COLOMBIA'S 'DIRTY WAR'

Right-wing Terror Squads Torture And Kill Union Workers And Kill Activists

BARRANCABERMEJA, DEPARTMENT OF SANTANDER, COLOMBIA -- When his body was
recovered, it was clear that Aury Sara Marrugo spent his last hours alive
in agony. His gums had been butchered. A blowtorch had been used to sear
the flesh under his arms and the soles of his feet. Over 70 small incisions
were found on his corpse, and strong acid had been applied to his abdomen.
At some point during the savagery, a single bullet was fired at close range
into the middle of his face, ending his misery. Sara had been "disappeared"
on November 30, 2001. His remains, and the grisly warning they were
designed to convey to his colleagues, turned up the following week.

Sara drew his final, tortured breaths in the town of Cartagena, on the
northwest coast of Colombia. His executioners, members of a right-wing
paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), wanted his fate to be public
knowledge. According to a statement by the AUC, Sara was executed because
he was thought to be a member of one of Colombia's armed opposition groups,
the National Liberation Army, or Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN).
Others familiar with the paramilitaries and their role in Colombia's
long-running civil war point to a more likely explanation for Sara's
murder. He was president of Union Sindical Obrera (USO) -- the Oil Workers'
Trade Union, Cartagena Section -- and was therefore guilty of a crime that
cost nearly 170 Colombian men and women their lives last year: he was a
trade unionist.

Since 1985, over 3800 union workers and leaders have been assassinated in
Colombia, making it by far the most dangerous place on earth to fight for
workers' rights. In 2001, according to the United Workers' Central, or
Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the country's 600,000-member
central trade union, there were 169 assassinations of union workers, 30
more attempted assassinations, 79 "disappeared" or kidnapped, and over 400
reports of threats and intimidations. And, as of the third week in January,
this year shows every indication of keeping pace with 2001's horrific toll:
already there have been six assassinations, including Maria Ropero,
president of the Union of Community Mothers, who was shot 13 times.
According to human-rights advocates at Amnesty International, in Colombia
"the security and armed forces, as well as their paramilitary allies, often
accuse trade unionists of being guerrilla sympathizers or auxiliaries."
This makes them "military targets."

The leaders of Colombia's labor unions believe they are being targeted
because they openly denounce the violence and unjust distribution of wealth
that takes such a heavy toll on the majority of their country's population.
As the most prominent members of Colombian civil society, trade unionists
- -- especially representatives of the threatened public sector -- find
themselves at the point where four very powerful vectors meet.

First, there are North American and European transnational corporations,
which look to take advantage of Colombia's vast natural resources and
growing, low-wage labor pool. Second, there is the Colombian government,
including the armed forces and national police, whose stability is
threatened by the civil war, and whose stated goals are to eliminate the
leftist guerrillas and enter the global economy.Third, there is the US
government, which has started to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to
the Colombian military, ostensibly to fight the "War on Drugs," but whose
desire to protect US-based corporations operating abroad is well-known.
And, last, there are the paramilitaries, a group whose various links to the
country's elites, the transnational corporations, the Colombian military,
and, by extension, the US government are a matter of record. Traditionally,
their primary function has been to perform the dirty work of torturing and
killing Colombians like Aury Sara.

COMPOUNDING the ongoing tragedy of Colombia's embattled trade unionists is
the plight of the country itself. Now in the 38th year of a civil war
between leftist guerrillas and the government, which claims the lives of
more than 3000 people annually, and having recently become the prime target
in the United States government's "War on Drugs," Colombia's 40 million
citizens confront a daily level of violence beyond the comprehension of
most Americans. Further exacerbating the situation is the two-tiered class
structure of Colombian society, in which the handful of wealthy elites who
own most of the land and resources have an equally disproportionate role in
shaping governmental policies. Unemployment hovers around 20 percent, with
underemployment affecting many more. More than half the country's
inhabitants live in poverty. Finally, there is the role of international
financial institutions in Colombia: the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
is insisting on extensive privatization of state-owned enterprises so the
country can pay off its external debt, which means more foreign
corporations investing in, and taking profits out of, the Colombian
economy, plunging it further into poverty.

