USW Delegation Visits Colombia to Meet Union, Political Leaders
February 11 2008 - 7:40PM
PR Newswire (US)
Fact-finding mission on Colombian Free Trade Agreement PITTSBURGH,
Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Representatives of the United
Steelworkers (USW) and Unite of the United Kingdom and Ireland
unions traveled today to Colombia, the most dangerous country in
the world for trade unionists, on a mission to gather facts
regarding the proposed Colombian Free Trade Agreement. (Logo:
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080131/DC12982LOGO ) Other
U.S. labor leaders including AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda
Chavez-Thompson, will meet tomorrow with Colombian trade union
leaders and the leaders of three major Colombian union federations,
CUT, CTC and CGT. On Wednesday, they are to meet with Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe and Attorney General Mario Iguaran. While
the Bush Administration and Uribe have applied new pressure to
bring the Colombian FTA to a vote in Congress, U.S. trade unions
have opposed any action on the pact while trade unionists are
routinely threatened, tortured and murdered in Colombia and the
country avoids prosecuting anyone for these crimes. In meetings
tomorrow, trade unionists are expected to tell the members of the
U.S. delegation about the 40 Colombian trade unionists who were
murdered last year, more than all union activists killed in all
other countries of the world combined. In addition, union leaders
in Colombia are expected to express concern about the failure of
the Colombian government to redress these murders. More than 2,283
labor union leaders have been killed in Colombia since 1991 -- 443
since President Uribe took the office in 2002. Yet fewer than 3
percent of these have been successfully prosecuted to conviction.
That means 97 percent of the killers remain unpunished. Also, the
so-called Peace & Justice law passed by the Uribe
Administration has guaranteed that the paramilitaries who have been
convicted of killing unionists will receive sentences of at most 8
years in prison and as little as 3 1/2 years. In the meantime,
death threats against trade unionists in Colombia persist, with
more than 200 occurring last year, and one union with which the USW
works closely in Colombia, Sinaltrainal, received numerous death
threats against its leadership last year from the extremely violent
"Black Eagles" of the AUC paramilitaries. Two Sinaltrainal members
were murdered last year. Also tomorrow, the union delegation is to
meet with the family of a CUT vice president murdered in 1998,
Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro and the mayor of Bogota, Samuel
Moreno. On Wednesday, when union representatives meet with Uribe
and Attorney General Iguaran, they are expected to discuss concerns
about human and labor rights conditions in Colombia and how that
affects the FTA. The USW represents more than 850,000 workers in
the U.S. and Canada.
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080131/DC12982LOGO
http://photoarchive.ap.org/ DATASOURCE: United Steelworkers ( USW )
CONTACT: Barbara White Stack of United Steelworkers,
+1-724-713-2821, Web Site: http://www.steelworkers-usw.org/
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