fervour and without hesitation by the managers. On December 2 the managerial body of Venezuela's state oil company, PDV (Petroleros de Venezuela), blocked the entrance to the refinery and used their vehicles to stop the workers, the 'lungos'-who had showed up to work in massive numbers-- from entering. The same managerial body was joined by the executive of labour relations in its attempts to bar the entry of workers.

But the real strength of the strike in Venezuela has been in the computers that control the giant and highly automated petroleum industry. Even though the PDV is nominally state-owned and run, the computer system is in the hands of the 'mixed' (public-private) enterprise Intesa. The party with the technical skill in the partnership is the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)-a transnational computing company. Among its directors: ex-US Secretaries of Defense William Perry and Melvin Laird; ex-directors of the CIA John Deutsch, Robert Gates; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (ex-director of the National Security Agency); other retired military staff including Wayne Downing (former commander in chief of US Special Forces) and Jasper Welch (ex-coordinator of the National Security Council).

The hold-up of the oil-tankers was directed from these computing centers. The hold-up was welcomed by various captains, but the tankers were forced to shore in any case: nothing moves without direction from the computers, which also stopped key operations in the refineries and the entry of vital gas for the metallurgic industries of eastern Venezuela. 'Lungos' from Guayana had to recover the gas.

The high salaries, privileges, and commissions of the managers, labour relations chiefs, systems engineers, and tanker captains has become a useful weapon of political control for the transnational corporations who seek to privatize Venezuela's (and Colombia's, Ecuador's, and Brazil's) petrol industry.

This 'middle' class with its disposable income is the political base of the right in Colombia and Venezuela (and its heroes are Bush, Aznar, or Berlusconi). It is the electoral force behind Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe Velez and behind the coup in Venezuela. Washington uses the mailed fist in Colombia and the velvet glove in Venezuela, but in both cases its local support is from these 'middle' classes who, like Bush himself, are too deaf to hear of the assassinations of unionists in Colombia but scream in rage if a hair on the head of a manager or oil-tanker captain in Venezuela is touched; who are quiet when 2 million Colombians are displaced from their lands but enraged by the Venezuelan Land Law when it threatens the unproductive ranches of large Venezuelan landowners.

On September 16 2002, Colombian peasants were treated cruelly for their protests on the highways. Their food was burned. They were denied drinking water. They were surrounded by the military and their leaders were arrested. 3 were disappeared. International delegates were deported. 7 of the protest leaders have since been assassinated, one disappeared, and many others harassed and threatened with murder. They stand accused-of blocking the roads. In Venezuela on the other hand, the 'middle' and upper classes blocked roads with their Mercedes Benz and BMWs, and their rights were respected.

In Cali, Colombia, the public service workers have been protesting privatization. The young workers of the apprentices' union have been protesting to maintain state control over the apprenticeship institution, SENA. Both sectors have been incessantly, brutally attacked and the international media have nothing to say. The media are silent as well on the daily confrontations on the Caribbean coast of Colombia when the privatized electricity company tries to cut electricity to thousands of indebted, poor people. Neither popular protest nor state repression make the international news if they occur in Colombia which, to the media, is a land strictly of terrorism and drugs.

The 'middle' class ought to watch out though-sometimes it can end up the victim of its own heroes, whether they be politicians like Bush or the mainstream media itself. That was what happened with the 'corralito' in Argentina, when the whole country-including the 'middle class'-mobilized against the banks and were denounced for it in the media.

Until this happens the 'señoritos' in wealthy eastern Caracas, in the Chico of Bogota and of Miami, will be the darlings of the media.: Hector Mondragón

Znet Commentary Translated by Justin Podur.

VENEZUELAN DEMOCRACY UNDER THREAT

David Raby reports from Caracas,

15th December 2002

In the past few weeks Venezuela has been under threat of a Bush/oil/Miami mafia inspired coup. Now, since the government seems to have overcome the threat of a coup, the real danger is that of a US/OAS (Organisation of American States) "democratic" intervention.

Since Monday 2 December an opposition strike (really a bosses' lockout) has tried to shut down the country's economy, the media have become ever more hysterical in their denunciations of President Chávez' "dictatorship", well-heeled demonstrators from the posh neighbourhoods of Caracas make nightly protests banging pots and pans and blocking roads and motorways, and dissident military officers dismissed after the April coup call on their comrades-in-arms to rise up against "the crazy man in Miraflores" (the presidential palace) and his "Castro-communism". Every day the media demand Chávez's resignation and predict that his fall is imminent, in a vicious campaign of lies, distortions and incitement to subversion which is unparalleled in intensity. This has certainly been effective with much of the middle class, whose hysterical anti-Chávez demonstrations have earned them the epithet of escuálidos (dirty or squalid) from government supporters.

Chávez hangs on

But Chávez has not fallen, and after nearly a fortnight of this massive opposition offensive it seems unlikely that he will fall any time soon, if at all. Even before the lockout began the government had shown its strength by decreeing military control of the Metropolitan Caracas Police, hitherto controlled by opposition mayor Alfredo Peña and notorious for their brutal treatment of chavistas and of the poor in general. When the lockout began, the government responded by using the military to set up 'popular markets' to distribute cheap food in lower-class areas of the cities, showing that it would not allow merchants and employers to create artificial scarcity and panic. Shopping centres and most businesses in middle and upper-class areas closed down, but in poor areas shops stayed open and street traders have been having a hayday.

Oil and sabotage

The opposition, led by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce (FEDECAMARAS) and the corrupt CTV union federation, quickly escalated the conflict by trying to paralyse the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Although nominally nationalised since the 1970s, PDVSA is in fact run by a clique of privileged managers closely linked to the multinationals and to the former governing party Acción Democrática (AD). On 4 December these managers declared themselves in support of the "national strike", and were immediately joined by the captains of Venezuelan oil tankers who struck anchor and refused to move. (Strangely, the country does not have a domestic oil pipeline and petrol is distributed by ship from the major oil-producing areas to various ports along the coast). Owners of fleets of road tankers also shut down their businesses and the result was the amazing spectacle of a major oil-producing country about to be paralysed by lack of petrol.

But Chávez's response was immediate: the military were sent in to keep the oil refineries running, the rebellious ship captains were dismissed and the navy was sent to take control, fines were imposed on striking road hauliers and the military requisitioned the vehicles. Finally, the President bit the bullet and did what many people thought he should have done in April: he dismissed the top management of PDVSA and centralised control in the Minister of Energy and Mines (and former head of OPEC) Alí Rodríguez. Despite an outcry in the media and intensified street protests by the opposition, the measures seem to be working and life is returning to normal. Although a week after the conflict began another blow has been struck for the opposition by the banks which have also partially closed down (they are opening with very limited hours), most businesses are open, Caracas has its normal chaotic traffic and the government has clearly won.

Media terrorism

A crucial element in the opposition campaign throughout has been the role of the media. It is often said that the Venezuelan media are biased against Chávez, but this does not begin to convey the extent of their involvement. Four of the five main TV channels, and 90% of the press, have become a prime political instrument of opposition in a way never before seen anywhere. Normal TV programming has been suspended and opposition activities are not simply reported but systematically promoted almost 24 hours a day. Every development in the bosses' strike was enthusiastically reported (and exaggerated) minute by minute. Of course when the government suggests taking action against this pernicious abuse of media power the OAS and international media accuse Chávez of threatening freedom of expression. But this is not journalism, it is subversion and would be cause for legal sanctions in almost any other country.

