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Labor, Human Rights Groups Urge Colombia to Respect Unionists |
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Eight labor and human rights groups, including the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and Human Rights Watch, this week called on the Colombian government to respect the work of trade unionists and human rights defenders in Colombia and to retract statements that put these workers at risk.
Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade union members. Over the past 23 years, some 2,697 trade union members have been killed in Colombia. That’s a rate of one every three days. Many other attempts to kill Colombian unionists failed, and there has been a notable increase in forced removals, arbitrary arrests, illegal raids and threats, especially in agriculture, health and education.
The latest death threat, which prompted the statement, was directed against a lawyer of a prominent human rights organization. The threat follows the government’s repeated statements lumping human rights defenders and union members with guerillas and other threats to the country.
Lina Paola Malagon, an attorney at the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), received by fax a detailed death threat signed by the Black Eagles, a paramilitary group. The threat explicitly said one of the main reasons she was targeted was because of her work on behalf of trade unionists.
Malagon has served for years as legal counsel to several trade unions and recently prepared a comprehensive report about the failure of the government to ensure that those responsible for killings of union leaders and members are brought to justice. This report formed the basis of testimony delivered at a Feb. 12 hearing of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) cited Malagon’s report in his opening remarks. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Yessika Hoyos, the nominee for the AFL-CIO’s 2008 Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award.
Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe denounced the witnesses at the hearing as having intentionally distorted the truth and having been motivated by “political hatred.” Last month, Uribe also publicly accused those who travel abroad and talk about human rights abuses in Colombia of being part of an “intellectual bloc” of the left-wing guerrillas in that nation’s ongoing civil war.
In the statement, the groups say such denunciations “de-legitimize the work of human rights groups, close the needed political space for them to exercise their right to free expression, and could put their lives at risk.”
We call upon the government to investigate the threats against Ms. Malagon…and to publicly affirm the legitimacy and value of the work of human rights defenders in a free and democratic society. A sustained, unequivocal, and public commitment to respect and support their work would go far in protecting human rights defenders from threats or violence.
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According to recent reports the United States has known of murders of union and human rights activists by Colombian security forces since the late 1990’s. And also the murders of thousands by the government linked paramilitary. Still this year reports keep coming in of these right-wing terrorist groups working with government forces and killing innocent civilians and/or stealing their land.
Part of the original plan of Plan Colombia stated that before the money could be released that the Colombian Government had to distance itself from the paramilitaries and bring them to justice. However then President Clinton cited national security and released the money anyway. Now over $6.8 Billion U.S. Tax dollars later we find increases of abuse by Colombian security forces, an increase in cocaine from Colombia and continuing impunity for many.
One might wonder why the American people keep believing Colombia is good. Part of the answer might lie with the American media who for years turned a blind eye to the abuses in Colombia. You can read more about that in an article titled, “Colombia &Venezuela: Testing the Propaganda Model” here:
http://nacla.org/node/5344
Then there is the fact that Colombia paid an American PR firm over $3 million dollars to make it look like a victim instead of the aggressor in American eyes and continues to this day paying American PR firms and lobbyists. Yet corruption remains a major theme and problem in Colombia. The country has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world and corruption is a tool used by the economic elite. It is what keeps even the best labor laws written into a free trade agreement from being enforced. It is what allows the intellectual authors of crimes against the rights of the people from being brought to justice. This was brought out in the recent U.S. House hearing on labor in Colombia. Consider that after the head of DAS (Colombia’s version of the FBI), Jorge Noguera, was found to be passing union member names to paramilitary death squads that the president of the country gave him a government job in Milan, Italy. More recently it was discovered that head of the Colombian Army, General Mario Montoya, worked with paramilitaries and responsible for the murder of hundreds of citizens. The president then appointed him ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
Consider this statement in an article this month on the Open Democracy web site: “The continuing chain of scandals shows that Colombia still has powerful elements - political bosses, military officers, crony capitalists - who keep one foot in the country’s legitimate institutions only to undermine them, occasionally through brutal means. They do so to protect wealth and power accumulated through corruption and ties to organised crime. In today’s Colombia, they pose an even greater threat than the badly weakened guerrillas.”
Full article can be read here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/colombias-imperilled-democracy
What is disturbing to me now is Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. She seems to be downplaying Colombia’s human rights problems and undermining the work of union and human rights organizations. Of course it is no surprise that as a senator she did not vote favorably for protecting workers. After the release of the US State department report on human rights in Colombia earlier this year many headlines in Colombia read something like, “U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton says Colombia is doing great.”
The report does have many good things and bad things to state about Colombia and I recommend it as an interesting read. It can be found here:
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/wha/119153.htm
For instance the report did state: “Since 2001 the Prosecutor General’s Office had prosecuted 126 cases, leading to the conviction of 247 perpetrators of violent acts against trade unionists. A special labor subunit, launched by the government in 2006 to prosecute those who commit such acts and staffed with 19 prosecutors and 96 investigators, resolved 80 of the cases, convicting 154 individuals.”
Such statistics sound good, but the numbers are deceiving. To be balanced the report should have mentioned that the amount of prosecutions represents less than 5% of the total murders. It also fails to address the issue brought out by the US House hearing that the justice system only has gone after the material author (the person who pulls the trigger) of the crime and not the intellectual author (the person who orders the murder).
I suppose this could be just considered sloppy work, but one should also consider not only the past of Ms. Clinton but also the following. Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, (when she ran for president) was at the same time working for the Colombian government. President Bill Clinton started Plan Colombia and released the money without the connection between the government and terrorist paramilitary being resolved. A Colombian group paid Mr. Clinton $800,000 for speaking engagements. Frank Giustra (a major contributor to Clinton’s charity) loaned Mr. Clinton his plan to fly him to the speaking engagements and soon afterward Mr. Giustra received some very lucrative investment rights in Colombia. When Hillary was running for president, The Colombian government gave Mr. Clinton the first “Colombia is Passion” award presenting it not in Bogota, but in NYC.
A recent sentence in an article in the Huffington Post sums things up very well. “Washington supports the Colombian government, and therefore the Colombian government can do whatever it wants without restraint. The human consequeneces of this political blank check have been disastrous.”
See full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-we-reset-relations-wi_b_172205.html