For decades, leftist guerrillas such as the ELN and the Colombian
Revolutionary Armed Forces, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
(FARC), have tried to loosen the wealthy landowners' stranglehold on
Colombia's economic life. Heavily influenced by Marxism's revolutionary
ideals and rhetoric, the guerrillas were committed to a program of wealth
and land redistribution. They resorted to kidnapping rich landowners and
charging ransoms, as well as levying taxes on local businessmen's commerce,
to fund their operations. By the mid 1980s, the ranchers, landowners, and
drug barons who were frequent targets of the guerrillas decided to fund a
private army of vigilantes to defend themselves, giving rise to the
paramilitary movement in Colombia. For several years, the Colombian Armed
Forces openly trained, equipped, and operated alongside the paramilitaries.
Together, they waged war not only on the guerrillas, but on anyone
suspected of supporting them, which led to widespread atrocities.
Ultimately, in 1989, the Colombian government, facing international
condemnation because of the paramilitaries' escalating human-rights
violations, declared them to be illegal.

Throughout the 1990s, profits from the drug trade (derived mostly from the
sale of cocaine) fueled the growth of both the paramilitaries and the
guerrillas. The paramilitaries also benefited from US military aid to the
Colombian government, which they accessed through their military
connections. Despite the 1989 ruling against the right-wing death squads,
they continued to collude with the Colombian Armed Forces against the
guerrilla insurgency. In reality, far from shunning the paramilitaries, the
military simply shifted its dirty work -- the assassination of trade
unionists, human-rights workers, outspoken professors, radical students, or
anyone who questioned the status quo -- to the paramilitaries. According to
Andrew Miller, the former advocacy director for the Americas at Amnesty
International USA, "these missions have been outsourced to paramilitary
groups that operate in heavily militarized areas and coordinate their
operations with the army. The proportion of abuses directly attributable to
the armed forces has declined in recent years, while abuses by their
paramilitary allies have escalated dramatically." Although Colombia
consistently had the worst human-rights record in the hemisphere, military
aid continued to flow from the US -- with a sudden and dramatic shift
toward the end of the decade.

The US government spent close to a billion dollars in the last two years
arming and training the Colombian Armed Forces, purportedly to stem the
flow of cocaine and heroin into the US, which consumes more than 90 percent
of Colombia's illicit drugs. "Plan Colombia," signed into law by President
Clinton on January 11, 2000, is a military-aid package that made Colombia
the third-largest recipient of American military aid on the planet, behind
Israel and Egypt. At the time of its proposal, human-rights organizations
such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch opposed the plan
because of the high incidence of human-rights abuses by members of the
Colombian military, in addition to their continuing involvement with the
paramilitaries. But lawmakers faced intense lobbying pressure by
corporations with interests in Colombia, including weapons manufacturers
and oil and coal companies. Congress passed the plan, and Clinton waived
the human-rights conditions that would normally have blocked the aid,
citing "national-security interests." Already, the Colombian military has
received $816 million in the form of arms, training, and helicopters to
fight the "War on Drugs." Another $399 million was approved for this fiscal
year, with the Bush administration broadening "Plan Colombia" into the
"Andean Regional Initiative."

Colombian labor leaders and their allies look askance at the US
government's claim that the money flowing to Colombia is for drug
interdiction. They foresee the relentless militarization of their country's
armed conflict resulting in a military state that will, conveniently
enough, impose the kind of stability foreign investors require, and set an
example for those who might otherwise balk at Washington's economic agenda
for the region. They claim that transnational corporations, whose lawyers
drafted the "free-trade agreements" (such as the Free Trade Area of the
Americas) for much of Latin America with the countries' finance ministers,
want to eliminate organized labor's influence so they can extract maximum
profits. William Mendoza, a leader in Colombia's food and beverage workers'
union, SINALTRAINAL, puts it bluntly: "The motivation behind Plan Colombia
is for the US to assure the best control of these countries and drown
people in their own blood if they attempt to resist." Mendoza's union has
joined the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor
Rights Fund in a federal lawsuit against one of the US's best-known
corporations, Coca-Cola, charging it and two Colombian subsidiaries with
complicity in the murder of union leader Isidro Segundo Gil.

