Colombia union members still targeted

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: AP

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - The Colombian government said Monday that a proposed U.S. trade deal will grow its economy by 1 percent and it hopes the pact can create new markets for legal products that will provide an alternative to the cocaine trade.

President Alvaro Uribe thanked President Bush for sending the trade pact to Congress and said he hoped for "a grand bipartisan agreement" to approve the deal.

"I want this message to get to the U.S. Congress: I beg you to look at the current problems (in Colombia) and the favorable evolution that Colombia has experienced," Uribe told reporters.

Since taking office in 2002, Uribe has demobilized many of the paramilitaries under an amnesty program and gone on the offensive against leftist rebels, sharply lowering levels of kidnapping and murder.

But the nation's trade unions and other critics see the opposite scenario if the U.S. Congress approves the deal -- the loss of millions of jobs and an economic downturn that could drive even more farmers into the cocaine trade.

The number of labor activists who have been killed has declined since 2002, but the unions say Uribe's administration has encouraged assassinations of trade unionists who cause problems for companies.

"It tries to stigmatize us, it tries to paint us as rebels, and that's when the right-wing death squads try to kill us," said Fabio Arias, vice president of Colombia's largest trade union federation. "These death squads still work with parts of the military and police to kill trade union members in Colombia."



Read more: http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid=6645709&subject=companies&action=article

[Acadia Blue]

1. This is another slave labor country that Bush has in mind for his

newest trade agreement. Thats what America does: prop up despotic countries and use slave labor to enrich the corporate socialists.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Anniversary of a Political Murder in Colombia

Anniversary of a Political Murder in Colombia
• Gaitán and the 9 de abril movement

~snip~
In the 1930s and early 1940s, during the so-called “Liberal Republic,” Colombia stood out as a relatively stable and democratic nation—one of the most respectable in the hemisphere. In fact, Colombia’s political culture spawned a massive populist movement led by prominent labor lawyer and politician on the Liberal left, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

Gaitánismo, as the movement came to be called, embodied a powerful call for social justice and increased democracy, and attracted large numbers of progressive Colombians to its banner. Though he was spurned by the Liberal party leadership in the 1946 presidential election (a decision that split its vote and cost the party the presidency), Gaitán outmaneuvered his rivals and became party leader in 1947. At the head of a reunited Liberal party, he would easily have been elected president in 1950.

Yet sixty years ago, three shots from a .38 caliber revolver helped create the chaotic Colombia, scenes of which can be witnessed daily. On April 9, 1948, an assassin murdered Gaitán outside his office in downtown Bogotá as he went to lunch. Over the following two decades, during the aptly-named period known as Violencia, thousands of his supporters and opponents were also killed as Colombia cycled through a vicious civil war pitting Liberal and Communist guerrillas against government forces and rightist partisans of the ruling Conservative party. The pattern of political murders established during the 1940s and 1950s has dominated Colombian politics ever since, and greatly influenced the region’s various other “dirty wars” in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Political assassinations also blossomed elsewhere in the hemisphere through the indiscriminate employment of bargain basement hit men known in Colombia as sicarios.

The tradition of political murder which Colombia exemplifies to this day is a style of repression that targets all messengers of change—not just armed revolutionaries, but also popular civilian political leaders, labor organizers, intellectuals, journalists, activist lawyers, academics, students, church men and women, and even progressive military officers.

Gunning Down the UP
In the mid 1960s, the old Liberal and Communist guerrilla bands reorganized themselves as the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, with their membership, leadership, and areas of operation continuing unchanged over the years. While being only one of Colombia’s several “Marxist” guerrilla movements, the FARC always remained the biggest and most successful example of the armed opposition. It is no surprise, therefore, that the FARC’s survival and later successes sparked the rise of a deadly rightwing paramilitary movement, which in recent days has been linked to the presidential palace.

From the early 1980s until the present, paramilitary “blocs” specialized in brutal attacks against the supporters (real or imagined) of guerrilla “fronts” throughout Colombia. Hearkening back to the slaughter of the Gaitánistas in the 1940s and 50s, the most dramatic example of this strategy was the near extermination of UP, the Patriotic Union party in the 1980s and early 1990s. Though affiliated with the FARC, most of the UP militants killed were urban leftists who wanted to demobilize and move their struggle from the countryside to urban areas, into the ante-rooms of conventional politics.