Subversion and terror

There should be no illusions about what has happened in the past fortnight: Venezuelan workers were not on strike, nor do the opposition have overwhelming public support as the media claim, and this was not a valiant democratic campaign for free elections against an autocratic government. On the contrary, the country has been subjected to a systematic plan of sabotage and subversion designed to provoke chaos and justify a coup or an intervention by the US under the "Democratic Charter" of the OAS (Organisation of American States).

This was a re-run of events leading up to the April coup, when a similar lockout and conflict centred on PDVSA culminated in a mass opposition march on the presidential palace and a mysterious shoot-out causing over 20 deaths, which were immediately blamed on Chávez and served as the pretext for the April 11 coup. The coup leaders (and the world) were astonished by the massive response of the Venezuelan people who took to the streets to demand the release of Chávez and the swift action of the loyal majority in the military leading to his restoration on April 13-14. But the government's extreme tolerance allowed the same reactionary coalition to regroup and to attempt a repeat in December. This time they failed, and it seems that the government has learnt its lesson and will not be surprised again.

The people, the military and their leader

In all of this there are three key actors which have been systematically underestimated by the opposition and the media: the Venezuelan people, the military, and Chávez himself. Despite the barrage of opposition propaganda the great majority of poor Venezuelans in the cerros - the hillside shanties of Caracas - and in the interior remain loyal to Chávez, and passionately so. In poor areas one has only to mention the opposition to be overwhelmed by a chorus of indignant voices denouncing the partisan hostility of the media, insisting on the corruption and injustice of the 40 years of pseudo-democracy which preceded Chávez, and defending the President's "Bolivarian Revolution". On Saturday 7 December, the sixth day of the lockout, a huge chavista demonstration marched from the Valle district in south-west Caracas to Miraflores to show their support for Chávez, a torrent of humanity who then stood for four hours to applaud their leader as he reaffirmed his commitment to the cause and announced the dismissal of the treacherous oil company bosses and merchant marine officers. No-one who saw this massive rally can have much doubt that if the opposition gets the early elections or referendum it wants, it will lose again as it has done seven times in the past four years. This is why the opposition is increasingly desperate - and dangerous. But it is also why the figure of Chávez himself is so crucial - something which Europeans and North Americans find hard to understand, but without which the Venezuelan process would be incomprehensible.

The idea that one man can galvanise and represent an entire people, and can do so without being a dictator or a demagogue, is anathema to most people in the West. But such heroic figures do appear from time to time - and not only in Latin America - in situations of national crisis, when the popular demand for change is overwhelming and no party or structured organisation is adequate to the task. In Venezuela by the early 90s all political parties were discredited, the economy was a shambles and the people had shown in no uncertain terms, in the IMF riots of 27-28 February 1989, their rebellious disposition. Chávez showed by his attempted military-civilian uprising of February 1992 (not just a conventional coup) that he understood and was willing to provide leadership and to pay the price of failure. When a few years later (released from gaol and amnestied) he adopted the electoral road, the poor of Venezuela knew immediately that this was their man, and no amount of liberal sermonising or marxist theorising about revolutionary parties could divert them from their path. With Chávez real change was at last possible: without Chávez Venezuela today would be like Argentina, in desperate crisis, with massive protests but no prospect of a solution.

Also fundamental to the Venezuelan revolution is the military. It is fashionable now to compare Venezuela to Chile under Allende, but there are two key differences: first, that Chávez has repeatedly won a clear majority of popular votes in elections and referenda (where Allende had only a relative plurality), and secondly, that the Venezuelan military are active participants in Chávez' revolution and not just passive and unreliable "constitutionalists" as in Chile. Many progressive people understandably find it difficult to come to terms with the idea of a Latin American military corps siding with the people, but for various reasons Venezuela is different: the recruitment of the officer corps is less elitist, many of them were trained in nationalist values and did not attend the notorious School of the Americas, and since the April coup the most reactionary officers have been purged and many others resent the idea that they were deceived and manipulated by the golpistas.

A real programme for the people

It is frequently said, even in the progressive media, that for all his promises and popularity Chávez has done nothing to improve the life of the poor in Venezuela. Nothing could be further from the truth: despite all kinds of political and legal roadblocks invented by the opposition, he has nearly tripled the education and health budgets, has introduced a special programme of Bolivarian Schools organised (but not run) by the military for poor children, public works programmes by the military in poor neighbourhoods, micro-credit for small farmers, a new Women's Development Bank, support for new housing projects organised and run by local communities with state aid, and above all, support for ordinary people to take control of their own affairs and organise to take power at all levels through participatory democracy. It is this which the Venezuelan oligarchy cannot tolerate, and this, together with his nationalist economic and foreign policies, which is so dangerous in the eyes of Washington.

The threat of intervention

The threat of violence (and contrary to the impression given by the media, the Venezuelan process has been remarkably peaceful except for the events of 11-14 April) is real, and last week it reared its ugly head again in the Plaza Francia of Altamira, a wealthy district of east Caracas. This square has become the focus of opposition activity, occupied for weeks by right-wing protesters and dissident military officers calling incessantly for Chávez' overthrow. On Friday 6 December shots rang out in Plaza Francia, resulting in three deaths and 28 wounded. Within a couple of hours opposition leaders, notably Carlos Fernández of the business association and Carlos Ortega of the CTV union federation, were on TV blaming the government - "¡Chávez asesino!" shouted a furious Ortega, without a shred of evidence. A Portuguese immigrant, Joâo de Gouveia, immediately confessed to the shootings, but it is not at all clear if he was responsible for all the shots and who (if anyone) put him up to it. The government lamented the casualties and called for calm while a thorough judicial investigation takes place, but it is obvious that the Altmira massacre fits right in to the opposition's plan to destabilise the country and condemn Chávez as a violent dictator. This is an almost exact replay of the April scenario which triggered the coup, but this time it didn't work: the people and the government would not fall for the same trick twice, and most significantly the military, conscious that they were manipulated in April, are now more solidly behind Chávez than before. Unable to provoke a coup, having failed to paralyse the economy, and knowing that they are unlikely to win a fair election, the opposition's last gambit is destabilisation in order to justify US intervention. That is now the one real threat to Chávez and his revolution, and that is what progressive and democratic forces world-wide must denounce and oppose by every means possible. Write to your MPs, to the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, organise solidarity meetings and demonstrations in support of Venezuela and its unique popular democratic revolution, write to the authorities in Washington and the OAS, and demand respect for the democratic government of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela!

David Raby dlrabyliv.ac.uk

INTERNATIONAL DELEGATES OPPOSE FREE TRADE AGREEMENT

The Second Hemispheric Meeting in Struggle against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was held in Havana from 25-28 November, with nearly 1,000 delegates from all of Latin America, the US and Canada, and several European observers. In plenary sessions and workshops there were intense discussions of the negative effects of existing free trade agreements, the way governments negotiate these agreements without public discussion, and how to struggle against the FTAA.

In contrast to the first such meeting held two years previously, the emphasis this time was less on denouncing the harmful impact of free trade than on analysing its modes of operation and developing specific proposals for resistance. Workshops debated the different issues raised by free trade for women, labour, native peoples, farmers and students, and reported on actions taken in different countries to defend public services and traditional community rights against the impositions of foreign corporations. Delegates stressed the need to study international commercial law and to maintain constant vigilance, since independently of the FTAA or the WTO (World Trade Organisation), clauses favourable to transnational corporations are constantly being inserted in bilateral agreements without any reference to national parliaments, let alone public debate.

