The U.S. Must Not Reward Murder

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/05/23/the-us-must-not-reward-murder/

by Tula Connell, May 23, 2008

This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.

AFL-CIO blog writer James Parks talked with Colombian trade unionists who traveled here last week to urge Congress not to pass the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement. As James relates below, Colombian trade unionists do not want Congress to reward that nation with a trade deal in a climate of fear and death that they and their union compatriots face daily.



On April 23, 2008, Jorge Gamboa was in Yarima accompanying a group of African Palm workers who were on strike to demand respect for their basic labor rights and to seek negotiations with their employer. Two individuals targeted Gamboa, one of them holding a revolver. Gamboa was fortunately able to disarm the individual before any shots were fired. The striking workers then apprehended the two assailants and turned them over to the police.

Instead of arresting the two men, the police put them in a truck and drove them to the highway, where they were released. At no point did the police question or arrest the perpetrators. In fact, they assisted them in their escape.

That’s what the life of a union leader is like in today’s Colombia. You could be killed at any moment and chances are not much will be done about it. Murders of union leaders often go unpunished because the murderers most likely are members of paramilitary groups with close ties to the government, Gamboa says.

Gamboa, the president of the National Petroleum Workers Union, is one of seven Colombian union leaders who visited the United States last week to lobby against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). He says 85 members of his union have been murdered and 400 have gone underground. The murders have killed a father or mother of some 650 children in his union alone. He says last week, workers uncovered a plot to kill his union’s general secretary and a union vice president was threatened. A Colombian labor scholar says trade unionists in Colombia face genocide.

Gamboa traveled to Washington, D.C., to make sure Congress “realizes what’s really going on” in Colombia. In meetings on Capitol Hill, he and his colleagues told lawmakers that despite claims by the Bush administration and Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe that progress has been made in stemming the violence against union members, the reality is that violence has increased against labor leaders in Colombia.

FULL story at link.