OF BLOOD AND PROFIT

The men might have foreseen their deaths, their bodies pale and drained,
their blood mixing with the dirt. In the end, they were beaten nearly
lifeless in front of their friends, finished off by a bullet and dumped on
a muddy roadside, or prodded toward death with a barrel at their backs,
tortured and left as carrion. Gustavo Soler, Victor Orcasita and Valmore
Locarno were only coal miners and union leaders. But it is Colombia, after
all, where union leaders can often expect a violent extinction, even when
working for a U.S. company like Drummond Co., a privately held coal mining
firm based in Birmingham.

After 38 years of civil war, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing
guerrillas, rogue military and homicidal drug lords continue to stain the
Colombian landscape with blood. The spoils of the cocaine trade fuel the
fighting like gallons of kerosene on a burning pile of brittle, brown leaves.

Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,
calls it a "holocaust of Biblical proportions."

Since the mid-1960s, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(known by its Spanish acronym FARC) has waged war against the Colombian
government, claiming it is controlled by the wealthy elite and exploits the
country's poor. Right-wing paramilitaries, such as the United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia (AUC), have grown, funded by large landowners and drug
lords, to help the government in their battle against the communist guerrillas.

In Colombia, warring parties carve up the country with extortion,
kidnappings, assassinations and public executions while the government
strains to keep its democracy intact and attract new investment.

"There is widespread lawlessness," said Michael Shifter of the
Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. "The state
can't even protect its own people."

That doesn't prevent American multinationals from seeking to turn hulking
profits in war-torn regions where instability and violence become as much
of a cost of doing business as paychecks and utility bills. Occidental
Petroleum's pipelines in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia are bombed routinely.
Chevron's forays into Angola fund a corrupt regime that is at war with
former U.S.-backed guerrillas. The British company Lonrho used government
soldiers to guard its cotton fields in Mozambique during that country's
civil war with Renamo rebels.

The chance for increased profits and greater production lures American
companies to such ravaged areas. Without their presence, the situation in
Colombia would worsen and diminish any remaining hope among Colombians,
Shifter said.

But in moving to such regions in search of increased profits, do American
companies then have a greater responsibility to protect their workers when
the imploded state can't do so?

"The company has to be mindful of this fact," said Larry Birns of the
Center on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington D.C., a Latin American
think-tank. "Eventually there isn't immunity from bad corporate practices .
its presence in Colombia has to be impeccable."

After abandoning Alabama mines for the wealth of Colombia's coal reserves
and the promise of cheap labor, Drummond excavated Mina Pribbenow, the
country's second-largest mine near La Loma in the department of Cesar.

Before they were assassinated, Gustavo Soler, Valmore Locarno and Victor
Orcasita all worked at the mine and served as high-ranking officials in the
coal miners' union. After receiving several death threats, Locarno and
Orcasita had asked the company for protection. Drummond refused the
request, according to journalist David Bacon in a May story for Pacific
News Service.

Although no one has been arrested for the murders, many believe they are
the work of the AUC or another right-wing paramilitary, who view union
members as communist sympathizers. Since 1986, nearly 4,000 union members
have been murdered in Colombia, according to the country's largest union
federation, the United Confederation of Workers.

The AUC is responsible for 80 percent of Colombia's human rights
violations, Birns said. The Bush administration recently added the AUC to
its list of terrorist organizations.

The U.S. State Department considers both the Colombian left-wing guerrillas
as well as the right-wing paramilitary "terrorists." Congress has
authorized $1.4 billion in foreign aid to Colombia - about 80 percent for
military purposes - to help make peace and to help fight drugs. Critics
charge the funds are actually used to fight a counterinsurgency war to make
Colombia safe for multinationals under the banner of globalization.

Last week, FARC and the Colombian government agreed to devise a cease-fire
by April 7. One spoiler to a potential peace plan may be the right-wing
paramilitaries who will not be included in the talks.

Although outlawed, local military and police commanders may give their
tacit approval to such groups, allowing their soldiers to drift between the
government and private armies. Soldiers also work as security guards for
foreign interests in Colombia.

Drummond does have an investment worth well over $400 million to protect.
Mike Tracy, a spokesman for Drummond, said the company tries to thoroughly
check the past history of all employees and does not intentionally hire
anyone with a questionable background or with a past of criminal activity.

But many Colombian experts say it is difficult to know exactly who you are
hiring in Colombia.

Drummond's forays into Colombia come as it shutters its Alabama mines and
becomes increasingly fueled by the desire for higher profits and cheap
resources. Miners in Colombia make between $500 to $1000 a month as opposed
to Alabama miners who average $3,060 a month plus benefits.