The present government of Álvaro Uribe—whose political party is said to have close ties to them—claims to have dismantled its close ties to the country’s ongoing rightwing paramilitary blocs, but watchdog groups in Colombia, international human rights organizations, and even the U.S. Department of State all affirm their continued existence in new forms. The modus operandi of these ultra-rightwing extremists is to single out anyone thought to have sympathies with the FARC. Therefore, the 9 de abril is a moment of living, if gloomy, history. It reminds us of the continuing threat to authentic democracy in many Latin American countries. But one thing is for certain, from the right and left; the Uribe-led Colombian government is a far cry from the thriving democracy portrayed by the Bush Administration and such backers as Florida Congressional Representatives Connie Mack and Llena Ros-Lehtinen, and several other far-right legislators.

http://www.coha.org/2008/04/07/anniversary-of-a-political-murder-in-colombia/

[catgirl]

3. K&R

[Judi Lynn]

4. Excellent comments on Uribe:

Colombia: The enemies of peace and democracy

The Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe is making strenuous efforts to identify the FARC guerrilla movement as the chief threat to the country's security and progress. But the evisceration of Colombia's state and society by paramilitary violence presents a deeper danger, argues Jenny Pearce for openDemocracy.


By Jenny Pearce for openDemocracy (09/04/08)

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=18843

~snip~
President Uribe is a threat to democracy because he does not really believe in it, and a threat to peace because he has no interest in it. Uribe believes in his direct relationship with the people, and in an efficient state machine to deliver the decisions he makes on behalf of the wealthy interests he protects. He is not interested in autonomous social organizations; labor, civil and human rights; or scrutiny by citizens, the lifeblood of an accountable and meaningful modern democracy.

His main presidential goal is a military defeat of the FARC; and to that end he will turn a blind eye to violence committed by any other armed actor. The result is to sow the seed for renewed violent conflict. Now, speculation is rife that he is now about to achieve his goal, and that a significant weakening of the FARC has been achieved. For Uribe, that is worth being forced - for example - by the Organisation of American States (OAS) to apologize to Ecuador for his infringement of their territory in the assassination of Raúl Reyes.

Whether the FARC is truly being seriously damaged is hard to judge. There is evidence of high-level infiltration of the FARC secretariat. The killing of a second FARC commander, "Ivan Rios" by his own head of security - a few days after the killing of Reyes - is an indication of this. The FARC is reduced in size and has suffered many desertions and loss of territory. However, it remains in control of vast areas of the south of Colombia, and still has an estimated 13,000 men under arms.

The FARC, in short, is a diminished military force but by no means a defeated one. Alvaro Uribe needs to show some very convincing victories in the coming months if he is to retain his political momentum. In the meantime, the cost of his policies is very high, both for the immediate future of the hostages and for the long-term prospects for peace. Reyes was killed at the moment when a high-level delegation from France was on its way to discuss the hostage situation with him; its members were warned against entering the guerrilla-camp zone by the Colombian government. The Colombian government's raid on the zone eliminated one of the FARC's most experienced international negotiators (as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said: "It is not good news that the man with whom we talk and have contact, is dead").

Uribe's domestic support gives him a great deal of leverage and legitimacy. But apart from his key allies in the Washington and London governments, his international standing is not so high. Even the Democrats in the United States have so far blocked Uribe's much desired free-trade agreement on the grounds of the absence of trade-union rights, and in view of the killings of 2,515 trade unionists since 1986 (mostly, where there is evidence, victims of the paramilitary). Most European governments (apart from Britain's) have been consistent in pushing for a peaceful negotiation to end the conflict, and improvement in Colombia's human-rights situation.

The international community has generally not accepted the intervention of the FARC in Ecuadorean territory as justification for the bombing of its camp and the killing of 21 people (including some Mexican students who were present). In Latin America, Uribe is isolated from the leftward regional shift in the 2000s. Many of his neighbors see Uribe's "pacification" project as ultimately one which favors certain sectors of the Colombian elite, particularly those which have accumulated their wealth through illegal and violent means.

More:
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=18843