On December 5, 1996, Gil, a member of his union's executive board, was shot
down by paramilitaries at the entrance to a Coke bottling plant in Carepa.
The union was involved in contract negotiations at the time, and the
following day, the AUC reappeared and demanded that all union members
resign. They also destroyed the workers' union hall, which was subsequently
rebuilt and occupied by the paramilitaries. Mendoza, who is the
human-rights chair of SINALTRAINAL, says that the US embassy and Coke's
headquarters in both Colombia and the US were informed about the incident.
To date, however, no formal charges have been brought in the killings.
"Unfortunately," he explains, "impunity in this country is 100 percent."
Labor leaders are commonly assassinated in broad daylight, says Mendoza,
who himself lives under threat of death by the paramilitaries: "The state
says nothing about the killing of union leaders. It's out in the open, the
link between the paramilitaries and the military authorities." Coke has
denied the charges, and Mendoza says that the company has countersued the
workers. Charges of collusion with Colombia's right-wing death squads have
also been leveled at the Alabama-based Drummond Coal Company. At a January
21, 2002, meeting with the president of the energy-workers union
FUNTRAENERGETICA, more allegations of corporations' targeting unionists
came to light. The union's leader, who does not want to be identified by
name, says that paramilitaries took part in the 2001 assassinations of
three union leaders, and that the company did nothing to respond to
workers' repeated requests for protection. The union leaders were involved
in negotiations at the time. The story is depressingly familiar.

In March, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita, the president
and vice-president of the coal-miners union SINTRAMIENERGETICA, were
traveling by bus from their jobs at the Drummond mine in La Loma. The bus
was stopped by a group of armed men, who searched the passengers until they
found Locarno and Orcasita, who were promptly removed from the bus. Locarno
was shot immediately in the face, and Orcasita was taken away. He was later
found dead, and his body showed signs of torture. "The paramilitaries
attack any worker who speaks out against what the owners want," the
unionist says. "Anyone who dares to speak out, asks for social justice, or
refuses to conform is declared a military target." Six months later, the
president who succeeded Locarno, Gustavo Soler, was also killed by
paramilitaries. No charges have been brought in the murders.

THE SPECTER of violence is nearly invisible outside the offices of the
Regional Corporation for Human Rights, or Corporacion Regional para la
Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (CREDHOS), located in Barrancabermeja, an
oil town in the heart of Colombia that is home to USO, the country's
biggest union. The streets below, viewed from the second-story balcony that
juts out above a triangular intersection known as the Eighth Diagonal, buzz
with the kinds of activity seen in any medium-size South American city.
Taxis, minibuses, mopeds, and bicycles flow in opposite directions through
the fork where the roads meet. Dozens of fruit carts, brightly hand-painted
all the way down to their wheel hubs, squat side by side under two shade
trees, which the small concrete island miraculously supports. An elderly
man in a yellow hat steps from behind his cart, pours water on a rag, and
starts to polish his oranges. Even the two young soldiers chatting with a
young female vendor of scarves and handbags seem benign. But there are
signs of the danger.

The thick steel grates and bulletproof glass that span the front of
CREDHOS' office are only the most obvious indicators of the danger there.
Of the 130 community activists killed in the city of Barrancabermeja since
the human-rights group was founded in 1987, five have been its own members.
A member of Peace Brigades International, a non-governmental organization
whose unarmed volunteers accompany threatened civilians in war zones, is on
hand to make sure no one walks the streets below alone. A military-troop
transport rumbles through the intersection, with half a dozen heavily armed
men riding in the back. And off in the distance, rising above the street
scene with mute indifference, are the smokestacks and gas flares of the
state's Ecopetrol refinery, whose entrance is 500 yards and a world away
from the bulletproof doors of CREDHOS.

While union workers and the human-rights advocates who defend them live
under constant threat of death with little or no protection from the state,
Ecopetrol has not one, but two full battalions of the Colombian Armed
Forces dedicated to ensuring the safety of its operations. In this regard,
the Colombian state oil company is an appropriate symbol for the country as
a whole -- offering protection for profitable businesses while the domestic
population suffers.

German Plata is a project director for the Program for Peace and
Development of the Middle Magdalena Region, named after the river that runs
through Barrancabermeja. He lists the enormous natural wealth of his
homeland, including Ecopetrol's oil, and poses a rhetorical question: "For
an area with so many natural resources, there is great poverty. Seventy
percent of the people have unsatisfied basic needs. Why?" With little
hesitation, he provides the answer. "Because this is an extractive and
exclusive economy. They extract our resources and the benefits stay in the
hands of a few." Of the $2 billion in oil wealth that Barrancabermeja
generates each year, only $90 million stays in the local economy through
Ecopetrol. The rest goes to foreign companies, such as the US's Occidental
Petroleum and Chevron/Texaco or England's British Petroleum. Few realize
that Colombia today is the 10th largest supplier of petroleum to the US.
The numbers are similar for the cattle-ranching and African-palm-tree
cultivation that mostly drive the rest of the local economy -- the
overwhelming majority of the money generated leaves Colombia.

