Assassination an Issue in Trade Talks

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Nov. 17 - With tears in her eyes, 80-year-old Mercedes

Cuéllar wrapped her arms around her son, one of Colombia's top union

leaders, and said goodbye as he boarded a flight to Miami and temporary

exile from the country's long conflict.



As the secretary general of the union that represents energy sector

workers, Francisco Ramírez had survived seven assassination attempts,

including one on Oct. 10. He was still alive, but hundreds of his

compatriots, victims of the political assassinations that have been a

scourge in this Andean country, have not been so lucky.



"I was so afraid for him that I wanted to see him go to another country,"

Ms. Cuéllar said, dabbing tears as Mr. Ramírez prepared to go through

customs on a recent afternoon. "I'm much calmer that he's not here."



As union activists have fallen by the hundreds here, making Colombia the

world's most dangerous country for union organizers, their families and

those who have dodged assassins' bullets have had little recourse.

Practically all killings of union leaders have gone unsolved.



Now, labor rights groups and some members of the United States Congress

have promised to do something about the violence and the impunity, using

free trade negotiations between Colombia and the Bush administration to

prod the government of President Álvaro Uribe to do more to protect union

activists and prosecute the killers.



The idea, say labor activists from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and senior

Congressional aides, is to make the issue of violence and impunity as

important a component in trade talks as the struggle over agriculture

tariffs and intellectual property rights. Its failure to protect union

members, the argument goes, gives Colombia an unfair edge over countries

that do, like the United States.



"A country should not achieve an unfair comparative advantage by willful

omission or noncompliance of labor standards," said Stan Gacek, assistant

director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s international affairs department, which

works with unions in other countries. "The issue of rights is not an

obstruction to trade, it is absolutely essential to the success of trade."



An American trade official, who spoke on condition that he remain

anonymous, says that Colombia is obligated to enforce its own labor laws,

which guarantee freedom of association and other labor standards.



"And how do I know someone is denied freedom of association?" he said. The

murder of trade unionists, the official said, is a violation of freedom of

association. "So clearly violence against trade unionists or impunity for

killers is an issue with Colombia, and we've told them that."



The pressure is already having an effect.



Trying to mitigate the damage, Vice President Francisco Santos in

September traveled to the United States to meet with a bipartisan

Congressional group and John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

"The government has a right to defend its record and that is the reason

for my visit, and surely I'll return several times," Mr. Santos said in an

interview.



Mr. Santos says that Mr. Uribe's government, which is widely credited with

reducing violence since taking office in 2002, has made the country

considerably safer for unionists. While 94 were slain last year, 58 had

been assassinated as of Tuesday, according to the National Union School, a

research and educational center in Medellín. The numbers are still

staggering, Mr. Santos acknowledged, but they do represent a marked drop

from 1996, when 222 were killed.



The vice president attributes the improvements to a new emphasis on

prosecutions and a protection program that has received budget increases

of 45 percent, to $13.8 million, since 2001.



Some rights officials, even those long critical of the Colombian

government, said that the government had become more responsive to

complaints from unionists fearful of being killed.



"I don't think this is a government where you have to make hundreds of

phone calls and lobby them to make a serious case," said José Miguel

Vivanco, who oversees the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, the

rights monitoring organization based in New York.



But Mr. Vivanco, other rights leaders and the unionists say that impunity

continues largely unabated, despite the government's assurances.



The vice president's figures show that the number of successful

prosecutions of assassins - 19 - represents a small fraction of all the

cases involving murders of union organizers. Nearly 2,100 union members

have been slain since 1991, according to the National Union School.



Union advocates in the United States attribute the decline in violence to

a cease-fire that Colombia's main paramilitary coalition, the United

Self-Defense Forces, declared in December 2002 before embarking on

disarmament talks with the government. The cease-fire has been violated

numerous times.



Those paramilitary groups - right-wing, antiguerrilla militias financed by

landowners and the cocaine trade - have long targeted unions, accusing

their members of being rebels or working with Colombia's two leftist

insurgent groups.



Asked about the murders of unionists, Rodrigo Tovar, one of the group's

most feared leaders, was adamant about the need to ferret out guerrillas

from unions.



"We have always acted against guerrillas, armed or not armed," Mr. Tovar,

who commands 5,000 fighters, said last week in an interview on a ranch in

northern Colombia. "Our war has been against the subversives, against

communist guerrillas, however they are dressed."



Mr. Tovar denied that paramilitaries had worked with companies to

eliminate union organizers. But few in Colombia dispute that union leaders

have made enemies in the country's highly stratified society, both for

their leftist declarations and for their harsh criticism of fiscally

conservative governments bent on privatizing industries and holding down

labor costs.



Indeed, Mr. Tovar, who was a wealthy landowner and businessman before

joining the paramilitaries, could not contain his disdain for unions. He

said that they had been "a disaster in Colombia for business" and that

union activists were "the ones who sabotage, who hurt companies."



The deaths of union members here, particularly those who work for big

foreign multinational companies, has become a thorny international problem

for Colombia's establishment and the Bush administration.



Five lawsuits have been filed in American courts accusing companies like

Drummond, a coal producer based in Birmingham, Ala., and two bottlers

affiliated with Coca-Cola of using paramilitary gunmen to eliminate union

organizers. The companies strenuously deny the allegations.



But the lawsuits, filed in American courts under a 215-year-old statute,

have put an unwanted spotlight on Colombia's problems and irritated the

Bush administration, which argues that they interfere with foreign policy

and open multinational companies to sometimes frivolous grievances.



It is just the kind of pressure that union advocates in the United States

want to increase, using the trade talks as a way of further prodding the

two governments.



"They're looking for levers of pressure," said Michael Shifter, a senior

policy analyst who closely follows Colombia for the Inter-American

Dialogue, a Washington group. "And it's not surprising as the United

States begins negotiations with Colombia on a free trade deal that they're

going to explore the possibility of using this as a way of increasing

pressure."



Several recent incidents in Colombia have energized union activists in the

United States.



In September, the attorney general's office charged three soldiers with

having murdered three union activists, an account that sharply contrasted

with the army's earlier claim that the unionists were guerrillas killed in

a firefight. And earlier this month, an army major escaped - apparently

with the help of other military officials - from a military prison where

he was serving a 27-year term for the attempted assassination of a union

leader.



Mr. Santos, the vice president, said the arrests of the soldiers showed

that the government was serious about pursuing the killers of union

organizers. The government also quickly fired four military officers at

the prison from which the convicted major escaped.



But inaction, union advocates say, is mostly the norm when it comes to the

murders of union organizers like Luis Obdulio Camacho, who once headed a

cement workers' local in Antioquia province.



Mr. Camacho had lost a son, also a union member, to paramilitary gunmen in

1991. Then, in 1998, he himself was slain; two gunmen shot him in front of

several witnesses.



Today, Mr. Camacho's widow, Sixta Tulia Rojas, 69, lives in a small house

in Bogotá, where she fled to escape her husband's fate. She yearns for

justice, but long ago gave up on the government ever making an arrest in

the case.



"No one saw anything and that's what's so terrible - the silence," Ms.

Rojas said. Pointing to a framed poster of 10 union leaders, including her

husband, she said: "Look at that photo. All of them were killed and no one

was arrested."