Widow of slain mine union leader speaks out against Alabama's Drummond Co. in Colombia
Widow of slain mine union leader speaks out against Alabama's Drummond Co. in Colombia
Melissa Brown | [email protected] By Melissa Brown | [email protected]
on July 16, 2013 at 1:09 PM, updated July 16, 2013 at 1:16 PM
The widow of a Colombian mine workers union leader is speaking out against Garry Neil Drummond, Alabama billionaire and CEO of Drummond Co., in a Bloomberg article that outlines the challenges the company is facing in Colombia and its expanding operations in Alabama.
Bloomberg Markets magazine interviewed Nubia Soler, whose husband, Gustavo, was abducted and "found under a pile of banana leaves with two bullet holes in his head" in 2001. Gustavo Soler was union president at a coal mine in Colombia owned by Drummond Co.
Soler tells Bloomberg reporters that her husband had received threats for months before his death and told her to pack up and be ready to leave the area as soon as he arrived home from the union office in Valledupar, Colombia. Gustavo never made it home.
Bloomberg reports that Drummond met with Soler personally and promised to put her adolescent children through school but hasn't followed through.
"He never paid for a pencil,” she tells reporters Anthony Effinger and Matthew Bristow.
More:
http://blog.al.com/tuscaloosa/2013/07/drummond.html
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Alabama Coal Billionaire Battles Murder Suits as Prices Ebb
By Anthony Effinger & Matthew Bristow - Jul 15, 2013 11:01 PM CT
Gustavo Soler knew he was in trouble. It was 2001, and Soler was union president at a coal mine in Colombia owned by Drummond Co., which is controlled by the wealthiest family in Alabama.
Soler’s predecessor, Valmore Locarno, and Locarno’s deputy, Victor Orcasita, had been killed seven months earlier, and now Soler was getting threats, says his widow, Nubia, in an interview in Bogota. He told his family to pack up. They would leave the area as soon as he got home from the union office in Valledupar, a city in the country’s coal belt. He never made it.
Armed men stopped his bus, asked for him by name and abducted him. He was found under a pile of banana leaves with two bullet holes in his head, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its August issue.
After the killing, Nubia says, Garry Neil Drummond, chief executive officer of Drummond Co., sent a taxi to bring her to the Drummond offices near the coastal town of Santa Marta, where, in a meeting, he promised to put her children, Sergio and Karina, then 14 and 9, through school.
Nubia describes a tender moment for a tough man. Drummond, now 75, started working in his family’s coal mines around Jasper, Alabama, at 15. As an executive in 1969, he negotiated an export deal with a Japanese trading company and fulfilled the commitment by strip mining Alabama’s hills with colossal shovels and trucks. When those reserves dwindled, Drummond Co. opened its first mine in Colombia in 1995. It came under attack from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a group that had been at war with the government since the 1960s.
More:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/alabama-billionaire-battles-murder-suits-as-prices-ebb.html