A startling example of this was given by Bolivian delegates, who explained how when the water supply in Cochabamba was privatised and sold to a US company, massive popular protests forced the Bolivian government to revoke the concession. But since the company had negotiated the concession through its Dutch subsidiary, and Bolivia had recently secretly negotiated a bilateral investment agreement with the Netherlands, the company was able to appeal to Dutch courts and win a settlement of $25 million compensation for lost profits, although it had only invested half a million dollars!

There was a general consensus that the FTAA is an instrument for, as the Cubans put it, for "the annexation of Latin America by the United States". Several delegations also pointed out that the threat is not only economic but political and military: the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush administration is only too apparent in Latin America, what with the renewed threats to Cuba, the interventionist "Plan Colombia" and "Andean Initiative" to guarantee US control of the region, and the short-lived coup against the progressive Chavez government in Venezuela in April.

The large Colombian delegation, which included labour leader and former presidential candidate Lucho Garzon, insisted on that country's key role in US plans for the whole of South America. The genocide of union activists, teachers, journalists and human rights workers by the military and paramilitary in that country is being intensified by the extreme right government of President Alvaro Uribe, and the so-called "war on drugs", now rebaptised as the "war on terrorism" in Colombia, is the main pretext for the creation of new US military bases in Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Argentina and for attempts to destabilise Cuba and Venezuela.

The high points of the Meeting were addresses by Bolivian peasant leader Evo Morales, Argentinian human rights champion Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Chilean journalist Manuel Cabieses Donoso, the speaker of the Cuban Parliament Ricardo Alarcon, and of course Fidel Castro who spoke for only three and a half hours! But as always, Fidel held the delegates' attention with a trenchant and ironic analysis of the origins and implications of the FTAA, a project which - he pointed out - was first presented in 1991 by George Bush senior and which is designed to guarantee perpetual US control of Latin American resources. The positive conclusion to be drawn is that with Chavez in Venezuela and now Lula in Brazil, Cuba is no longer alone in Latin America: but this means more work, not less, for solidarity activists in Britain and elsewhere!: David Raby

Eyewitness from Quito: Popular Rage Against FTAA

Please accept this bulletin from the edge of consciousness. I don't know whether I feel like crying because I am so moved by what I saw today, because my mucous membranes are shot to hell from too much tear gas, or from sheer exhaustion. But I want to get this out while it is fresh in my mind.

Tonight I watched some of the most oppressed people in this world confront some of the most influential. Tonight I watched a group of poor farmers, indigenous people, and workers speak, shout, sing truth to power.

When the day started, I was 20km south of Quito with maybe just 300 indigenas, one of two protest caravans that had crossed the country spreading the word about the protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quito. But soon after we got off the buses near Quito, the number of people seemed to mysteriously increase, as buses from the South disgorged fresh groups of protesters.

People lined the street to watch as we passed by. One shopkeeper explained to me that the indigenous people were like burros, dragging along the rest of the country, who also opposed the FTAA because it would devastate the economy.

As we headed north we were joined by groups of campesinos, students, trade unionists, and international activists who had already been fighting running battles with police attempting to turn everyone back from the summit.

Soon we were stopped by riot police, who refused to allow a delegation of civil society groups into the summit. So we headed west toward the Volcan Pichincha. More groups drifted in from the sides, and soon la Avenida Colon was packed for perhaps 8 or 10 blocks. There must have been between 8 and 15,000 people.

As we approached the Avenida Amazonas, the police opened fire with tear gas. I couldn't see or breathe. The president of the National Judicial Workers Union was hit with three tear-gas cannisters and taken to the hospital. Several children almost asphyxiated. A reminder that 'free' trade can only proceed via brutal repression.

At 6 pm we made our way to the Suissotel, where the trade ministers were meeting with assorted CEOs and trade lobbyists at the 7th Americas Business Forum. 2000 people marched up to police barricades. Clearly hoping to avoid the kind of confrontations that have occurred in past uprisings, the government allowed 40 people to come in and address the visibly uncomfortable ministers, including US trade representative Robert Zoellick, who stared fixedly at his shoes.

The first speakers were representatives of an international meeting of parliament and congress members from across the hemisphere. They condemned the FTAA process, and called for an alternative integration, one that respects the needs and particular situations of the people of each country. Next came several representatives of a "civil society" forum organized by a number of pro-neoliberal NGOs with close ties to the government. Their tepid proposals were for the most part drowned out by the crowd.

Finally, the social-movement representatives spoke. Leonidas Iza, President of CONAIE (the Ecuadorian indigenous federation), rejected the FTAA and neoliberalism in general. "We are in desperate shape," he told the ministers. "You couldn't possibly understand, you who were born in golden cradles and have never suffered. But we don't have food to feed our children. Our markets are flooded with cheap imports. When we complain, the US government calls us terrorists. We are not threatening anything, but we are hungry and tired and things have to change."

Today the hemispheric resistance to free trade and the FTAA took a huge step forward, even if this is but one day in a long struggle. Tonight's show of force may also strengthen the resolve of poor countries in the negotiations that follow.: Justin Ruben

For more information about the Quito mobilization visit: http://www.ecuador.indymedia.org/
For information about the Montreal Student Strike visit: http://www.montreal.indymedia.org
For general information about the Hemispheric anti-FTAA campaign visit: http://www.stopftaa.org

From Liberator to Destroyer

Colombia's first president Simón Bolívar liberated six countries from Spanish colonial rule. He deservedly earned the popular title The Liberator. Bolívar's great vision of an independent Latin America, united and equal amongst the nations of the world, was sadly already falling apart by the time of his death. In a perverse reversal of history, Colombia's latest president Álvaro Uribe Vélez is preparing to surrender not only his own country's sovereignty, but to sacrifice the independence of the Andean region and subjugate it to the demands of the US empire, thereby breaking the prospect of continental unity.

The US strategy to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean is structured through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).* As the battle for and against the FTAA unfolds, and as widespread popular opposition becomes more pronounced, the fight to stop Uribe the Destroyer has become an urgent issue for all independent Latin Americans. This is because he has formed a key alliance with the USA to help it expand NAFTA south of Mexico. Right-wing forces have the initiative in Central America (still traumatised by the Reagan/Bush inspired wars of the 1980s), in Colombia and in Chile. Chile and Colombia have emerged as the two Trojan horses for US aggression against South America. Their ruling classes are not just vende patrias but vende continentes.

Chilean President Largos concluded a free trade agreement with the USA that will come into force in 2004. The only other countries who enjoy the same commercial terms are Mexico and Canada under NAFTA, and Israel and Jordan. The agreement is not so much about free trade (Chile already has very low tariffs, and its exports to the US are unlikely to increase greatly) as the free operation of US capital. Controls on capital movements have been lifted, the country's mineral wealth has been fully opened up to US corporations. The essence is to guarantee the profitability of US multinationals investing in Chile. In other words, the agreement is a prototype for what the USA is seeking on a broader scale through the FTAA. Moreover, this agreement reverses Chile's momentum to regional economic integration with Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay through Mercosur. It is a modern reformulation of that classic colonial mainstay, divide and rule.

Chile's economy is already one of the most open in Latin America. So the agreement is not simply an increase to make it yet more open, rather it will change the meaning of Chile's openness to US investors. It is a commitment to qualitatively change the power balance between US capital and the Chilean working class. US corporations will have the right to insist that the Chilean state does whatever is required - break strikes, remove environmental controls, exempt taxes - to ensure their profitable capital accumulation. A legal framework endorsing the right of multinational corporations to untrammelled super-exploitation, a spectre that was meant to be buried with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, has again reared its ugly head with this bilateral accord. This is not free trade, it is monopoly capitalism in every sense.

