by Mark Thomas
In minutes we have moved from the morning havoc of the back streets into Teusaquillo, an area where the roads are slightly wider and the craters fewer. Trees periodically dot the pavement and white walls and grilles harbour little gardens of yuccas and palms. The terracotta roof tiles give each home an air of stability, while the buildings themselves are set back a little from the road. The well-to-do used to live here but they moved on long ago, leaving it inhabited by human rights lawyers, civic groups and non-government organisations.
We stop at a house with a low brick wall. The front garden consists of one patch of grass, one patch of concrete and two oil stains. It is the kind of place that back home in England would have a disused caravan parked in one corner. Here the front doors of the building are large, wooden and nondescript, and give little clue as to the identity of the occupants. Especially since the old graffiti that used to read ‘Death to trade unionists!’ has been painted over. Now there is nothing to announce that this ordinary house is home to Sinaltrainal (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos -
The National Union of Food Workers). They are the biggest trade union in the ‘Coca-Cola system’ in Colombia, representing over half the organised Coke workers, though after over a decade of attacks and intimidations the membership isn’t as big as it was. In fact, with a current membership in the Coca Cola plants of only 350 it is fair to say they have been decimated, but (and the but in this case is enormous) this is the group that started Coca-Cola’s current woes. This is the union that has seen its members and leaders murdered. This is also the union that took on one of the biggest companies in the world. These two things are not coincidental.
This building is where we meet two men, Giraldo and Manco. They arrive on different days and subsequently give their testimonies separately but they tell the same story and they both tell it from an old table in the middle of a union office covered in campaign posters. The propaganda slogans demand boycotts and justice. The images are of handguns painted in the company colours of red and white. The names and pictures of dead trade unionists are everywhere. Giraldo and Manco knew these men, they were friends and relatives, and now they sit under the watch of the dead as they speak of how they died.
On a Saturday morning Oscar Alberto Giraldo Arango (Giraldo) walks into this office. He is forty-two but he carries a few more years on his shoulders. His shirt is as thin as his face, worn and frayed too, his cheeks look like they are down to the last layer of skin. Hunched and with an old black cap on his head ready to be pulled down, he sits looking out of big dark eyes, void but for an impassive watery stare.
The first time I met the men at Sinaltrainal they told me, ‘To be a trade unionist in Colombia is to walk with a gravestone on your back.’ I initially took this as a reference to the fact that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists: since 1986 2,500 trade unionists have been killed, that averages two a week. But the men I met looked weary - as if they had physically borne their stone.
Giraldo sits down, looks up, takes off his cap, stiffly rubs the top of his head with his hand and begins. He was born and breed in Carepa, Urabá , in the north-west of the Colombian countryside near the Panama boarder. He started work for Coca-Cola in 1984 at the Bebidas y Alimentos de Urabá bottling plant - which translates as Drinks and Foods of Urabá. When he told his friends of his new employers they congratulated him, ‘Well done, that’s great! You got such a good job!’ and it was too. The union had done well for the men, securing bonuses, overtime and health benefits. But this was not to last. Graffiti announced the paramilitaries’ arrival in Carepa in 1994. ‘We are here!’ it declared. Shortly after the graffiti arrived so did the bodies. The first Coca-Cola worker and trade unionist in Carepa to be assassinated was José Eleazar Manco in April 1994. The second was killed days later on the 20 April. He was Giraldo’s brother, Enrique.
In the mornings Enrique travelled to work on the back of a friend’s motorbike. There is only one road to the bottling plant and that morning three men emerge from the side of it. They stand in the middle of the road and aim guns at the bike forcing it to stop. Enrique is dragged from the publicly exposed lane, into the trees and bushes with the armed men. As the paras disappear they shout to the driver -‘Go!’
News travels fast and when Giraldo gets to work everyone is talking about what has just happened. The shock of Enrique’s kidnap circles the plant, disbelief and confusion growing with the telling. The deliverymen, production-line workers - all of them try and grasp the facts and speculate on why Enrique was picked up in this way. But the gossip quickly turns to mourning. Another man arriving for work has seen Enrique’s body dumped at the side of the road.
THE PARAS
‘We are the defenders of business freedom and of the national and international industrial sectors.’
Carlos Castano, leader of the AUC paramilitaries2
The Colombian paramilitary groups were spawned in the conflict between the state and revolutionary guerillas. In 1982 officers under General Landazabal, the Defence Minister of
Colombia, worked with multinationals and cattle ranchers to organise and fund ‘defence groups’. Ostensibly they were to fight left-wing insurgent groups but increasingly the paras, as they are known, became entwined with the drug cartels and the army, often leaving it difficult to see where one group finishes and another starts.
