http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/2/bacon-d.html"The level of violence against Colombian unionists is staggering: In 2000, assassinations took the lives of 153 of the nation's trade-union leaders. In 2001, the figure had reached 143 by the end of November. According to Héctor Fajardo, general secretary of the United Confederation of Workers (CUT), Colombia's largest union federation, 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia since 1986. In the year 2000, three out of every five trade unionists killed in the world were Colombian, according to a recent report by the United Steelworkers."
Tough crowd.
"Unionists and human-rights activists hold Colombia's paramilitary forces responsible for almost all the trade-union assassinations--though those forces aren't working simply for themselves. Robin Kirk, who monitors abuses in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation's leading paramilitary grouping, and the Colombian military. "The Colombian military and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anticommunist since the 1950s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives--as a very real and potential threat." Roberto Molino of the Colombian Commission of Jurists contends that "in the case of the paramilitaries, you cannot underestimate the collaboration of government forces." Those forces, says Samuel Morales of the CUT, "believe it's a crime to try to present any option for social change.""
Amazing. I bet Bush would love to have little militia group going around shooting union leaders.
"According to the complaint in the Florida case, here's what happened:
At 8:30 a.m. on December 5, 1996, a right-wing paramilitary squad of the AUC showed up at the gate of the Coke bottling plant in Carepa. Gil, a member of the union's executive board, went to see what they wanted. The paras opened fire on Gil and he dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. An hour after he was assassinated, paramilitary forces kidnapped another leader of the union at his home; he managed to escape, however, and fled to Bogotá. At 8:00 p.m., paras broke into the union's offices, destroyed the equipment there, and burned down the entire house, destroying all the union's records."
I'll have an iced-tea please.
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