Through Uribe, Colombia is caught in the grip of a similar process, the external dimension of which is causing increasingly tense relations with its neighbours in the Andean group.

Since 1990 one fifth of Colombia's agricultural land has gone out of production. Soya, cotton and sorghum crops have dropped by 60% to 80% because 'free trade' means imports from the US and EU at state subsidised prices. The loss of domestic foood production is a massive crisis in Colombia. There is a protectionist wing and a neo-liberal open market wing within the propertied classes. Initially the government held that agriculture should be protected with import tariffs at the highest limit allowed within WTO rules. The US government threatened to withdraw access to its markets if Colombia insisted. An emergency meeting, Uribe persuaded the agriculture and foreign trade ministers to accept the US position. Colombia's backdown broke an earlier accord with Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela to stand up to US pressure.

With international coffee prices at rock bottom, traditional producers have started planting coca bushes in with their crop, and Uribe has promised a fumigation campaign. The monster is eating its young.: Andy Higginbottom

US Troop Build Up

Marines Ordered In via Peru

Around October 2002 two battalions of US Marine Jungle Expeditionary Forces received deployment orders for insertion into Colombia in February, 2003.

According to reliable sources, the battalions, roughly 1,100 men, will rotate in and out of southern Colombia by way of Peru, with orders to eliminate all high officers of the FARC, scattering those who escape to the remote corners of the Amazon. The offensive will be led by the Colombian military, which will push the FARC south toward the waiting Marines. The US troops will probably operate out of both the US base at Manta on the coast of Ecuador as well as at a secret base deep in the Peruvian jungle near the Putumayo river-Peru's border with Colombia.

The presence of US troops in battle in Colombia will be in direct contravention of Congressional restrictions on military aid. But with the propaganda that has been churned out during the past year regarding terrorism-including Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers' claim that the FARC were training with Al Qaida (a statement he quietly rescinded)-the administration feels the American public's outrage will be controllable.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo denied any future involvement of US troops on Peruvian soil, or the presence of a US base in Peru. But insiders saw the arrival of the USS Portland with 600 Marine jungle troops near Iquitos in Peru's Amazonian interior last year as a double message. To the FARC it said that the US can show up any time and cut off their southern river escape routes. To the Peruvians it was a reminder that Toledo had crossed the line when he abruptly cancelled a joint Peruvian-US military training exercise in April 2002.

The administration will try to keep the presence of the marines secret for as long as possible. But in the event that the US public discovers that its government is engaging in an offensive war, the administration is prepared to deal with that, including taking the heat for as many indigenous peoples and campesinos as might be killed.: Peter Gorman

(Abridged, full article in www.narconews.com)

MORE US SPECIAL FORCES ARRIVING

US Special Forces personnel started to arrive in Colombia in October 2002 as part of a $95 million package to train two Colombian army units and equip them with helicopter gun-ships.

The new training and equipment is aimed at increasing security for the Caño Limon oil pipeline that is owned and operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental. The pipeline, which runs through north-eastern Colombia, is a regular target (it was out of action for more than 170 days in 2001) of leftwing rebels, who object to Colombia's oil wealth being expropriated by multinational corporations. The newly trained units are expected to attempt to find the guerilla units responsible as well as guard the pipe.

The two units due to receive the training and equipment, the 5th and 18th Brigades of the Colombian army, both have a long history of violating human rights and setting up and working with paramilitary death squads. Human rights organisations fear that the fresh aid will lead to further violations, especially as Washington enforces none of the human rights conditions attached to legislation on aid to the Colombian military.

According to Isabel Acevedo Muñoz, a human rights worker in the region, the new aid is very worrying to her and her colleagues. "Why is the US working with these military units when it is so well-known that they are always targeting the civilian population? Both the 5th and the 18th Brigades work with the death squads and we fear that this training could easily increase the problems especially if the US trainers teach them the sort of scorched earth tactics used in Central America and other places."

Acknowledgement: Our previous article "US Military Involvement Deepens" in Colombia Solidarity No 8 was compiled from several sources, including ANNCOL news agency.

US Military Doctrine and Colombia's War of Terror

Under the new presidency of Alvaro Uribe Vélez paramilitarism is once again legal. His network of a million paid informants essentially makes overt what has long been a joint covert US-Colombian strategy of brutal counter-insurgent paramilitary warfare. To fully grasp the relationship between US military training and aid, paramilitarism, and human rights abuses in Colombia today it is necessary to examine the evolution of US counter-insurgency doctrine.

Counter-insurgency was firmly wedded to US foreign security policy goals with former US President Kennedy's authorisation of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. This act sent US aid to developing nations to increase bilateral ties and encourage capitalist orientated economic development. It also encompassed a wide ranging security dimension which aimed at:

improving the ability of friendly countries and international organizations to deter or, if necessary, defeat Communist or Communist-supported aggression, facilitating arrangements for individual and collective security, assisting friendly countries to maintain internal security and stability in the developing friendly countries essential to their more rapid social, economic, and political progress.

Throughout the Cold War, Latin America was viewed as both the US's primary sphere of influence and as fundamentally related to US security through its territorially close proximity to US borders. The primary means for US assistance in maintaining "internal security and stability" became counter-insurgency assistance. Recipient militaries were organised to police their own populations and prevent internal social forces from challenging a status-quo geared towards the prevention of independence and the preservation of countries open to US capital penetration.

US policy frequently led to the mass violation of human rights and large-scale civilian death. The US was linked to these practices not only through the installation and support of abusive governments, but also through the very doctrines and practises passed on through US training.

Counter-insurgency campaigns often relied on mass civilian displacement to deny guerilla forces a civilian base within which to work and the terrorisation of civil society. A 1962 US Army Psychological Operations manual outlined that:

An isolation program designed to instil doubt and fear [among civilians] may be carried out . . . it may become necessary to take more aggressive action in the form of harsh treatment or even abductions. The abduction and harsh treatment of key enemy civilians can weaken the collaborators' belief in the strength and power of their military forces.

Counter-insurgency also frequently relied upon clandestine paramilitary forces to carry out political assassinations, disappearances and the terrorisation of those considered inimical to state interests. This form of warfare was considered necessary both to create a plausible deniability for state terror, and to install fear into target populations.

Colombia was one of the largest recipients of US counter-insurgency aid. General William Yarborough headed the original US Special Forces team sent to Colombia in 1962 to organise the Colombian military for counter-insurgency. He argued that a "concerted country team effort should now be made to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training". These paramilitary teams were to be used to perform "counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents" and were to be "backed by the United States".

Torture was routinely practiced by US-backed counter-insurgency states and was taught by US experts. The School of the Americas, the US's pre-eminent Latin American military academy, used training materials which the US's Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) argued "appeared to condone practices such as executions of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment". During the US-backed Contra insurgency in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the CIA distributed an updated version of its 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, renamed the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, which included extensive guidelines on the most effective means of torture including the use of drugs, sleep deprivation, physical violence, and solitary confinement.

The targeting of civil society also formed a cornerstone of US counter-insurgency training and doctrine. A 1985 Tactical Intelligence manual from US Southern Command (Unified Command for Latin America) explained that "'battlefield preparation' means collecting information on civil society: who stands for what, which groups or individuals can be mobilized for counterinsurgency and which must be neutralized". Counter-insurgents must watch for any "refusal of peasants to pay rent, taxes, or loan payments or unusual difficulty in their collection," an increase "in the number of entertainers with a political message," or the intensification of "religious unrest".

