Amy Masciola of the AFL-CIO Organizing Department sends us this blog about the annual vigil and protest at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.

Union supporters and organizers are routinely killed throughout Latin America and many of them are victims of graduates from the School of the Americas (SOA) operated by the U.S. Department of Defense at Fort Benning, Ga., according to investigations by several human rights groups.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson and AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff joined representatives from several affiliated unions this past weekend at the annual protest at SOA to demand justice for the workers of the Americas. The federation, along with UAW, Georgia State AFL-CIO and the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council, sponsored a symposium, “Workers’ Rights as Human Rights in the Americas,” Nov. 18 to highlight the violence against workers in countries such as Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Honduras and Peru.

According to the activist group SOA Watch, which organized the protest:

the SOA has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in courses such as counterinsurgency, psychological warfare, military intelligence, and interrogation tactics. Graduates of the school have been consistently linked to human rights violations and to the suppression of popular movements in the Americas.

More trade union members are killed each year in Latin America than in the rest of the world combined, primarily because of extreme anti-worker violence in Colombia, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), now called International Trade Union Confederation.

In an annual report of people killed because of their union activities, the ICFTU says 145 unionists around the world were murdered. Of these, 99 were killed in Colombia. Last year, 70 trade unionists were killed in Colombia.

A report by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center documents the deadly threats workers in Colombia face from employers, paramilitary gangs, drug lords, guerrillas and the government—which provide weak or non-existent oversight.

Chavez-Thompson told the more than 150 union members at the SOA workers’ rights symposium:

If we’re going to fight for the freedom of working people to organize into unions and to bargain collectively, it makes perfect sense for us to reach out to our natural friends and allies—human rights groups, women and people of color, environmentalists, academics—and to link our struggle to theirs. We really are one. We should work together.
 
 

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