Teamsters Protest Colombia’s Violent, Anti-Worker Government
September 9, 2009
Teamsters are telling the ugly truth behind the pretty exhibits that are part of Colombia’s latest campaign to get a trade deal with the United States.
Teamsters took part in a demonstration involving hundreds of human rights and fair trade advocates outside of Washington’s Union Station on the day after Labor Day. There, the Colombian government had handed out flowers and displayed giant decorated hearts.
The demonstrators held up hearts of their own as they marched past commuters streaming into the train station. The hearts featured pictures of union leaders and indigenous people, including children, who had been murdered with impunity.
“Don’t believe their lying hearts, no more NAFTAs, that’s not smart,” the demonstrators chanted as a bugler played “Taps” in memory of the murder victims.
Colombia President Alvaro Uribe desperately wants a trade deal with the United States. The Bush administration negotiated a pact, but Congress refused to approve it. Lawmakers simply didn’t want to excuse Colombia’s horrific aggression against workers.
It was especially insulting to workers everywhere that the Colombian government handed out flowers as part of its PR campaign.
Flowers are one of Colombia’s biggest exports. Colombia’s flower workers – mostly women, mostly single mothers – earn poverty wages. Pregnant flower workers are often fired. Sometimes pesticides are sprayed on them while they’re working. Should a Colombian flower worker try to organize a union to try to improve her working conditions, she might be fired. Or even killed.
Colombia’s violence against unions is unlike anything anywhere in the world – but Colombia’s government would prefer that it go unnoticed. Hence the public relations campaign designed to elicit pleasant images of Colombia’s culture, its landscape and its exports.
Two weeks ago, Gustavo Gomez was shot to death in his front doorway. Why? Because he was a Nestle employee working on a lawful petition drive for the Colombian Food Service Workers Union. The odds are his murder will never be investigated.
Since 1986, 2,700 union leaders have been assassinated in Colombia. Fewer than 4 percent of their murderers have been convicted, and six in 10 assassinations haven’t even been investigated.
Like other recent trade deals, the Colombia version is modeled after NAFTA. It would destroy family farms in Colombia, the way NAFTA did in Mexico. And, like NAFTA, it would move good jobs to Mexico.
The Teamsters have consistently fought against the trade deal – called the “Colombia Free Trade Agreement” – because it would reward that country’s systematic attacks on workers. It would further Colombia’s anti-labor agenda by protecting the interests of corporate investors at the expense of workers’ rights.
Labor leaders such as Teamsters President Jim Hoffa, along with human rights activists, consistently speak out about Colombia’s abuses against its own people.
American workers don’t need another bad trade deal like NAFTA, and they certainly don’t need a trade deal with a country like Colombia.