Civil society organisations, especially those that seek to challenge prevailing socio-economic conditions are viewed as subversive to the social and political order, and in the context of counter-insurgency, become legitimate targets. This security orientation has had devastating consequences for Latin America with hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered by US-backed counter-insurgency states. With the ending of the Cold War a rhetorical shift has occurred in US policy from anti-communism to a war on drugs and now a war on terror. However, US objectives have essentially remained the same; the prevention of a workable hemispheric alternative that may challenge US hegemony, and the continued suppression of civil society.

The primary means for repression has been the use of paramilitaries. In the last fifteen years in Colombia an entire democratic leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries; 4,000 activists were murdered in the 1980s; 151 journalists have been shot; 300,000 civilians have been killed; three out of four trade union activists murdered worldwide are killed by the Colombian paramilitaries. Paramilitary groups also regularly target human rights activists, university lecturers and teachers, indigenous leaders, and community activists. Uribe's new legal death-squads will serve to further increase the repression in Colombia.: Doug Stokes

Review

Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles *

According to this report by Amnesty International USA, the US trains more than 100,000 foreign police and soldiers from over 150 countries each year, but fails to provide sufficient oversight or emphasis on humanitarian law to prevent serious abuses of human rights. The report contains a detailed breakdown of current US military training programs, paying special attention to the notorious School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC), highlighting the role of 19 of its graduates in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, as well as providing a list of other criminal alumni, including 123 Colombian army officers. The report also provides details of seven training manuals used by SOA during the 80s, which advocated the use or torture, summary execution, and kidnap. Finally, the report offers a series of recommendations that includes suspending the School of the Americas pending an independent enquiry into its activities.

The report's weakness is that it does not question the assumption that violations perpetrated by recipients of US training can be attributed to a lack of proper oversight and vetting. At times, the reluctance to consider whether these violations are the intended result of US training reaches the level of farce. The report argues that phrases such as 'politically neutralizing targets' and 'reduction or elimination of sources of support' might be misinterpreted by foreign soldiers to mean assassinations, when in reality they merely refer to radio jamming!

Human rights violations by US-trained armies are entirely consistent with broad policy objectives and need to be seen as the systematic result of military aid. Far from simply increasing accountability, it is high time that the system of US military assistance is itself dismantled and that those who have been complicit with rights violations are indited as the war criminals they are.

Forum on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights in Colombia

The forum took place in Bogotá on 6th and 7th December as a joint initiative from trade unions in a broad range of sectors and concerned NGOs. The forum succeeded in its primary objectives, to establish a permanent commission that will co-ordinate investigations into the role of multinational corporations in Colombia and Latin America generally, and to support campaigns of protest and legal action against specific companies.

Union and student delegations arrived from all corners of the country to make an inspiring event, bringing their home-made placards and forever inventing new tunes and slogans against the hated neoliberalismo. We witnessed a strong impetus to unite forces in this project, joining workers from banking, energy, public services, mining, food and drink, and telecommunications with Colombian lawyers and investigators as well as contributors from Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Britain and the USA.

Immediately prior to the forum, on 5 December, the food and beverage workers union SINALTRAINAL had hosted a Public Hearing into Coca Cola and its links with paramilitary assassination of trade unionists. SINALTRAINAL has had 8 of its members working at Coca Cola plants assassinated. The day started with a rally outside Coke's main bottling plant and then, despite the heavily armoured police, a demonstration marching around the US Embassy in Bogotá and ended with moving testimonies from a worker who had suffered torture in prison because he dare to organise in Coca Coal plants.

Contributors pointed to the twin logic of paramilitary violence: to force Colombians away from zones where multinational corporations are after the country's natural resources, and to target comrades leading resistance to the plunder of the multinationals. 148 trade unionists have been assassinated this year alone. Analyst Hector Mondragon traced the connections between the multinationals in league with Colombia's big four monopoly groups, and from them to just two US banking groups - Citibank and Morgan Chase - whose financial interests dominate the whole process. Time and again we were reminded that Colombian workers have a very high political level, both in their militancy and in their preparedness to launch an international counter attack. They know that with the Uribe government, it is now a battle for the very survival of working class organisations and popular resistance.

Domingo Tovar, head of the CUT union federation's Human Rights Department welcomed the spirit of co-operation, "Unity is indispensable to fend off the broad offensive that is coming from the multinational companies against our movement".

As one member of the US delegation expressed it, "Abajo Plan Colombia! Abajo la genocida de Coca Cola! - Down with Plan Colombia! Down with Coca Cola Genocide!": Andy Higginbottom

Another Nestlé Scandal

Nestlé's money grabbing demand on Ethiopia has refocused attention on the activities of this Swiss based multinational, the largest food processing company in the world. Nestlé is at the centre of another scandal.

On 22 November the DAS security police ordered Nestlé Colombia to decomission 200 tons of imported powdered milk. The milk had come from Uruguay under the brand name Conaprole, but the sacks had been repackaged with labels stating they had come from Nestlé's Bugalagrande factory, and stamped with false production dates of 20th September and 6th October 2002. The real production dates were between August 2001 and February 2002. The discovery of another 120 tons on 6th December with similarly false country of origin and production dates, points to systematic fraud. Yet Nestlé responded indignantly, apparently it has been the victim of a set up, and in any case powdered milk has for industrial purposes an eighteen month lifespan. This bluster begs the obvious question, why relabel at all?

The discoveries caused a stir, with senators insisting the Attorney General conduct a full inquiry leading to prosecutions. The quality of Colombian justice, especially its partiality towards multinationals, is such that this must be in question. Nonetheless Nestlé has been sharply condemned. Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo charged it with using sub-standard, contaminated milk, "a serious attack on the health of our people, especially the children". The latest outcry amplifies persistent complaints from the trade unions that Nestlé does not respect human rights. Since the 'dirty war' erupted in the early 1980s, Colombian trade unionists have been on the front line of targeted, but unofficial, repression. The Food and Drink Workers Union SINALTRAINAL was formed in 1982. Eight of its members working at Nestlé have been assassinated.

The principal perpetrators are the paramilitary death squads. Their links with official entities are an open secret. For example, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) arrived in the Cauca valley in 1999. Human Rights Watch reports that it was the Colombian army who set up this new AUC front (http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001), which declared local union leaders as military targets. Within six months six trade unionists had been assassinated, including SINALTRAINAL member Omar Dario Rodriguez Zuleta in Bugalagrande on 21 May 2002.

There is no evidence connecting Nestlé with this. However the logic of the violations, to eliminate trade unionists and other social movement activists, corresponds with the company's own aggressive policy to liquidate the union. In late 2001 management at another Nestlé subsidiary 'Comestibles La Rosa' threatened workers that they must either renounce union membership or lose their jobs. In February 2002 the union formally presented demands to Cicolac, Nestlés milk processing subsidiary. Management tried to break the collective agreement covering 400 workers, sack 96 workers and break the contracts of another 58 workers so that there jobs could be contracted out through labour agencies. Sub-contracting and cheaper inputs are two aspects of the same drive to cut costs.

This brings us back to the cheap powdered milk imports. According to SINALTRAINAL, Nestlé-Cicolac's new policy 'has generated misery for small and medium dairy farmers and for peasants'. One area known as 'Little Switzerland', where livelihoods depend 90% on milk output, has been devastated.

SINALTRAINAL is a very good example of how workers in the 'Third World' have taken the initiative in resisting the multinationals. As they say:

"Nestlé converts the factories into camps for the public security forces in order to create terror in the community, destroy the unity of the workers, and misinform the members of the union, with the goal of putting them against the leaders and destroying the movement ... This reality urgently demands the globalization of solidarity against the globalization of misery, oppression, and death of the communities."

