Plan Colombia, America’s $1.3 billion aid package to the Colombian governent, is supposed to be about ending that country’s civil war, but that money may be helping fund death squads that brutally oppress, even kill, everyday working Colombians.
from: http://www.guerrillanews.com
As GNN has reported, multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola have been implicated in the death squads’ dirty deeds. Now, as David Bacon reports in this article which originally appeared in The American Prospect magazine, the killings have shown no sign of letting up, despite efforts by American union activists who have traveled to Colombia to help stop the violence against their brethren:
After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind bars, while the murderers went free.
Convinced that Colombian officials were unable or unwilling to bring the perpetrators to justice, they decided to go abroad for help. Accordingly, last July, the Colombian union Sinaltrainal, together with the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), filed a lawsuit in the Florida courts against Coca-Cola, Panamerican Beverages (the largest soft-drink bottler in Latin America), and Bebidas y Alimentos (owned by Richard Kirby of Key Biscayne, Florida), which operates the Carepa plant. The suit charges the three companies with complicity in the assassination of the union leader Isídro Segundo Gil.
The case has become the centerpiece in a new strategy devised by Colombia’s labor movement to stop a wave of murders of union activists that’s lasted over a decade. International labor cooperation, the unions believe, is the only means left to them to counter the power of the corporations that they think are the instigators and beneficiaries of the repression.
read the full story at http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc315.html