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The slaying of one Florida teenager, Trayvon Martin, roiled anger and outrage in this country among citizens who believe the killing was unjust and unwarranted. Similarly, the torture and killing of one labor activist in Bangladesh last week provoked an outcry there and a half-page story in the New York Times.

Americans don’t countenance murder, particularly when it’s racially or politically motivated. Americans are justice-seeking and fair-play-believing. And that is why we, as a country, cannot certify that Colombia has fulfilled its obligations under the Labor Action Plan. Certification is a step necessary before the free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States can take effect.

Colombia eagerly anticipates that happening this weekend during the Summit of the Americas to be held in Cartagena, Colombia. For us to do so would be to turn our backs on the 30 trade unionists slain in Colombia last year and the six that Justice for Colombia reports have been murdered already this year.

The Labor Action Plan that was attached to the free trade agreement when the United States approved it a year ago was intended to pressure Colombia to stop the killing and torture and to prosecute the perpetrators. The routine slaughter of human rights activists and trade unionists in Colombia is a quarter century old. It didn’t end in a year’s time. And for us to certify that it did would be to betray the victims and their families.

Over the past quarter century, paramilitary groups and even the Colombian military have killed 3,000 unionists, making this South American country the most dangerous in the world for union activists. The killing continued because there were no consequences. The Colombian government overlooked these murders. The United Nations recently reported that the killers are successfully prosecuted in only 5 percent of cases. That means in 95 percent of the killings, the murderers walk free. Most are never even charged.
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Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Tragically, the government of Colombia exhibits the behavior of an addict. And, just as regrettably, the United States is co-dependent, so addicted to so called free trade that it plans to award Colombia an agreement based solely on promises.

Addicts always promise. They’ll stop, they pledge. Their co-dependents desperately want to believe, so they cooperate with the addicts’ demands.

Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, has pledged to try to stop the murders to persuade Congress to approve a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Promises, promises.

And the United States has agreed to accept those promises rather than demand performance before signing an FTA. American’s Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations crave another FTA so badly they will believe anything.

When the Colombia FTA was first proposed, Congress refused to approve it because so many trade unionists are assassinated each year by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces that the murders exceed the number of unionists killed in all other countries of the world combined. In 2007, the year that former President George W. Bush completed the agreement, 39 Colombian unionists were slain.

The Colombian government knew why Congress denied approval. It could have responded four years ago by protecting trade unionists and preserving their lives. It did not.

Instead, the murders increased. In 2008, 52 Colombian trade unionists were assassinated, one a week. In 2009, the number declined by 5 to 47, but it was back up to 52 last year. Six have been slain so far this year, including Hector Orozco and Gilardo Garcia, members of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, who were threatened by the Colombian military just before they were assassinated. Promises, promises.

In response to the concerns expressed by Congress about the murders, the newly-proposed FTA requires Bogota to improve safeguards for workers by April 22, and to develop a plan by May 20 to enhance the capacity of regional judicial offices because the murders of trade unionists go unpunished by the Colombian government – giving the killers an impunity rate of approximately 95 percent. And by mid-June, the Colombian government promises to increase penalties for threatening workers.

The government of Colombia could have completed all of those steps four years ago. It didn’t bother.

To this point, Congress has taken the moral high ground by refusing to approve the trade deal. It said, basically, as long as Colombia continued to countenance the slaughter of its community and labor leaders, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, America would not give it special treatment for trade purposes.

In addition, Congress recognized the FTA’s potential to devastate Colombian farmers. The FTA would speed forced displacement of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people by encouraging increased exploitation of their land by business interests, such as palm oil companies, half of which are owned by paramilitary groups. Expelling these farmers from their land would further swell Colombia’s internally-displaced population – the largest in the world at 4.3 million.

Making matters worse for Colombian farmers, the main U.S. beneficiaries of the FTA would be big agricultural companies which would be permitted to dump cheap, subsidized food stuffs into Colombia duty-free. This would result in farmers’ impoverishment and land loss because small growers would not be able to compete with the low-cost American produce.  In Haiti and Mexico, domestic food production was wiped out by similar free trade agreements. It’s likely that Colombia would follow the path of Mexico, where, as the ability to grow legitimate crops became economically impossible, farmers turned more and more to producing illicit drugs. Colombia already produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s cocaine.

Business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, protested the refusal by Congress to approve the FTA, contending that increasing American exports and jobs was more important than protecting Colombian lives and human rights.

The Chamber’s position is not only depraved, it’s based on flawed calculations of exports and jobs. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and granting China entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Colombia FTA will cost America jobs and exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit.

Previous projections by the Chamber and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that NAFTA and China’s WTO membership would improve the U.S. economy proved catastrophically off base.