These developments present a challenge to the movement in Britain, where labour relations with Nestlé have been relatively benign. Nestlé even had a stand at last year's TUC annual conference, jointly staffed by corporate executives and union representatives. It is time for a more robust and independent approach, based on relationships with unions like SINALTRAINAL in Colombia, and elsewhere to make common cause against a rapacious multinational.

SINALTRAINAL RESISTS Coca Cola Genocide

The incandescent red and white logo of Coca-Cola - the world's fastest selling non-alcoholic beverage - has long secured its niche as the global mascot of The American Dream and the successes and happiness rendered by capitalism.

Ongoing abuses suffered by Latin American Coca-Cola workers demonstrate that such success often comes at a terrible price. Specifically, the multinational has been riding on the back of Colombia's dirty war on social protest -a war that has engendered the paramilitary's hounding of food and beverage union SINALTRAINAL. The message behind the violence and threats of violence is always the same: "Dissolve the union or else."

This repression has helped Panamco S.A, Coca-Cola's local franchisee, to drastically reduce their production costs by minimising salaries and firing over five-thousand workers whilst doubling their production, and their profits.

The litany of abuses suffered at the hands of the paramilitaries includes the assassination of eight workers who were local leaders, three union members have been forced into exile, over sixty live under the shadow of death threats and some forty-eight others have been displaced.

Union President Javier Correa describes conditions. "The paramilitaries have graffitied threats and accusations against us on the walls of the bottling plants.

These plants have become like concentration camps. The army patrols the buildings. There is so much repression that union workers are even followed into the toilet. One worker killed himself. In his suicide note he blamed Coca-Cola."

And he explains the corporation's attitude: "Coca-Cola has turned from a time of exploitation to a time of slavery. Because the workers continue to resist this oppression the paramilitaries now try to kidnap family members, they've burnt union headquarters and destroyed whatever evidence they can so we are unable to bring a case against them. If SINALTRAINAL is dissolved," adds Correa "we face assassinations".

William Mendoza is SINALTRAINAL branch President in Barrancameja - an oil rich town at the epicentre of Colombia's conflict. The paramilitaries attempted to kidnap his daughter last year. Mendoza describes SINALTRAINAL as "under siege. the Barrancameja plant manager tells the paramilitaries that we are terrorists. We have become military targets. Would-be union members at the Coca-Cola plant now see joining SINALTRAINAL as like signing one's own death sentence."

The Colombian state has neither investigated, brought to justice nor punished those responsible for the killings.

So with help from the American Steelworkers Union, a federal court case has been put forward against Coca-Cola in the U.S. to gain reparation for the victims. Panamco has responded by taking SINALTRAINAL to the Colombian courts - renowned for corruption - with charges of calumny.

Failed and abused by both the Colombian system and Coca-Cola, SINALTRAINAL has turned to the people and the international community to explain their crisis.

Since July last year three International Public Hearings have taken place, the first in Atlanta in July, the second in Brussels in October and the final one in Bogotá on 5th December 2002. These hearings were a formidable expression of resistance. The aim? To denounce and combat the devastating effects of terrorism: both by the Colombian state and by the multinational companies.

All those who took part in the hearings have pledged to campaign, consolidate the solidarity network and endeavour to start breaking the colossal Coca-Cola culture. "The obstacles are big", acknowledges Pedro Marecha, the union's defiant lawyer, "but we will overcome them."

SINALTRAINAL leader Carlos Julía gave an unforgettable testimony at the Bogotá hearing. He told the 500-strong audience:

"When you drink Coca-Cola remember that you are contributing to a process which sews unemployment, hunger and pain. The young, happy image projected by Coca-Cola masks the suffering and the return of profits from Colombia to the U.S. We ask Coca-cola to stop killing and you to stop drinking Coke."

Meg Willams

The Apartheid Connection

Three of the top five mining corporations in the world are British, or part British. They are Anglo-American, Rio Tinto Zinc and BHP-Billiton. Anglo-American and BHP-Billiton each own a third of Latin America's biggest coal mine, the El Cerrejon complex located in the La Guajira peninsular on the Caribbean coast.

Despite its name, Anglo-American is actually Anglo-South African. With a stock market capitalisation of £13 billion it is the seventeenth biggest UK multinational. The De Beers diamond company founded in the 1860s was the forerunner. Over the next twenty years the Africans were forced off their land to provide the labour for the mining boom. De Beers owners, the Oppenheimer family, grew spectacularly wealthy. They formed the Anglo-American group in 1917 to gain access to US capital to finance expansion into gold mining. "Anglo" was dominant during the apartheid years, by the 1980s it controlled over 70% of all shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange. Following apartheid's downfall Anglo moved its headquarters to London in 1999, so that it could enjoy lower interest rates, and go world wide.

But another, lesser known, South African mining company called Billiton had already stolen a march on Anglo. Billiton was formed in South Africa in 1997, a merger of the country's second and third biggest mining corporations. One of these was Consolidated Goldfields, originally founded by Cecil Rhodes and responsible for some of the worst crimes against the black majority. Billiton moved its corporate HQ to London in 1998. Billiton merged again with the Australian corporation BHP in 2000. Today BHP-Billiton is the biggest mining multinational in the world, and a genuine transnational in that it has dual listings of shares on both the Australian and London stock exchanges. This feature of 'globalisation', the sudden rise of London based mining multinationals, is none other than the internationalisation of production relations forged under apartheid. BHP-Billiton's thermal coal operation in South Africa is a combined system, with large scale mines feeding railways that transport the coal to Richards Bay seaport for shipment to Europe or Asia, and all produced by workers on low wages. This is the capitalist El Dorado - integration and technology combined with super-exploitation of the workforce. And Colombia's El Cerrejon offered the same combination of productive elements, consequently it produces the lowest cost coal supplying the Atlantic basin. Billiton, Anglo and a Swiss based multinational Glencore bought 50% of El Cerrejon from the Colombian state in 2000. The deal caused a storm because the $384 million paid was only a third of the state's accumulated investment in the project. Cerrejon's operating company Intercor, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, owned the other 50%. Intercor was bought out by Billiton-Anglo-Glencore in early 2002.

The mining multinationals had been pressing for a liberalisation of state controls. Colombian mineworkers leader Francisco Ramirez points out that the new Mining Code cut taxes from 10% to 0.4%. The two London based multinationals now each own 33% of the world's potentially most profitable coal complex, so long as its operations can be extended.

And there lies the rub. The mine complex and the 150km railway link to Puerto Bolivar have been built on indigenous land. Settlements of the Wayúu people and Afro-Colombians have been cleared to make way for it. On 9th and 10th August 2001 the village of Tabaco was destroyed, dispersing 350 families from their homes. 200 police and army fought the villagers as Intercor bulldozers smashed down their homes. The homeless villagers were offered $1,000 compensation per family, and their lawyer was persecuted. A local court has ruled that there should be consultation before future removals. That will be tested as more communities stand in the way of Cerrejon's expansion.

Dispossession of the common people is the condition of the multinationals' takeover. And forcible ejection is backed up by unofficial terror. Billiton's other Colombia operation, the nickel mine Cerro Matoso is in an area where the paramilitaries hold the population in the grip of fear. Meantime BHP-Billiton held its first AGM on 4th November, with a live video link from a London Mayfair hotel to Melbourne. Shareholders approved the group chief executive Brian Gilbertson's remuneration package worth $5.06 million per annum.

