[R-G] Bush and Harper Ignore Colombia’s Labor Rights Reality

[Anthony Fenton]

December 10, 2007

Bush and Harper Ignore Colombia’s Labor Rights Reality

by Garry Leech

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia268.htm

In the past year, there have been ongoing debates in both Washington  
and Ottawa about potential free trade agreements with Colombia. The  
failure to implement a hemisphere-wide agreement has led the  
governments of both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister  
Stephen Harper to push for bilateral pacts with their ideologically- 
aligned ally in Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe. Both Bush and  
Harper are facing domestic opposition that seeks to thwart the  
signing and ratification of the agreements due to ongoing human  
rights abuses in Colombia, particularly against unionists. The US and  
Canadian governments repeatedly point to a recent reduction in the  
number of Colombian labor leaders killed as justification for a free  
trade agreement. However, in actuality, the intensity of attacks  
against Colombian workers has increased, not decreased, under the  
Uribe government—and state security forces are directly responsible  
for an increasing number of the abuses.

The Bush administration signed a free trade pact with Colombia in  
November 2006, but congressional Democrats have stalled its  
ratification on human rights grounds. For its part, the Harper  
government is currently negotiating its own bilateral deal with the  
Uribe administration, but it is also facing increasing opposition at  
home as critics point to the severity of continuing abuses against  
Colombian workers.

Both governments have responded to critics by pointing out that there  
has been a significant decrease in the number of unionists killed  
since Uribe came to power. In October, US State Department  
spokesperson, R. Nicholas Burns, declared, “Homicides of trade  
unionists have shown a steep decline…. Rather than condemning as  
insufficient the considerable progress already made by the Colombian  
people, we should help them consolidate that progress through  
expanded trade.” Echoing the Bush administration’s argument in  
defense of a free trade agreement, Canada’s Trade Minister David  
Emerson recently stated, “We recognize there have been some terrible  
violations, but you would have to admit the level of those incidents  
have been declining.”

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been  
assassinated. And of the 144 unionists killed worldwide last year, 78  
were Colombian—eight more than the previous year. According to the  
International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU), there were 1,165  
documented murders of Colombian trade union members between 1994 and  
2006. However, the state has convicted the perpetrators in only 14 of  
these cases—an impunity rate of over 95 percent.

This dirty war against workers, in conjunction with the  
implementation of neoliberal economic reforms, has devastated union  
organizations and their membership. More than 195 trade union  
organizations were dissolved between 1991 and 2001, with union  
membership declining by more than 100,000 workers during that period.  
In fact, with only four percent of the workforce unionized—compared  
to 15 percent 20 years ago—Colombia now has the lowest unionization  
rate in Latin America.

While the US and Canadian governments focus on the significant  
decline in the number of Colombian unionists killed in recent years,  
they ignore both the principal reason for this decline and the  
escalation in other forms of human rights abuses against workers. The  
decrease in the number of unionists killed is more a product of a war  
of attrition against organized labor than of any policies implemented  
by the Uribe administration. In other words, more than 20 years of a  
dirty war waged against Colombia’s unions has meant that there are  
fewer labor leaders left to kill. Consequently, while the total  
number of unionists killed has declined in recent years, the  
intensity of the slaughter has not diminished.

A review of the numbers shows that the ratio of labor leaders killed  
relative to the number of unionized workers in Colombia is higher  
under the Uribe government than it was during the 1990s. Last year,  
one out of every 6,800 union members was assassinated. This rate of  
extermination is significantly higher than during the mid-1990s when  
an average of one out of every 8,100 unionists was killed. Because  
the level of unionization in Colombia has declined to only four  
percent of the workforce, the percentage of unionists being killed  
today is markedly higher than a decade ago.

Furthermore, other forms of human rights abuses against unionists  
have increased under the Uribe administration when compared to  
previous governments. There was a 62 percent increase in the number  
of threats against unionists in 2005 when compared to four years  
earlier—the final year of the Pastrana administration. There was also  
a 57 percent increase in arbitrary arrests and a 38 percent increase  
in harassment.

Not only have there been increases in the intensity of the killing of  
unionists and the number of threats, arbitrary arrests and serious  
incidents of harassment—along with the maintenance of a 95 percent  
impunity rate—there has also been a dramatic escalation of the  
state’s direct role in these abuses. According to the ICFTU,  
paramilitaries were responsible for 89 percent of the human rights  
abuses perpetrated against Colombian unionists in 2001, while the  
state and leftist guerrillas accounted for the remaining 11 percent.  
Four years later, state security forces were directly responsible for  
41 percent of the violations—and paramilitaries for a further 50  
percent.

In actuality, the Colombian government should be held responsible for  
human rights abuses perpetrated against unionists by both the state’s  
security forces and the paramilitaries since the two frequently  
collude in the country’s dirty war. Colombia’s ongoing para-politics  
scandal has confirmed links between the government and right-wing  
paramilitary death squads. In fact, more than 40 Colombian  
legislators are currently being investigated or have already been  
imprisoned as a result of the scandal—the overwhelming majority of  
them are political allies of President Uribe.

Earlier this year, long-standing accusations of collusion between the  
paramilitaries and multinational corporations—who stand to be the  
principal beneficiaries of a free trade agreement—were also  
confirmed. In March, Chiquita Brands International pled guilty in US  
federal court to funding Colombian paramilitaries on the US State  
Department’s list of terrorist organizations to the tune of $1.7  
million between 1997 and 2004. Those paramilitaries killed thousands  
of civilians, including unionists, in the banana-growing region  
during the years they were on Chiquita’s payroll.

The United States and Canada should not “reward” the Colombian  
government with a free trade agreement while it continues to violate  
the human rights of unionists. After all, it is primarily the  
Colombian government and certain political and economic elites in the  
country, rather than the Colombian people, that want the free trade  
agreement. Polls show that more Colombians are opposed to a free  
trade agreement with the United States than support it. While no  
similar poll has been conducted on an agreement with Canada, there is  
little reason to believe that the attitude of the Colombian people is  
any different with regards to that free trade pact.

Furthermore, in a July 2007 poll, 73 per cent of Canadians said that  
their federal government should not negotiate free trade agreements  
with countries that have dubious human rights records. That same  
month, Harper illustrated just how out of step he is with the  
Canadian people when he responded to criticism of his free trade  
negotiations with Colombia by declaring, “We’re not going to say fix  
all your social, political and human-rights problems, and only then  
will we engage in trade relations with you. That’s a ridiculous  
position.”

There is no moral justification for the United States and Canada  
negotiating free trade agreements with Colombia when the foundation  
of these pacts is the slaughter of Colombian unionists. The  
perpetrators of these crimes should not be rewarded with agreements  
that most Colombians do not want.