Pubdate: Sun, 27 Jan 2002
Source: Anniston Star (AL)
Copyright: 2002 Consolidated Publishing
Contact:  http://www.annistonstar.com/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/923
Author: Stephen Jackson Flanagan and Richard Raeke, The Anniston Star

OF BLOOD AND PROFIT

The men might have foreseen their deaths, their bodies pale and drained, 
their blood mixing with the dirt. In the end, they were beaten nearly 
lifeless in front of their friends, finished off by a bullet and dumped on 
a muddy roadside, or prodded toward death with a barrel at their backs, 
tortured and left as carrion. Gustavo Soler, Victor Orcasita and Valmore 
Locarno were only coal miners and union leaders. But it is Colombia, after 
all, where union leaders can often expect a violent extinction, even when 
working for a U.S. company like Drummond Co., a privately held coal mining 
firm based in Birmingham.

After 38 years of civil war, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing 
guerrillas, rogue military and homicidal drug lords continue to stain the 
Colombian landscape with blood. The spoils of the cocaine trade fuel the 
fighting like gallons of kerosene on a burning pile of brittle, brown leaves.

Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, 
calls it a "holocaust of Biblical proportions."

Since the mid-1960s, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia 
(known by its Spanish acronym FARC) has waged war against the Colombian 
government, claiming it is controlled by the wealthy elite and exploits the 
country's poor. Right-wing paramilitaries, such as the United Self-Defense 
Forces of Colombia (AUC), have grown, funded by large landowners and drug 
lords, to help the government in their battle against the communist guerrillas.

In Colombia, warring parties carve up the country with extortion, 
kidnappings, assassinations and public executions while the government 
strains to keep its democracy intact and attract new investment.

"There is widespread lawlessness," said Michael Shifter of the 
Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. "The state 
can't even protect its own people."

That doesn't prevent American multinationals from seeking to turn hulking 
profits in war-torn regions where instability and violence become as much 
of a cost of doing business as paychecks and utility bills. Occidental 
Petroleum's pipelines in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia are bombed routinely. 
Chevron's forays into Angola fund a corrupt regime that is at war with 
former U.S.-backed guerrillas. The British company Lonrho used government 
soldiers to guard its cotton fields in Mozambique during that country's 
civil war with Renamo rebels.

The chance for increased profits and greater production lures American 
companies to such ravaged areas. Without their presence, the situation in 
Colombia would worsen and diminish any remaining hope among Colombians, 
Shifter said.

But in moving to such regions in search of increased profits, do American 
companies then have a greater responsibility to protect their workers when 
the imploded state can't do so?

"The company has to be mindful of this fact," said Larry Birns of the 
Center on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington D.C., a Latin American 
think-tank. "Eventually there isn't immunity from bad corporate practices . 
its presence in Colombia has to be impeccable."

After abandoning Alabama mines for the wealth of Colombia's coal reserves 
and the promise of cheap labor, Drummond excavated Mina Pribbenow, the 
country's second-largest mine near La Loma in the department of Cesar.

Before they were assassinated, Gustavo Soler, Valmore Locarno and Victor 
Orcasita all worked at the mine and served as high-ranking officials in the 
coal miners' union. After receiving several death threats, Locarno and 
Orcasita had asked the company for protection. Drummond refused the 
request, according to journalist David Bacon in a May story for Pacific 
News Service.

Although no one has been arrested for the murders, many believe they are 
the work of the AUC or another right-wing paramilitary, who view union 
members as communist sympathizers. Since 1986, nearly 4,000 union members 
have been murdered in Colombia, according to the country's largest union 
federation, the United Confederation of Workers.

The AUC is responsible for 80 percent of Colombia's human rights 
violations, Birns said. The Bush administration recently added the AUC to 
its list of terrorist organizations.

The U.S. State Department considers both the Colombian left-wing guerrillas 
as well as the right-wing paramilitary "terrorists." Congress has 
authorized $1.4 billion in foreign aid to Colombia - about 80 percent for 
military purposes - to help make peace and to help fight drugs. Critics 
charge the funds are actually used to fight a counterinsurgency war to make 
Colombia safe for multinationals under the banner of globalization.

Last week, FARC and the Colombian government agreed to devise a cease-fire 
by April 7. One spoiler to a potential peace plan may be the right-wing 
paramilitaries who will not be included in the talks.

Although outlawed, local military and police commanders may give their 
tacit approval to such groups, allowing their soldiers to drift between the 
government and private armies. Soldiers also work as security guards for 
foreign interests in Colombia.

Drummond does have an investment worth well over $400 million to protect. 
Mike Tracy, a spokesman for Drummond, said the company tries to thoroughly 
check the past history of all employees and does not intentionally hire 
anyone with a questionable background or with a past of criminal activity.

But many Colombian experts say it is difficult to know exactly who you are 
hiring in Colombia.

Drummond's forays into Colombia come as it shutters its Alabama mines and 
becomes increasingly fueled by the desire for higher profits and cheap 
resources. Miners in Colombia make between $500 to $1000 a month as opposed 
to Alabama miners who average $3,060 a month plus benefits.