Desperate Situation for Refugees

A desperate situation faces more than one hundred families who fled Colombia in 2002 following death threats. One group of eight families, who had applied for asylum in Australia with the help of the CUT (Colombian Trade Union Congress), was forced to flee to El Salvador due to repeated death threats while their cases were being considered.

The group includes trade union leaders, state sector workers, community leaders and a journalist. Amnesty International's request to the Australian government for their resettlement illustrates the situation facing those at the forefront of the struggle in Colombia. Two are widows of the president and vice-president of National Union of Mining and Energy Workers, forced off a Drummond company bus by paramilitaries and assassinated in March 2001. When they denounced the killings of their husbands they received death threats against themselves and their families. A local union leader and a key witness in the case organised protests against the killings. Paramilitaries sought him at the Drummond workers' camp, forcing him to flee to Bogotá and on to El Salvador. In October 2001 the president of the union at Drummond was killed by paramilitaries.

A community leader in El Queremal campaigned against the expansion of hydroelectric projects in her region, as peasant farmers were being pressured to sell off their land cheaply. The community leaders were threatened 36 times, accused of being guerilla collaborators. In May 2000 a massacre took place in another area where hydroelectric projects were planned and in August 2000 a nearby community was the target of a massacre. By late November 2000 the paramilitaries had moved into El Queremal, threatening to kill the leaders.

Another community leader in the group was forced to flee his area following paramilitary death threats. Two of his brothers were killed. A further refugee, a leader in the healthworkers union, was seriously injured in an assassination attempt, continued to receive death threats and was repeatedly followed.

The eighth member of the group was a television journalist who had to hide her journalist sister and three children in her house as her sister was receiving paramilitary death threats. After her sister had left the country she started to receive death threats against herself and her child. She moved house and her child's school but when she started making a video about the internal situation in Colombia for an Australian NGO she again received death threats.

Despite these clear histories of politically motivated threats and assassination attempts, the group have been treated, like so many other Colombian refugees around the world, as pariahs. Although they arrived in El Salvador with prior agreement and were recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the group have been detained, had their documents taken from them, have not been allowed to work and have no economic support. After many months considering their application, Australia denied them political asylum in July 2002. The families are now desperate and, in the words of one of them, "dying of hunger".

Besides these families, the CUT knows of 30 temporary refugees in the USA, 10 in Sweden and 10 in Spain. One family in Spain reports that they are "living on US$120 a month, having to put up with discrimination from the inhabitants of this city and eating promotional hamburgers. It is the cheapest there is". In a way, these are the lucky ones and external refugees are just the tip of an iceberg; internal displacement is the unseen fate for many more trade unionists and community leaders. Of teachers alone, 2100 arrived in Bogotá in 2001, displaced from other regions. Many activists who flee to Bogotá are targeted by the Bloque Capital paramilitary units. Then there are those who don't make it that far. At the end of October 2002 the leader of the Cimitarra Peasants Association, Gabriela Vélez, was taken at an illegal roadblock by the AUC paramilitaries. She was tortured and after two days was shot twice in the head and killed.

Against this background, Germany has secretly obtained EU permission to veto any Schengen area visas already granted to Colombians if they are on Germany's list of undesirables. This treatment was previously doled out only to nationals of Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea: Bush's "Axis of Evil". While the Colombian government is a favoured ally of Bush in it's supposed fight against terrorism, its nationals are the pariahs of Europe.

Zoe Green

40,000 GATHER TO CREATE A PEOPLE'S EUROPE

The gathering of tens of thousands of Europe's radicalised youth in Florence in November was proof of far more than the scale of mass disaffection, which would barely have been news, but was testimony to the competence, creativity and capability of the largest and most diverse movement in history.

Well over 40,000 delegates - registration credentials ran out after that number had entered Florence's historic Fortressa on the second day - with an average age of no more than 25, gathered to participate in the European movement's coming of age: moving from destruction, opposition and confrontation to sowing the seeds of a new society.

It is acute political and economic disenfranchisement which has brought these diverse groups and individuals together - the violence of a tiny global elite, seemingly determined to turn a majority of the world's population to the margins in a push towards war, blood, starvation, unending inequality and impoverishment.

The cross-section of European society represented at the European Social Forum (ESF) - from large environmental and development NGOs, reformist economists and mainstream trade unions to the anarchistic "Hub", assorted far left parties and liberation movements - incorporated a range of ideologies and political practices that would traditionally have been unable to share the same conference centre.

But beyond even the ideological wonder was the scale and competence of organisation, almost all volunteer, which was enough to put American political conventions to shame and make even a cynic truly believe that another world is possible. Simultaneous translation into 5 languages was provided for 1,000 speakers at 30 conference sessions, 200 workshops, 150 seminars, 25 campaign meetings, and a huge range of cultural and practical events, fringe meetings with subjects ranging from oppression and resistance in Africa and Asia to the creation of alternative economies; from the betrayal of the environment to closing down tax havens.

Like many others, War on Want argues that the struggle against neo-liberalism's iniquitous structure as witnessed by currency speculation and tax havens; the elimination of poverty caused by sweatshop labour and privatisation; and the right of the Palestinian and Saharawi peoples to basic human dignity, are all part of the same war. It is the globalisation of capital which created this movement and, therefore, only a globally focused movement can create change, as powerfully enunciated by War on Want partner Berenice Celeyta municipal services union SINTRAEMCALI (Colombia).

ANOTHER COLOMBIA IS POSSIBLE

The starkness of life as a trade union activist in Colombia paints the world structure more clearly than many of us in Europe can see it. Berenice, in a seminar on trade unions and privatization, told delegates how their struggle against Plan Colombia and President Uribe Velez's new and fanatical 'war on terror' was part of the same process as the struggle of European unions against privatisation - a process "that used to be called neo-liberalism and before that neo-colonialism". Cocaine is not the problem, but the self-sufficiency of the Colombian peasant at the foot of the Multi-national corporation. The strength of a European movement which the ESF formally called into being was the "only space for solidarity in the west".

Berenice, talked of the 36 day occupation by SINTRAEMCALI in defence of public services in Colombia's second city, and explained how a strategy based locally, nationally, and transnationally had managed to hold back a privatization plan orchestrated by multinational corporations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Colombian government.

A MILLION PEOPLE MARCH AGAINST WAR

But the best was still to come. Until you see what 1 million people looks like on the streets - and very few non-Italian delegates would be old enough to remember such a demonstration - it is impossible to imagine the scale, the colour, the sound. Those who thought the days of genuinely popular mass struggle faded with the ascendancy of neo-liberalism looked in disbelief as demonstrators marched through tower blocks with older men and women hanging off their balconies waving thousands of rainbow peace flags; listened as thousands of bystanders lining the streets trying to get round the city showed their solidarity by singing the moving anti-fascist anthem "bella ciao".

As night drew in, thousands still poured through the streets chanting, dancing, waving banners and everywhere the Palestinian scarves, for Palestinian resistance is the symbol of this movement - an emblem of hope in the teeth of powerful adversity for millions of young people the world over, for whom the political and economic system that rules the globe seems not merely unfair, but utterly insane.

Never before have so many enjoyed the pain of a hangover and sleep deprivation than those sitting in the closing 'assembly of social movements' on Sunday morning, with thunderous voices coming through their translation headphones, and the belief truly engraved in their souls that another Europe is possible. Or as the Colombians put it "the river grows in strength as it moves from its source and is joined by other streams to ultimately become the ocean - the most powerful force on earth."

