for American-based multinationals to exploit, companies like Coca-Cola, Chiquita Banana (formerly United Fruit all over Latin America), Nestle, Drummond Coal Company, etc. These companies have employed right-wing paramilitaries which help them keep down the labor costs by killing union organizers.
Here's info. on a recent case concerning the Alabama-based Drummond Coal Company which pulled up its operation at over 10 sites in Alabama, and moved the whole mining operation to Colombia, where it doesn't have an environmental restraints, doesn't have to worry about insurance for employees, or employee rights, apparently, and getting away with it. By the way, after putting all those miners in Alabama out of work, Drummond is thumbing its nose at its host state by importing the Colombian Coal to provide electricity to them all. Nice touch, isn't it?
COLOMBIA: Suing Multinationals Over Murder
by Ken Stier, TIME Magazine
August 1st, 2007
Organized labor often complains of its treatment at the hands of corporate America, but its accusations pale in comparison to those made recently by the widows of Colombian mine workers in an Alabama courtroom. During a two-week trial, a Birmingham jury weighed charges that the local Drummond Coal Company bore responsibility for the murders of three union leaders who represented workers at its Colombian mine - the world's largest open pit mine. The widows lost their suit last week. But the case, and issues at the heart of it, are far from resolved: an appeal is all but certain, and the courts will surely hear more lawsuits trying to use a once obscure, colonial-era law to hold U.S. companies liable for human rights abuses committed abroad.
The known facts of the Drummond case as outlined in the complaint are disturbing enough. For months union leaders pleaded with company executives for more security against lawless right-wing paramilitaries operating in the northern Cesar province, where the 25,000-acre mine - from which Drummond exports 25 million tons of coal a year, with an estimated value of $700 million - is located. One key request that was refused was to allow workers to sleep on the premises. Once outside company property, miners were vulnerable to the paramilitaries, who are believed responsible for most of the 900 extra-judicial killings taking place every year in the country's continuing, decades-long civil war. And just as Drummond's local union chapter was involved in heated negotiations over wages and and compensation for workers killed in a mining accident, pamphlets appeared on Drummond property denouncing the union as a "guerrilla union" - regarded by the workers as a virtual death sentence to its leaders.
On March 12, 2001, as company buses ferried miners to the nearby village where they were staying, waiting paramilitaries stopped the bus carrying union president Valmore Lacarno and vice president Victor Orcasita. They boarded the bus, Lacarno was taken off and promptly shot in the head in full view of fellow miners. Orcasita was bundled off, reappearing hours later with a lacerated chest, smashed teeth and a bullet in his brain. The next miner to step forward as leader, Gustavo Soler, met a similar fate several months later.
It was a harrowing tale, but the jury did not think there was sufficient evidence linking Drummond with the murders. The plaintiffs concede this was "understandable" but only because the jury was not able to hear the testimony of four key witnesses. Two of them, Rafael Garcia and Alberto Visbal, a former paramilitary himself, claim to have attended a meeting at which they saw money passed from the president of Drummond's local subsidiary to a representative of paramilitary commanders for monthly "taxes," or to pay for the assassinations, a charge that Drummond has vehemently denied. Of course, nothing is that simple in Colombia; one of the witnesses, Garcia, a former IT director in Colombia's version of the FBI, currently is serving a 24-year prison term for erasing data on drug traffickers.
Still, "if any of the four witnesses Judge Karon Bowdre excluded would have been allowed to testify, the jury would have had the missing link," insists Terry Collingsworth, of the D.C-based International Labor Rights Fund, which helped bring the case and several other similar cases against other major companies.
(snip/...)
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14614~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The U.S. also has "advisors" and military stationed in Colombia, and some people guarding the oil pipelines. You may remember in the last couple of years, a story about a high-ranking American officer's wife getting caught mailing some cocaine to her friends back in the States, and also about American service men trafficking in weapons down there.
It's very possible
Bush is going to take advantage of an offer made by the Colombian President Uribe of a military base to be stationed on the Colombia/Venezuela border.
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