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From Sourcewatch: Political Contributions
In June 2000, Drummond gave $500,000 to the Republican National Committee.<4> The company also gave $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Campaign that year.<4> In October 2000, Drummond gave $20,000 to the National Republican Senate Campaign.<4>
~snip~
In 2002, the families of three deceased Colombian labor leaders and the union they belonged to, Sintramienergética, filed suit against Drummond Company, Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiary Drummond Ltd. in U.S. federal court. The plaintiffs alleged that Drummond hired Colombian paramilitaries to kill and torture the three labor leaders in 2001. Sintramienergética represents workers at Drummond’s coal mining operations in Colombia. The case was brought under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act and Alabama state law.
Drummond sought dismissal of the case. In 2003, the court granted dismissal on the state law claims and one of the ATCA claims. The court declined to dismiss the ATCA claims of extrajudicial killing and the denial of rights to associate and to organize. In March 2007, the court ruled that the case against Drummond Ltd. would go to trial but dismissed the case against the parent company of Drummond Company. In June 2007, the district court judge dismissed the wrongful death claims but allowed the war crime allegations under the ATCA. The trial began in July 2007, and after trial, the 10 person jury acquitted Drummond finding that the company was not liable for the deaths of the three murdered labor leaders. On December 11, 2007, the plaintiffs filed to appeal the lower court’s verdict with U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. In December 2008, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia upheld the verdict.<9>
In March 2009, the families of the three murdered men filed another suit against Drummond.<10> This time, a key witness who had been in prison during the trial has been released and is able to testify against Drummond.<11> <12> <13> <14> <15> <16>
Drummond charged in the murders of 67 Colombians
In May 2009, law firms Conrad & Scherer LLP (of Florida) and Ivey Law Firm (of Jasper, Alabama) filed a federal lawsuit against Drummond for the company's involvement in the murders of sixty-seven Colombians.<17> Drummond paid millions of dollars to the paramilitary terrorist group United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (the AUC) to protect the company's property and U.S. workers, and according to the lawsuit, "allowed the AUC terrorists to set up a military base of operations on its property, and supplied electric, food and fuel."<17> The sixty-page lawsuit documents many allegations of violence against people who were perceived as sympathetic to leftist guerilla groups and supportive of local union organizations, including "how hundreds of men, women, and children were terrorized in their homes, on their way to and from work… innocent people killed in or near their homes or kidnapped to never to return home, their spouses and children being beaten and tied up, and people being pulled off buses and summarily executed on the spot."<17> The lawsuit also describes a meeting between Drummond and the AUC in November 2000 where the company ordered the execution of two union leaders.<17>
The law firms represent 252 plaintiffs, who are relatives of the sixty-three men and four women that were murdered.<17> Their names were withheld from the lawsuit in order to prevent repercussions.<17>
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Drummond
~~~~~
Reports on Labor Rights on Colombia
~snip~
Drummond Co., an Alabama-based coal-mining company, has also overseen a series of similar assassinations in recent years. In March of 2001, during the course of a dispute between Drummond and the union Sintramienergetica, paramilitaries took the union's president, Valmore Lacarno Rodríguez, and vice-president, Víctor Hugo Orcasita Amaya, off a company bus and executed them. As in the Coca-Cola case, Drummond had ignored open threats from the paramilitaries, circulated publicly on flyers, and had even refused Lacarno and Orcasito's plea that they be allowed to sleep at the mine for safety. Moreover, many workers, including the next union president, Gustavo Soler Mora, argued that the mine's management had helped the paramilitaries to find and identify Locarno and Orcasita.8 Seven months later Gustavo Soler Mora was also taken off a bus and murdered.9
~snip~
A US-Funded War on Trade Unions?
Important as they are, lawsuits such as those filed against Coca-Cola and Drummond are only a partial solution for Colombia's workers. Colombia's labor movement as a whole will remain vulnerable as long as union leaders and organizers face the constant threat of paramilitary violence. However, people in the United States have an important role to play here as well. The Colombian military is now the third largest recipient of American military assistance in the world. As human rights organizations, journalists, labor and civic leaders in both the United States and Colombia have pointed out, there is serious cause for concern that this steady flow of arms from the United States to Colombia is dramatically worsening the status of labor rights in the country.
Of greatest concern are the alarming links between the official Colombian military and the ultra-right wing paramilitary organizations of the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), who are responsible for 90% of trade union assassinations in Colombia (and a majority of political killings in general).11 In a recent report prepared for the US State Department, prominent international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, found clear evidence of extensive military-paramilitary cooperation. The report makes sobering reading: "…military units and police detachments continue to promote, work with, support, profit from, and tolerate paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied to and compatible with their own." The report goes on to outline the details of this working relationship, which has included everything from the sharing of equipment and intelligence, to the hosting of paramilitaries on military bases, to active cooperation on the battlefield. Active duty soldiers from the regular army serve in the paramilitary forces and are on the paramilitary payroll.12 Under these conditions, it is often difficult to find any distinction between the military and the paramilitaries, causing many in Colombia to label the paramilitaries as the army's "Sixth Division."
Because of the extensive paramilitary-military cooperation in Colombia, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that US aid to the Colombian military is facilitating the persecution of Colombia's trade unions. Investigations have revealed "links between active-duty and retired members of the security forces, known paramilitaries and professional killers, and attacks on trade unionists."13 The broad pattern of paramilitary/military cooperation shows that this is not just a matter of a few isolated extremists. In fact, many in Colombia's labor movement believe that the destruction of unions is their government's policy. The CUT, Colombia's umbrella trade union organization, points to absurdly low budget allocations for the protection of threatened trade unionists. Nor does the government bother to prosecute these crimes once they occur; the last 3,500 murders of trade unionists in Colombia have resulted in only six convictions.14 The ongoing violence against unions furthers the governments' neoliberal economic policies, which have met stiff resistance from organized labor. A chilling example is the call from the head of the Ministry of Labor for "unions who face labor conflicts to negotiate and avoid worsening the violence in Colombia."15
More:
http://henningcenter.berkeley.edu/gateway/colombia.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org.nyud.net:8090/images/thumb/e/ea/Drummond_-_Uribe_Drummond_%2B_Jimenez.jpg/567px-Drummond_-_Uribe_Drummond_%2B_Jimenez.jpg
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