IAC Report #2 on Coca Cola Tribunal in Colombia—Crimes against Workers/Meetings with Unionists, Students
December 9, 2002--Some 500 people, including a delegation of 22 people from the International Action Center, attended a public hearing December 5 in Bogotá on Coca Cola’s crimes against Colombian workers. The hearing was named union leader Hector Daniel Useche Berón, who was assassinated in Cauca on July 22, 1986, while working for Nestlé. No one has been punished for his murder.
The union of the Coca Cola and other food-processing workers in Colombia, SINALTRAINAL, aimed at showing through the public hearing that Coca Cola management in Colombia engages in a conscious anti-union policy. This policy includes using paramilitary forces known as death squads to intimidate, beat and murder union activists. Coca Cola management does this in collusion with the Colombian government.
The union President Javier Correa of SINALTRAINAL gave an overall view of how disappearances of union activists, searches of factories by paramilitary death squads and police led to what he called a “militarization of the work place.”Those at the hearing learned that of the 5,500 union workers at bottling plant in Bogota, now only 1,700 are left. Coca Cola management has replaced some 2,000 unionized workers by temporary workers. These temps get lower pay and work longer hours. Coca Cola, an Atlanta-based transnational company, is trying to increase this replacement in Bogota and at other plants around Colombia.
Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta claim they have no responsibility for what happens locally. The workers argue that it certainly does, as the firm profits from any additional exploitation of local workers. Murders have taken the lives of 16 SINALTRAINAL members, eight of them workers at Coca Cola, the most recent on August 31 of this year.
With the portraits of murdered union workers hanging on the walls of the meeting hall, other workers took the platform to testify to a systematic policy of terror against the union. Workers told of death threats, forced displacements, the incarceration of workers and union leaders on trumped-up charges, the raiding of union offices, cooperatives and homes of union members, union de-certification, extortion and kidnapping of union members in order to force them to renounce their right to association, and the violation of collective agreements.
A worker told of how he was tortured eight years ago by Coca Cola’s hired goons and how he is still unable to sleep through the night because of the trauma of that experience.
The meeting spotlighted the terrible repression the Colombian working class faces and the strong need for international solidarity.
Meetings with unionists
This lesson was repeated at the hours-long meeting December 6 between the 22-person IAC delegation and dozens of union leaders at the SINALTRAINAL headquarters. The IAC delegation were mostly union activists themselves, along with some progressive lawyers and anti-war organizers who have been protesting the increased U.S. military intervention in Colombia.
Evaluation the meeting for his guests, SINALTRAINAL Pres. Javier Correa said the union leadership had a dream and feel they were able to make that dream come true. They were afraid that aggression from the state, from the paramilitaries, from the Coca Cola management would succeed in destroying the union. To counter this, the workers wanted to expand the struggle to bring it to an international movement.
Coca Cola can count on the support of the Colombian state, he said, what we do here in isolation doesn’t matter. The participation of the international movement brings pressure on the Colombian government and on Coca Cola.
Correa was referring not only to the U.S. delegation, but to those from Europe and all over Latin America who had participated in the public meetings.
“With your participation,” he said, “we know we are not alone.” The public audience is a means to make the internationalization of our struggle possible, and this solidarity makes it possible for us to stay in the struggle.
Correa explained that the workers felt enormous satisfaction they were able to carry out this activity. It enables a whole political process against transnational corporations like Coca Cola and Nestles. The experience from this process will permit the unionists to make new proposals to groups around the world to carry out campaigns against Coca Cola and the other corporations.
The union will be demanding compensation and reparations for victims. The goal is to build solidarity with other workers, peasant and human rights’ organizations worldwide.
Students to protest December 10
The IAC delegation also met with students from the National University that same night. They are in an organization called FOCUS. At two of the important public universities, the National University and the District University, students are being asked for more tuition as the government is cutting funds.
The student group defends both university and what they call social movements—of workers, peasants—which are all under severe repression. Students too have been assassinated, including one, Jaime Alfor Acosta Campos, whose murder led to the latest struggles.
The students said that it was too dangerous for them to leave the university grounds, and held an encampment that lasted a week. Many were arrested and beaten by the police. Cops also destroyed computers to try to stop communication over the internet, and they also came to the students’ homes and ransacked them.
Then the university officials closed up for a week, partly because the university had become a center for resistance on the eve of the visit Dec. 4 by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Some student leaders are still in hiding.
The students plan to hold a demonstration on Tuesday, December 10, at the university to protest the repression against their movement.
Photo credit: Steven Gillis
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