Spreading out countrywide, the paras grew steadily into the AUC (in Spanish this stands for the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, its English translation is the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia). They quickly became known as death squads, attacking and killing anyone considered to support the left-wing guerillas - basically anyone working in human rights or trade unions. It is a common refrain amongst the establishment and security forces that the guerillas and trade unionists are one and the same. As if to illustrate this point Colombia’s President Uribe as late as 2007 said ‘Either carry out union organising or carry out guerrilla warfare, but this wicked mixture does much damage to Colombia.’3
The paras have a bloody history of working with the security forces. Human Rights Watch published a report in 2001 called ‘The Sixth Division’. The title comes from the fact that there are five army divisions in Colombia but so great is the level of collusion between the army and the paras (sharing equipment, information and personnel) that the paramilitaries are often called the Sixth Division.4
Carlos Castano, the charismatic leader of the paras, claimed that 70 per cent of his organisation’s funding came from the cocaine industry. However, he was also an ardent supporter of neo-liberal economic policies and of multinational investment in Colombia. Castano said of their relationship with the AUC, ‘Why shouldn’t national and international companies support us when they see their investments limited…We have always proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom and of the national and international industrial sectors.’5 Perhaps not surprisingly for a group so committed to multinationals, the paras developed their own logos, branding almost, and one of their logos was crossed chainsaws - the preferred tool of choice when carrying out massacres.
In a newspaper interview Carlos Castano was quoted as responding to the accusation that the paras attacked indiscriminately by saying, ‘Blind attacks? Us? Never! There is always a reason. Trade unionists for example. They stop the people from working. That’s why we kill them.’6 Given that statement it’s perhaps not surprising that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) puts the conviction rate of trade union murderers at 1 per cent,7 although even that figure is considered a little on the high side by those on the ground. Certainly President Uribe has shown little inclination to rectify this situation. His public statements on the matter include, ‘There are no assassinations of workers in Colombia’8 but there are ‘rotten apples’ in the trade union movement.9
Perhaps the most startling statistic with regard to violations
of international humanitarian law is the dramatic escalation in the direct role played by the Colombian State. When President Uribe assumed office in 2002, the State was responsible for 17 per cent of all human rights violations. Four years later - at the end of Uribe’s first term - the State was responsible for 56 per cent of human rights abuses; with the paramilitaries and FARC accounting for 29 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.10
Giraldo has lived with the story of his brother’s murder for twelve years and betrays little emotion when he says, ‘they contacted the body collectors in the area who went in search of the body.’ No one was charged with Enrique’s murder. He was dragged from the motorbike and executed, his body left at the side of the road, and as far as the authorities were concerned that was that; it was an unpleasant incident that generated a little paperwork. ‘There wasn’t very much of an investigation,’ says Giraldo. But a definite pattern emerged when almost a year to the day another Sinaltrainal leader working at the Coca-Cola plant in Carepa was killed. His name was Enrique Gómez Granado and on the 23 April 1995 he was shot on his doorstep in front of his wife and children. It seems almost indecent to mention the end of this man’s life and the searing horror endured by his family in so brief a sentence. But it is with brutal ease a man’s life becomes a statistic. So Enrique Gomez became the third Sinaltrainal leader murdered in just over a year, leaving the unavoidable link between union organising at the Coke plant and being killed.
When the surviving union leaders were threatened and intimidated it became blindingly obvious that there was a campaign against the union at the Coca-Cola plant. These men were followed as they left work, cards and letters delivered to their homes that read ‘Go now or face death!’ The entire union leadership opted for the first option and fled to Bogota en masse, which left the workers with no effective union in the Carepa plant, a situation that appeared to suit the management just fine. Giraldo claims that, ‘some of us had been working for the company for nine or ten years but the company would call us in one by one and say to us, “Come on, look, the union has fallen…the union doesn’t exist any more so you need to do what the company tells you to do”.’ As the union was attacked and its leaders murdered, managers at the plant were making it crystal clear that they intended to take full advantage of this situation.
So the workers remaining in Carepa meet in secret. ‘We agreed to set up a new underground union,’ says Giraldo. The president was Luis Hernán Manco Monroy (Manco). A few days after talking to Giraldo at the old table in the Sinaltrainal office in Bogota, I speak to him. At 1.9 metres he is a tall man with receding black hair and a maroon coat that looks like a battered driving jacket. But the thing that catches your attention when you meet Manco is the way he holds himself. He has a cautious swagger, his whole frame seems to bob slightly, like a boxer. He is sixty years old but has the awkward twitch of a man who expects to be hit.
As president of the newly formed union leadership he helped draw up a collective agreement, the terms and conditions they wanted the company to negotiate over. Then the union came out into the open. ‘We informed Coca-Cola that we had new leadership and so we started having meetings with the management at the Coca-Cola plant.’ The manager at the time was a man called Ariosto, who, they allege, not only knew but socialised with the paramilitaries. On one occasion, Manco said Ariosto sat drinking with the local paramilitary commanders outside the plant. ‘There was a meeting with Cepillo and Caliche [the commanders] at the kiosk, they were drinking with Ariosto and he said that if he wanted to end the union, it would be very easy.’
