Top Labor Lawyers Call for Independent Investigation of Slain Teamster Leader

Top Labor Lawyers Call for Independent Investigation of Slain Teamster Leader

Integrity Of Soto Murder Investigation Questioned

December 22, 2004

(Washington, D.C.) - Citing “serious questions about the integrity of the official investigation,” Teamsters Union and AFL-CIO General Counsels have asked the Institute of Human Rights at the Jesuit Central American University in San Salvador to conduct a full independent investigation of the murder of Teamster leader Gilberto Soto.Based on her review of police files and interviews with detainees, Salvadoran human rights ombudswoman Beatrice Alamanni de Carrillo provided Teamsters General Counsel Patrick Szymanski and AFL-CIO General Counsel Jonathan Hiatt information about irregularities and discrepancies with the investigation.Soto was shot in the back and killed on November 5, 2004 while making a cell phone call outside his mother’s house in Usulutan, El Salvador. He was in Central America meeting with port container truck drivers and the unions attempting to organize them in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. The Teamsters, along with the London-based International Transport Workers Federation, are building a solidarity network linking the unions seeking to represent workers employed by Copenhagen, Denmark-based A.P. Moller Maersk, the world’s largest steamship line.

• On November 9, 2004, within days of Soto’s murder, Salvadoran Interior Minister Rene Figueroa told the media that the government considered Soto’s murder a “common crime.”

• On November 16, 2004, Teamster President James P. Hoffa and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney met with Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, Rene Leon, demanding that the government conduct a thorough, transparent investigation without pre-judging the motive or outcome.

• At the invitation of Leon, the Teamsters sent a delegation of labor and human rights activists to El Salvador. On November 30, 2004, the delegation met with the Salvadoran Foreign, Interior and Labor Ministers and the Attorney General, all of whom assured the delegation the government was pursing all theories concerning the murder, including that it might be related to Mr. Soto’s labor rights work.

• On December 1, 2004, the delegation met with Alamanni de Carrillo, who informed the delegation that the national police and the attorney general were illegally preventing her from reviewing the Soto case files and the evidence that had been collected. She expressed her concern that the government was in the process of fabricating a case against innocent people to show a quick arrest and provide support for their theory that the murder was related to gang warfare, a family feud, or “mistaken identity.” Alamanni de Carrillo warned that there was a history of aborting public inquiry into political cases by such police tactics, with judges later dismissing the erroneous charges after the press lost interest in the cases.

• On December 3, 2004, the day after the delegation left El Salvador, the police announced the arrest of three alleged gunmen. A day later, they arrested Soto’s mother-in-law in Usulutan and declared that her motive was to profit from Soto’s “two million dollar Teamster life insurance policy.”

• On December 6, 2004, Alamanni de Carrillo issued a statement explaining her “concern about irregularities in the investigation.”

• On December 7, 2004, the Teamsters Union released documents indicating that there was no “two million dollar” policy and that Soto’s children-not his wife-were the beneficiaries of his modest Teamster policy.

• On December 20, 2004, Alamanni de Carrillo issued a more comprehensive response, stating that the statements implicating Soto’s in-laws were actually obtained through subjecting the detainees to psychological and physical torture, charges confirmed by a medical evaluation of the detainees. What’s more, her review of the police files revealed that the prosecutors have no records showing the chain of custody of the material evidence they have collected, and the police never pursued the theory that Soto’s union activities might have been a motive for the murder.

The Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have lost all confidence in the state investigation of Gilberto Soto’s murder and the organizations feel an independent human-rights, non-governmental organization’s assistance is necessary.The Institute of Human Rights at the Jesuit Central American University in San Salvador has an impeccable reputation for integrity and effectiveness in investigating human-rights violations in El Salvador, dating back to the murder of nuns 24 years ago. In addition to several other international awards, the director of the institute, Benjamin Cuellar Martinez, received the Prix des droits de l’homme de la Republique Francaise (the French republic’s international human rights award) on December 8 from French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.