In Colombia, 'Free Trade' Brings More Poverty and More Killings: Afro-Colombian Union Organizers Face Displacement and Slaughter by Coca-Cola Henchmen

Activist Daneyi Estupiñán describes the impact of the Free Tree Agreement on Afro-Colombians. (Screen capture from
YouTube video)

By David Bacon
The free trade agreement (FTA) between the US and Colombia, which took effect on May 15, 2012, hadn't yet reached its second birthday when the office of the public workers' union in Cali, SINTRAEMCALI, was firebombed. On April 11 a Colombian court had ordered the country's government to apologize for attacking the union, along with that of the telephone workers, SINTRATELEFONOS, and university workers, SINTRAUNICOL, during the past administration of President Alvaro Uribe, who signed the trade agreement. The bombs were thrown five days later.

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In 2004, a large number of SINTRAEMCALI workers were fired, and over the years since 15 were forced to flee Cali, eight were murdered and over 100 more threatened. Last year, a leader of the city union's retirees' organization, Luis Fabio Campo Rodriguez, was murdered, and the union's past president, Alexander Lopez Maya, was revealed as the target of a government assassination program, "Operation Dragon."

On March 14, two months before the FTA's birthday, 17 leaders of the Association of Peasant Workers of Nariño were arrested in Nariño province. The arrests were widely viewed in Colombia as government retaliation for a strike organized by farmers and students this past August.

Twenty-six Colombian unionists were murdered in 2013, and 73 over the past three years. Among them was Oscar Lopez Triviño, a leader of the union for workers at bottling plants, SINALTRAINAL, in Bugalagrande. Lopez and other leaders had received death threats, and were conducting a hunger strike at the time of his murder on November 9...

The attacks by Coca Cola haven't stopped. SINALTRAINAL says that the plant in Medellin contracted out the jobs of 100 workers to a front company, Eficacia ("Efficiency"), and other workers were told that if they didn't resign from the union, their jobs would go to another front company, Atencom. When the subcontracted workers at Eficacia joined the union despite threats, they were fired. Coca Cola managers called in the police, who arrived in "armored tanks," according to the union, and stayed inside the plant several days. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, "illegal subcontracting and mass firings continue to be widely used to violate the right to free association."

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