Giraldo recalls another instance when Ariosto said, ‘“The union exists because I let it exist, if I don’t want it here, that will be the case”, but we didn’t think about this because we didn’t know how bad it would get…’
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. On 6 December 1996 Carepa’s darkest day begun.
The body of Isidro Gil lay inside the plant. The first bullet had hit him between the eyes. The remaining five shots were fired out of spite or anger or bravado - who knows, perhaps it was just a way of saying ‘We are here!’ But he died where he fell in the courtyard. No one touched him until his brother Martin arrived. Crying, he held Isidro in the courtyard as the Coke workers looked on until the police came to take them away. It was just after 9am, and he was the fourth Coca-Cola union leader to be killed in Carepa.
The two paras who killed him had arrived on a motorbike and gone to the security hut by the main gates, where Isidro was working. As he opened the large iron gates to allow a delivery lorry to leave the paras saw their chance, slipped past the office, through the gates and shot him. Giraldo ‘was 10 metres away from him when they shot him, and then I ran inside because I didn’t know what…’ His voice trails off. ‘When I heard the first shot, I was walking nearby the entrance. Those of us who were nearby ran off.’
Manco looked up when he heard the first shot. ‘the machine that I was working on was quite near the door…When I heard the shots, I looked behind me because the door was behind me, and Isidro had already fallen to the ground.’
Aristo the manager had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. So without knowing what to do or directions from the company the men hung around the plant. ‘We didn’t know where to go and we were waiting for [the police] to come and take the body and tell us that we could leave,’ said Giraldo.
Even when the men were finally told to go home they didn’t. ‘The production line stopped,’ said Manco, ‘but we stayed there in the afternoon because we were too scared to leave…not working, just waiting there.’
Eight hours after Isidro had been killed the men finally left the plant to go home. They were right to be fearful. One of the worried men was a trade union organiser called Adolfo Luis Cardona, nicknamed El Diablo. El Diablo was a local footballer of some renown, a former champion in fact. He too had seen Isidro killed and that afternoon, while his friends and workmates waited in the plant, he went to Carepa. The paras spotted him and called out that the local para commander Cepillo wanted to see him, ‘Come with us, Cepillo wants you…Come, nothing will happen. Get in the lorry we will drive you there.’ But this lorry was of some local infamy. It was said people got into it but did not return alive. ‘Come and get in we will take you to meet the Cepillo,’ the paras insisted.
There and then El Diablo made the most important decision of his life. He ran. He took off running down the village street screaming ‘Van a matar a mí!’ They are going to kill me! He ran and ran and ran towards the police station four blocks away. There were few cars but the road was full of people, fetching, carrying, hustling, bustling, shopping, walking, working people. Into the oncoming crowd he ran, dodging anything that came towards him, twisting his body to avoid a collision, his legs churning and scuttling to keep upright. On he ran through the narrow streets crying, panic filling every part of him as he screamed to onlookers, ‘They are going to kill me! They are going to kill me!’ Behind him the paras gave chase, one on motorbike the rest on foot charging after him, all pretence of normality thrown away. They were hunting him down in broad daylight. The bike weaved its way through the traffic of people as the foot soldiers bumped and jostled those in their path. No one said anything. No one did anything. What could they do? How could they stop the paras stalking a man in broad daylight? But the assassins lacked the adrenalin of a condemned man and the instincts of a footballer. El Diablo burst frantically into the police station begging for protection and sanctuary.
The police all but shrugged: ‘What can we do?’
This is what they managed to do: they escorted El Diablo home, waited while his family packed and then drove them to the airport. There they went first to Bogota and then on to the USA, where El Diablo lives today. In this case Colombian justice was no more than a taxi service into exile.
The morning had seen the murder of Isidro Gil, the afternoon the attempted abduction of El Diablo and that night saw the final event. Sinaltrainal’s offices in Carepa w
ere firebombed. Metal bars had smashed the doors apart, files and papers were scattered around the building, joining the litter of the broken tables and chairs. And then the entire building was burned to the ground. A blazing beacon shone out in the night as the union office crackled and smoked in the flames, a warning beacon, to which the message was clear: your union is finished, go or die!
Manco had gone into hiding but the following day the para leader, Cepillo, sent out messages that he wanted to talk to the union men, to hold a meeting with them. Manco’s world had been destroyed, his certainties had vanished, the only coping mechanism he had left was fear. In order to survive in abnormal situations we need to make abnormal reactions and fear helps us make them. Manco certainly reacted abnormally… he agreed to see the paras, persuaded by another union man that he should go.
