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Solidarity with Coca-Cola workers By Heather Cottin
The Colombian Coca-Cola workers' union, SINALTRAINAL, has called for an international caravan to travel to Colombia in solidarity with the union movement there. In response to this call, the International Caravan to Save the Lives of Colombian Workers will take place from June 20 to June 30. The message is urgent. SINALTRAINAL is calling on activists from all over the world to come to the support of workers in Colombia. "In order to continue living and constructing new dawns for our Colombia, it is necessary that the international union movement, human-rights organizations, social organizations and democratic personalities visit the country and share with us this harsh reality," says the union's statement. All who attempt to organize in Colombia are under threat, from teachers to human-rights activists, industrial workers to petroleum workers. From the United States, members of the International Action Center will join activists from United Students Against Sweatshops and the Committee for Social Justice in Colombia on this voyage of solidarity. The International Caravan will also include activists from Australia and Ireland. All will bear witness to the paramilitaries' crimes all over Colombia. In addition, the delegation will accompany protesting workers at occupied factories in Medellin, visit urban youth in Cali and see an environmental project in Bogotá. Teresa Gutierrez, co-director of the International Action Center and national coordinator of its Colombia Project, is organizing activists to join the caravan. Gutierrez told Workers World, "The IAC is calling on the religious, labor and student communities to contribute to a fundraising campaign to support the SINALTRAINAL union." Colombian workers have faced Coca-Cola, British Petroleum, Nestlé, Occidental Petroleum, and the many other multinationals that have privatized and looted the country. In the pay of these multinationals, Colombian paramilitaries and death squads oppose workers' right to organize. Official Colombian government policy threatens union activists. In April, a strike in Colombia's oil industry was declared an act of "terrorism" by the U.S.-backed Uribe government. The Colombian government placed legal sanctions on the 5,500-member union, arrested strike leaders, and has threatened military force to bust the strike. Death threats have been made against striking workers. In the past five years, police and paramilitary death squads in Colombia have assassinated over 3,800 union activists, according to the Web site www.killercoke.org. The union movement declares that it is being "increasingly battered and in the process of being annihilated for the benefit of the state, the multinationals and the national monopolies." Gutierrez says: "Labor activists in Colombia, as well as women, students, campesinos and all popular sectors, face a dire situation. Their struggle for justice is part of the anti-globalization and anti-FTAA struggle and should be earnestly supported by the solidarity movement. This is also part of the struggle against Plan Colombia, which is the military wing of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. "The Bush administration is every day militarizing Colombia, not only to attack the movements in Colombia, but also to threaten Venezuela and revolutionary Cuba. "People need to think about going to Colombia. If they can't go themselves, they should try to have resolutions passed in their unions supporting struggling workers in Colombia. Unions should send messages of solidarity and contribute to the IAC's SINALTRAINAL Solidarity Campaign." |