When the U.S. signed NAFTA in 1993, it had a $1.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. After the agreement, that surplus quickly morphed into a deficit, which ballooned to $64.7 billion in 2008. These annual deficits cost the U.S. 560,000 jobs between 1993 and 2004.

Similarly, the ITC predicted that the tariff reductions China offered when it entered the WTO would result in a trade deficit of $1 billion a year. Instead, between the years of 2001 and 2008, the actual result was deficits of $185 billion, and the loss or displacement of 2.3 million American jobs.

The U.S. already runs a trade deficit with Colombia. It was $1.86 billion in 2009. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the proposed FTA with Colombia would nearly double that trade deficit by 2015, which would cost the United States another 55,000 jobs.

Frankly, the EPI calculation, which factors in effects on trade like currency manipulation, is far more credible than the ITC and Chamber reports, which ignore these issues.

Bogota wants the FTA because it believes the deal will be good for Colombian business interests. One immediate bonus, for example, is that the FTA would eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of Colombia’s exports to the U.S.

To get what it wants, the Colombian government is willing to say anything. Just like an addict. Promises, promises. The Colombian government’s past performance shows its pledges to protect workers from assassination are empty.

America must reject the role of co-dependent. It must demand the proof of performance before rewarding the government of Colombia with an FTA.

Without proof of performance, the government of Colombia will get away with murder.  It will export more of its goods – crude oil, coffee, fruit and flowers — to the U.S.  And unwitting Americans will buy more blood red Colombian roses.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

In an Oct. 1 editorial, the Los Angeles Times echoes the sentiment that the United Steelworkers union has been expressing for years – corporate supporters of paramilitaries in Colombia who murder trade unionists must be held criminally accountable. 

Specifically, the Los Angeles Times is applauding the order of a Colombian judge that top officials of the Alabama-based mining corporation, Drummond, be investigated as the intellectual authors of the brutal slayings of three union leaders in 2001. 

As the Los Angeles Times opines:

 “[i]t is troubling . . .  that when a defendant is convicted [in Colombia], it is generally a hit man or low-level thug and almost never the mastermind or shot-caller who ordered a labor leader’s murder.  That’s why it is significant that a judge in Colombia has asked the attorney general to launch a criminal investigation of top executives at Alabama-based Drummond Co., a multinational coal company.”

The Los Angeles Times explains:

 “[a]t issue is whether Drummond executives collaborated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC in Spanish), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to murder union leaders organizing the Drummond coal mine in La Loma in 2001.”

This issue arises in the context of an epidemic of anti-union violence in Colombia unprecedented in the world.  As the Los Angeles Times notes:

 “Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union organizer. In the last 17 years, more than 2,700 teachers, farmworkers, coal miners and other laborers have paid with their lives for seeking rights that Americans have long taken for granted, such as safe working conditions. During that same period, there were more than 4,000 reported death threats against labor leaders, 350 disappearances and kidnappings, and 75 cases of torture.”

It is in light of this problem of anti-union violence that Colombia, and the U.S. as well, must vigorously prosecute corporations that have supported paramilitary groups which in turn have gone on to kill literally thousands of innocent civilians.  According to Colombia’s Attorney General, Mario Iguaran, the support which Chiquita Brands International admittedly gave to the AUC paramilitaries over a 7-year period (guns as well as $1.7 million), facilitated the AUC’s murder of about 4,000 civilians.   And, while Chiquita was indicted and pled guilty to this support of a designated terrorist organization, it was merely fined $25 million which it was allowed to pay over a five-year period.

Meanwhile, just as the Los Angeles Times says, “ex-paramilitary soldiers are naming top Drummond executives as having requisitioned and paid for two of the murders,” top ex-paramilitary commanders have also fingered other U.S. multi-nationals for supporting the AUC over the years.   Most notably, Salvatore Mancuso, a former top AUC paramilitary commander who is currently in U.S. custody on drug-trafficking charges, has claimed that Del Monte, Dole, and Drummond have all made regular payments to the AUC over the years.

While there have been a number of civil actions against U.S. multi-nationals for their role in supporting paramilitary atrocities in Colombia, the Los Angeles Times rightly points out that there:

 “is no substitute for a criminal investigation in Colombia. The perilous environment for workers there exists not only because of the violence they face but the historical impunity of their attackers.” 

The USW would further submit that there is no substitute for a criminal investigation by the U.S., which has the tools to effectively investigate and prosecute corporations on its own soil for the wrong-doing they committed in Colombia.  Both Colombia and the U.S. should carry out such investigations and prosecutions to put an end to impunity for corporations which bankroll the killing of labor leaders and innocent civilians.