Nick Dearden Campaigns Officer, War on Want

Colombia Solidarity Campaign at ESF

Our delegation of 6 members raised the banner of solidarity with Colombia proudly at a range of events during the conference. The Colombia Solidarity Campaign worked jointly with a range of European organizations and Colombian exiles in The European Coordinating Committee for the Colombian Human Rights Campaign 'Colombia Clama Justicia' (Colombia Calls For Justice).

Our group had speakers in several meetings including one seminar specifically dedicated to the issue of Plan Colombia, another in conjunction with War on Want on trade unions and privatization, and also in a much bigger forum on Latin America. Our delegates sold magazines, handed out leaflets and worked hard to raise the issues of Colombia inside and outside of the conference. We stayed with Italian members of the rank and file trade union - COBAS in the INTIFADA - community centre in EMPOLI, just outside Florence.: Mario Novelli

"Conflict in Colombia: Repression, Resistance and the Chances for Peace"

Speakers: Gloria Ines Ramirez, Father Javier Giraldo,Carlos Lozano Guillen, Brendan Barber, Professor James Petras, Michael Rix and (by video) Professor Noam Chomsky.

Hosted by the Colombia Peace Association (CPA) and Justice for Colombia (JFC).: More information website.colombiapeace.org

INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC SECTOR DELEGATION

A delegation of public sector trade unionists from Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK joined an international mission led by Public Sector International to Colombia from 5th to 11th December. The PSI delegation visited Cali and Medellin, as well as the capital Bogotá. 172 trade unionists were assassinated last year up to the visit. The delegation condemned the stigmatisation of trade unions that it found. In Cali the delegation launched a booklet commemorating the SINTRAEMCALI occupation to stop the privatisation of public sector workers, based on the eye witness reports of Campaign member Mario Novelli. The occupation succeeded in getting an agreement signed by the government on 29th January 2002 promising that it woul keep the municipal corporation EMCALI in the public sector.

Louise Richards Head of UNISON's International Department gives her impressions of the visit.

"The big problem for SINTRAEMCALI is the implementation of the agreement. From what we ascertained it is not being implemented. When we spoke to the Superintendencia of Public Services, which is in charge of EMCALI and other public services, all we heard was a privatisation agenda. We said to the new manager of EMCALI corporation that we are against privatisation of EMCALI. What the dispute has done is shown the Colombian authorities that there are people outside watching, and I think that is helpful for the union.

We launched the ISP publication. There were a lot of press there, that will inspire SINTRAEMCALI. And the fact that SINTRAEMCALI is fighting privatisation inspires other unions in Colombian. They have seen what can be achieved with international support.

Solidarity is still very much needed by the Colombian trade union movement, it is still under threat. And not only the trade unionists who are seen as enemies of the state, but their families as well are threatened with death. There is not enough being done by the authorities to protect trade unionists, whose human rights are still being abused.

It seems that governments, including our own, see Uribe as bringing hope. That is very much not the case. What Uribe is bringing is privatisation, in the same way as we saw under Thatcher. That is not going to help the vast majority of the people who are suffering from poverty as well as human rights abuses. Large parts of the population live in immense poverty. The government's programme is not going to alleviate that, it is going to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. What struck me was the high levels of unemployment. People can't get jobs.

Uribe is not going to be the saviour of the country in the way that the US and the British governments think. Certainly the plans of the US and British governments have got nothing to do with the wellbeing of the people, their policy is for the wellbeing of the multinationals who are controlling what is going on.

The unions are organising in circumstances where to be a trade unionist means risking your life. To join a trade union means that you are under threat. You run a risk, and it's not only your life but the lives of your family. Having said that people are very courageous.

The big hope in Colombia is that there is now a group of independent congresistas, Alexander Lopez is one of the leaders. They told me that one of their jobs is to educate the Colombian public on issues that they haven't known or haven't been interested in what is going on. The coming referendum is a big danger, because it is couched in terms that people don't understand. They will be asked to put Yes or No to disguised statements, that will actually mean reduction in pensions, reduction in the welfare state, cuts in benefits that are very meagre anyway. Uribe's referendum is a big danger for the future of Colombia."

SOLIDARITY NEWSROUND

SOAW - Growing Stronger Together

The vigils outside the US Embassies in London and Dublin on 16 November was the first time that the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Fort Benning in Georgia USA had simultaneoous international events. 10,000 people protested in Georgia. Close to 100 people arrested, most of whom had a trial date set for 27 January. They all had to pay bond fees to be released until their trial. We should focus on the upcoming trial. Letters to SOAW and to the activists when they are in prison after that would be good.

More info on SOA Watch www.soaw.org
Sarah Bania-Dobyns

Bristol Colombia Solidarity Campaign held a highly successful film night at the Cube Cinema Bristol on 27 November. The documentary 'SINTRAEMCALI - the Tower of Victory' and the BBC documentary 'Is another World Possible?' were well received. Over 50 people attended the evening and had the opportunity to listen to Dean Mills, Southern Regional Officer of the FBU who talked of the international solidarity work the FBU is involved in, and also gave an update on their current dispute. Mario Novelli, spoke on the SINTRAEMCALI occupation, and the struggle for human rights both in Colombia and the UK, and the importance of solidarity work.
Mario Novelli

The Bring Them Home campaign on behalf of Niall Connolly, James Monaghan and Martin McCauley has strong support in Ireland as testified by the 200 people at a social in Dublin on 24 November and an even bigger event in the north. For more information contact Bring Them Home, Dominick Court, 40-41 Lwr Dominick St, Dublin 1, Ireland. Tel: (00353) 868311311 or E-mail caitrionaruaneeircom.net

Sussex University Colombia Solidarity group mobilised 85 students to a meeting on 25 November with speakers Marta Hinestroza, Jeremy Lennard and Andy Higginbottom. SINTRAEMCALI solidarity with FBU A solidarity message from Colombian public service union SINTRAEMCALI was read out to great applause at the FBU demonstration on 7 December.

Marta Hinestroza spoke alongside Mexicanworkers at the No Sweat! conference on 23 November.

Marta also spoke to the Ilisu Dam Campaign Refugees Project public seminar HOW UK FOREIGN INVESTMENT CREATES ASYLUM SEEKERS, held on 8 December at the Kurdish Community Centre in London. About 100 people, including members of the Tamil, Ugandan and Kurdish communities participated in the event which was, as David Morgan writes "an innovative attempt to recast the UK public agenda on asylum and immigration policy in order to focus on questions of the political economy of asylum, why people leave their homelands and the responsibilities of host countries reluctant to accept the newcomers despite the demonstrable benefits they bring in terms of labour, skills and enrichment of culture". For the full report , and for further information to take this initiative forward, please contact the IDC Refugee Project through either: Rochelle; 07876 771 576, rochelle.harrisukonline.co.uk or Estella; 020 7586 5892, estella24tiscali.co.uk

See website: www.ilisu.org.uk

We organised International Human Rights Day vigils on 10 December in London (outside BP headquarters), Liverpool and Cardiff . Activists from the South Wales branch braved the sub-zero temperatures to mark human rights day in Queen St., Cardiff's principal shopping thoroughfare. A coffin witht he names of the 148 trade unionists murdered to that date last year was carried through the pedestrian street, with other activists running a stall and distributing flyers warning of the incipient fascism that is being engendered in Colombia.

Gareth Gordon

Colombia Solidarity Weekend

26 -27 April 2003

Saturday 26 10am - 5pm Public Dayschool

Uribe Vélez, Bush's Man in Latin America

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Holborn)

Sessions on:

Uribe's Regime

The Multinationals in Colombia

US Counterinsurgency - A History

Colombia & Latin American Resistance

7pm Party with live music and food

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.

Colombia Solidarity Bulletin Nº 9

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