After the miners shovel the coal out of Mina Pribbenow, the company's 
private railway pulls the coal cars 215 miles to Puerto Drummond on the 
Caribbean coast. There it is loaded on ships and carried to Mobile for 
awaiting customers Alabama Power and the Alabama Electric Cooperative, 
among others. They burn the coal in local power plants to light Alabama's 
homes.

Colombia's civil war makes that process fraught with landmines, physical 
and political.

The communist FARC has attempted to extort money from Drummond, in the form 
of a 10 percent tax. In retaliation for the company's refusal to pay, it 
bombed the rail line five times in 2001, derailing trains and disrupting 
coal shipments.

Under threat from these guerrillas, companies in Colombia, including 
Drummond, often hire government soldiers or private guards to protect their 
investments. But the line between private security, government soldiers and 
outlawed paramilitaries blurs in Colombia as mercenaries drift with the 
dollars between the forces.

"It's hard to know who you are hiring. A lot of groups have been 
infiltrated," Shifter said.

Insecurity Colombia is a very insecure environment, home to 70 percent of 
the world's kidnappings. The state can't protect its citizens, nevermind 
large foreign interests.

"No one should underestimate the difficulties," Shifter added.

Colombia is also a decentralized country where local leaders may determine 
policy in lieu of a national authority. As such, the strength of the bonds 
between the military and paramilitary varies from region to region.

If local troops are hired for protection, the local Colombian army 
commander may turn the task over to paramilitary groups, said Jack Laun of 
the Colombia Support Network in Wisconsin. Although they are illegal under 
the law, local military leaders may offer their tacit approval and backing 
of paramilitaries.

Those paramilitaries often associate anyone belonging to unions as 
sympathizers of the leftist guerrillas.

In Cesar, as the government soldiers, FARC and the right-wing AUC skirmish 
over turf, that assumption may have had grave consequences for the three 
workers.

During the days before their murders, Locarno and Orcasita had received 
numerous death threats from the AUC paramilitary. They met with Drummond 
officials to ask for protection. Locarno and Orcasita wanted to sleep in 
barracks at the mine instead of going home every evening.

Mine management and U.S. workers fly into the site on corporate jets for 
two-week rotational assignments and stay in "secure, full-service, 
hotel-style complexes," according to a help-wanted advertisement posted on 
Drummond's website.

But Locarno's and Orcasita's request was denied. They were murdered one 
week later. Thirty miles from the mine, 15 gunmen stopped the company's 
charter bus and began checking identifications. Finding Locarno and 
Orcasita, the men pulled them off the bus. As the other workers watched, 
they hit Locarno in the head with a rifle butt and then shot him in the 
face. The hit-men, some dressed as regular Colombian soldiers according to 
witnesses, then took Orcasita off into the woods and executed him. When 
found later, his fingernails had been torn off.

After the murders, the 1,200 miners at La Loma briefly stopped working in 
protest.

Drummond Ltd., in Colombia, issued a written statement, disavowing any part 
in Colombia's conflict and reasserting that its presence was for the best 
of the country.

"Drummond Ltd. Finds this type of action deplorable from every point of 
view," the statement read. "Drummond asks the respective bodies to begin an 
investigation aimed at stopping these terrible acts which cause the company 
itself, its workers and the mining sector in general much grief."

The Colombian government has never found and arrested the killers but the 
local police commander attributes the murders to right-wing paramilitaries 
that operate in the region.

Soler, who reluctantly took over for Locarno as president of the miners' 
union, met a similar fate in October, seven months after the murders of 
Locarno and Orcasita. His killers dumped his corpse on the side of the road 
between his home and Drummond's mine.

The deaths have brought outcry here in the United States.

"Drummond has chosen to relocate its mining to a place where they murder 
trade unionists," said Jerry Jones, national vice president of the United 
Mine Workers of America.

But the company says it is running out of viable coal reserves here.

Terry Collingsworth, general counsel of the Washington-based International 
Labor Rights Fund said he is preparing to file a lawsuit against Drummond 
in Federal court in Birmingham utilizing the obscure Alien Torts Claim Act 
of 1789.

Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy did not return numerous phone calls seeking 
further comment.

Collingsworth said the Drummond suit is quite similar to one his group 
filed last July against Coca-Cola in a Miami federal court. Five union 
activists working for a Coca-Coal bottling plants in Colombia were murdered 
and the ILRF suit maintains that the bottling company "hired, contracted 
with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces" in the killings.

"Whether Drummond brought in the killers of these union leaders for 
security purposes or to intimidate the workers, whatever, it brought them 
in, and it led to the murders," charges Collingsworth. "And we feel 
Drummond is responsible. If you hire the Mafia for security and they kill 
somebody, you're responsible."

Stephen Jackson Flanagan reported from Colombia. He is an associate 
professor of journalism at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and an associate 
editor of the Latin American Post in Bogota. Richard Raeke is the editorial 
writer for The Star and contributed to the reporting.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D