After the miners shovel the coal out of Mina Pribbenow, the company's
private railway pulls the coal cars 215 miles to Puerto Drummond on the
Caribbean coast. There it is loaded on ships and carried to Mobile for
awaiting customers Alabama Power and the Alabama Electric Cooperative,
among others. They burn the coal in local power plants to light Alabama's
homes.

Colombia's civil war makes that process fraught with landmines, physical
and political.

The communist FARC has attempted to extort money from Drummond, in the form
of a 10 percent tax. In retaliation for the company's refusal to pay, it
bombed the rail line five times in 2001, derailing trains and disrupting
coal shipments.

Under threat from these guerrillas, companies in Colombia, including
Drummond, often hire government soldiers or private guards to protect their
investments. But the line between private security, government soldiers and
outlawed paramilitaries blurs in Colombia as mercenaries drift with the
dollars between the forces.

"It's hard to know who you are hiring. A lot of groups have been
infiltrated," Shifter said.

Insecurity Colombia is a very insecure environment, home to 70 percent of
the world's kidnappings. The state can't protect its citizens, nevermind
large foreign interests.

"No one should underestimate the difficulties," Shifter added.

Colombia is also a decentralized country where local leaders may determine
policy in lieu of a national authority. As such, the strength of the bonds
between the military and paramilitary varies from region to region.

If local troops are hired for protection, the local Colombian army
commander may turn the task over to paramilitary groups, said Jack Laun of
the Colombia Support Network in Wisconsin. Although they are illegal under
the law, local military leaders may offer their tacit approval and backing
of paramilitaries.

Those paramilitaries often associate anyone belonging to unions as
sympathizers of the leftist guerrillas.

In Cesar, as the government soldiers, FARC and the right-wing AUC skirmish
over turf, that assumption may have had grave consequences for the three
workers.

During the days before their murders, Locarno and Orcasita had received
numerous death threats from the AUC paramilitary. They met with Drummond
officials to ask for protection. Locarno and Orcasita wanted to sleep in
barracks at the mine instead of going home every evening.

Mine management and U.S. workers fly into the site on corporate jets for
two-week rotational assignments and stay in "secure, full-service,
hotel-style complexes," according to a help-wanted advertisement posted on
Drummond's website.

But Locarno's and Orcasita's request was denied. They were murdered one
week later. Thirty miles from the mine, 15 gunmen stopped the company's
charter bus and began checking identifications. Finding Locarno and
Orcasita, the men pulled them off the bus. As the other workers watched,
they hit Locarno in the head with a rifle butt and then shot him in the
face. The hit-men, some dressed as regular Colombian soldiers according to
witnesses, then took Orcasita off into the woods and executed him. When
found later, his fingernails had been torn off.

After the murders, the 1,200 miners at La Loma briefly stopped working in
protest.

Drummond Ltd., in Colombia, issued a written statement, disavowing any part
in Colombia's conflict and reasserting that its presence was for the best
of the country.

"Drummond Ltd. Finds this type of action deplorable from every point of
view," the statement read. "Drummond asks the respective bodies to begin an
investigation aimed at stopping these terrible acts which cause the company
itself, its workers and the mining sector in general much grief."

The Colombian government has never found and arrested the killers but the
local police commander attributes the murders to right-wing paramilitaries
that operate in the region.

Soler, who reluctantly took over for Locarno as president of the miners'
union, met a similar fate in October, seven months after the murders of
Locarno and Orcasita. His killers dumped his corpse on the side of the road
between his home and Drummond's mine.

The deaths have brought outcry here in the United States.

"Drummond has chosen to relocate its mining to a place where they murder
trade unionists," said Jerry Jones, national vice president of the United
Mine Workers of America.

But the company says it is running out of viable coal reserves here.

Terry Collingsworth, general counsel of the Washington-based International
Labor Rights Fund said he is preparing to file a lawsuit against Drummond
in Federal court in Birmingham utilizing the obscure Alien Torts Claim Act
of 1789.

Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy did not return numerous phone calls seeking
further comment.

Collingsworth said the Drummond suit is quite similar to one his group
filed last July against Coca-Cola in a Miami federal court. Five union
activists working for a Coca-Coal bottling plants in Colombia were murdered
and the ILRF suit maintains that the bottling company "hired, contracted
with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces" in the killings.

"Whether Drummond brought in the killers of these union leaders for
security purposes or to intimidate the workers, whatever, it brought them
in, and it led to the murders," charges Collingsworth. "And we feel
Drummond is responsible. If you hire the Mafia for security and they kill
somebody, you're responsible."

Stephen Jackson Flanagan reported from Colombia. He is an associate
professor of journalism at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and an associate
editor of the Latin American Post in Bogota. Richard Raeke is the editorial
writer for The Star and contributed to the reporting.