Labor Rights Remain a Dream Unrealized for Colombia’s Workers

[Judi Lynn]

Labor Rights Remain a Dream Unrealized for Colombia’s Workers

Just over a year after the implementation of a new free trade agreement with the United States, Colombia’s sugarcane cutters continue to face widespread labor rights violations.

By Adam Shaffer, August 5, 2013.

On Wednesday, July 10, a district court in Buga, Colombia, absolved six labor leaders of “conspiracy to commit a crime.” The accused—four sugar cane cutters and two Colombian Senate staffers—were originally charged for attending a 2008 meeting where it was alleged that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) were present (WOLA was also at the meeting, and can attest that it was a meeting about labor rights violations, and no FARC members were in attendance). The labor leaders, the prosecution alleged, were conspiring to commit a violent act.

Their acquittal is little short of historic; in a country where union organizing has often been equated with terrorism and union leaders are regularly declared “military objectives,” the court’s decision that the meeting was part of a legitimate, legal struggle for labor rights is a major step.

Yet while the case is encouraging, it is hardly emblematic of Colombia’s broader labor rights situation. A year into a new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, labor rights violations continue to be the norm in Colombia.

A more typical case is that of the San Carlos sugar mill. On April 16, 2009, Daniel Borja and Alexander Carrillo showed up at work at the sugar mill near Cali, Colombia. Greeted by armed men, they were informed that the mill was under new management, and they and some 200 other workers would be let go. Faced with effectively mandatory resignation papers, the workers had two choices, explained officials from Human Transition Management (HTM), the consulting firm executing the mass firing: sign or sign.

More:
http://fpif.org/labor-rights-remain-a-dream-unrealized-for-colombias-workers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=labor-rights-remain-a-dream-unrealized-for-colombias-workers

(My bolding)

[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, as I see it, the whole point of the U.S. arming/training/funding the Colombian military...

...besides war profiteering and, very probably, eliminating rival cocaine gangs in favor of the CIA, the Bush Cartel and other beneficiaries, was to decapitate Colombia's labor movement as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich."

Colombian labor leaders were a major target of the criminal, U.S./Bush Junta-backed Uribe regime which was illegally spying on its "enemies"--including judges and prosecutors--probably with U.S./Bush Junta assistance, and was spying on labor leaders TO CREATE HIT LISTS for the military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads to assassinate those leaders. U.S. corporations--Drummond Coal and Chiquita--were also using rightwing death squads to solve their "labor problem." This is what the U.S. "war on drugs" was about--killing labor leaders and other advocates of the poor, driving poor peasant farmers off their lands (FIVE MILLION peasant farmers brutally displaced)--in anticipation of U.S. "free trade for the rich"--and diverting the trillion+ dollar cocaine profits into the hands of the uber-rich.

President Obama has implemented Stage 2 of this subjugation of the Colombian people, capitalizing on all the horror inflicted by Uribe/Bush to create a large, rightwing-run client state, in which the poor have no rights and Colombia's resources are sold off to multinationals with no benefit to the Colombian people. Though murders of labor leaders are still occurring, now we get the whitewash and the cover-up and the Great Forgetting, with Uribe under the protection of the Obama administration and the CIA, much the same as with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. SEVEN BILLION of our tax dollars (the visible dollars) have been lavished on this despicable project. It sickens me no end that our government has become merely an adjunct of our real rulers--transglobal corporations and war profiteers. Considering what we might have been, it is a tragedy of the first order.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Absolutely, the same groups of people are being murdered terroristically

by the very same right-wing people as before. In the immediate present, the official term used toward the death former paramilitary death squad members has been changed to BACRIMS, the term devised to cover what they "explain" as various criminal sorts, gangs, etc. It's still the same people, as noted early on, after the official stepping down and disbanding of the AUC occurred, by the human rights groups who back then called them out on being the same people, in different groups, with different names, doing the same things. The Colombian government calls them "gangs" or BACRIMS, the human rights groups call them the same old death squad, AUC members, narcotrafficking assassins.

The old whitewash seems to be working for the "journalism" community slinging the propaganda, but the same stuff is going on, with the most conspicuous players tucked away, out of sight. They had to get serious with some of them, like Jorge Noguera, the former head of D.A.S. for Uribe, who went on the lam and hid in Europe until INTERPOL scooped him up, returned him to Colombia, after it was publicized that he had been making those death lists for Uribe and handing them off to the assassins so they could keep busy terrorizing, then murdering union leaders, writers, even a famous Colombian political comedian, indigenous leaders, religious, education, human rights leaders, leaders of the campesinos, and the doubly dispossessed African Colombian citizens trying to stay alive on their own property wanted by corporations like mining companies, or agricultural corporations or palm oil operations.

They can get by with this evil war against the helpless because the victims ARE helpless. You can be sure if they tried any of this filth against people with power like themselves, they'd be all found lying in fields with torture marks, or floating, in pieces, down the river, like their own victims.