The leaders of the oil-workers union believe that one of the goals of the
global economic system, at least as far as the corporations are concerned,
is the elimination of organized labor. "A death penalty has been declared
against union workers here," says Mendoza. "When you kill a union leader,
you destroy the union." As international scrutiny has intensified,
paramilitaries have been forced to focus more on union leaders, as opposed
to indiscriminate mass executions of workers. "Globalization is trying to
deny us our human rights," says one of USO's national-level leaders, whose
life has been threatened and who also asks that his name not be published.
"We have a very revolutionary history, and our union, especially, has been
very hard hit by the state and the groups that operate outside `the law.' "
He makes sure that the translation from Spanish reflects his belief that
the paramilitaries threaten him and his colleagues with the blessing of the
Colombian government. "The political project being carried out here by the
ultra-right is a state policy. This is why you see so much complicity on
the part of the state with those who carry out the assassinations." He
refers to the high level of paramilitary violence in the region, which fell
under the control of the right-wing squads just over a year ago. In
addition to the presence in Barrancabermeja of the military battalions that
protect Ecopetrol, there are two police stations and an attorney general's
office. Yet the paramilitaries "control the life of this place," according
to CREDHOS executive director Regulo Modero.

"They have a permanent presence, permanent roadblocks," he explains. "But
the public forces haven't done anything about it. There's no logical
explanation for the fact that the most militarized region of the country is
controlled by the paramilitaries." And they control it ruthlessly. The most
infamous example in recent history occurred on May 16, 1998, when seven
people were massacred by the paramilitaries on a soccer field. Another 25
were "disappeared" -- taken away and never heard from again. According to
Modero, they, too, were executed, cut into pieces with electric chain saws,
and thrown into the Magdalena river that flows through the barrios on the
outskirts of town. Modero insists that state forces were involved in the
massacre, and that the paramilitaries entered and exited the neighborhood
where they committed the atrocities through a military checkpoint.

Military leaders deny any involvement between their forces and the
paramilitaries, insisting that US taxpayer dollars are funding drug
eradication, not the murder of trade unionists. Colonel Gilberto Ibarra, of
Barrancabermeja's Nueva Granada Battalion, says that "in terms of the
paramilitaries, the army commanders created a law to sanction the AUC
sympathizers in the armed forces. They're kicked out of the army." US
officials are less emphatic in their denials, indicating that while there
are no links "at the command level," there are still instances of
collusion. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a high-level US embassy
officer declares that "there is a dedication to root these people out."
Others disagree. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the
Washington Office on Latin America issued a report last week stating that
the "Colombian government's progress against paramilitary groups has
amounted to little more than rhetoric, unsupported by actions in the field
designed either to break existing links between the military and
paramilitary groups, prosecute the officers who support these links, or
pursue those groups and their leaders effectively in the field."

Colombian economist Hector Mondragon, who risks his life by criticizing his
government's policies, said in a January 20 interview in Bogota that "the
farce of the `War on Drugs' is reaching its conclusion." He, too, agreed
that US backing of the Colombian military is driven much more by economic
imperatives than by a desire to eradicate drugs, and that the "War on
Terror" provides a better pretext for increasing US military involvement in
his native land. It looks like he was right.

On February 5, President George W. Bush, heeding calls from his Colombian
counterpart Andres Pastrana to widen US involvement in his country's civil
war "to assure a continued flow of oil," announced $98 million in
additional military aid to Colombia. The money will go to train and arm
soldiers to protect the 490-mile Cano Limon oil pipeline, which carries oil
to the Caribbean coast for Occidental Petroleum and other companies,
according to the Associated Press. US Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs Marc Grossman told reporters: "We are committed to help
Colombians create a Colombia that is a peaceful, prosperous, drug-free, and
terror-free democracy." The working men and women of Colombia would say
that giving more aid to their military is helping to create just the opposite.