Business reporter
In July final 12 months, Jesús Cometa was shot at as he was driving by way of the Cauca Valley in southwest Colombia.
Gunmen on motorbikes pulled up alongside his automobile and sprayed it with bullets. Mr Cometa escaped unhurt however his bodyguard was hit.
“He still has a bullet lodged in his chest,” he says.
Mr Cometa is one in every of hundreds of commerce unionists who’ve been attacked in recent times in Colombia which, by some measurements, is probably the most harmful place on the earth for organised labour.
The Cauca Valley is house to the nation’s sugar business, and he’s an area consultant of Sintrainagro, Colombia’s largest agricultural commerce union.
“When you take on these roles in the union, you lose your social life,” Mr Cometa says. “You can’t just go and hang out in a crowded bar, or on a street corner, because you never know when you might be targeted.
“Your household suffers too as a result of they know that they are additionally targets.”
This is a problem with a long history.
In his ground-breaking novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez famously highlighted the massacre of workers on banana plantations in the country in the 1920s.
The Labour Ministry says that since the early 1970s, well over 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia.
And even though the nation is more peaceful than it once was, the attacks continue.
“For a few years now already, sadly, Colombia is the deadliest nation on the earth for commerce unionists and for commerce union work,” says Luc Triangle, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), a global umbrella organization based in Brussels.
Every year the ITUC publishes a survey of the atrocities carried out against trade unionists around the world. Its most recent edition covers the year to the end of March 2024.
It found that in those 12 months, 22 trade unionists were killed for their activism around the world. Eleven of them were murdered in Colombia.
“Generally, these are focused murders,” Mr Triangle says. “They know what they’re doing. They know who they need to homicide.
“It’s not targeting the big bosses of the trade unions or the leaders. They are targeting in small villages people that are doing active trade union work.
“Between 2020 and 2023, we recorded 45 murders in Colombia. In 2022, 29 murders. It’s much less violent than it as soon as was, but it surely’s nonetheless very violent, definitely when you examine it with different international locations.”
Why is this happening?
Fabio Arias, the head of Colombia’s largest trade union federation, the CUT, says it is all part of Colombia’s long and complex civil conflict, which pitted left-wing rebel groups against right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the Colombian state, and which still rumbles on in some parts of the country.
“The commerce union motion has at all times been linked to the events of the left and sadly the various right-wing governments we have had in Colombia have at all times claimed that anybody who’s a leftist is a guerrilla, a terrorist,” Mr Arias says.
“And as soon as you have established that, then folks really feel justified in attacking them.”
He says the attacks on workers are also linked to Colombia’s illegal economies, notably the cocaine trade and illegal mining.
“If you have a look at the place these assaults are occurring, it is within the departments of Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Arauca, Norte de Santander and Caquetá, as a result of that is the place the largest coca plantations are, and the place the unlawful mining is.”
It is not clear who is carrying out these killings and who is ordering them. Some trade unionists blame the private sector, saying businesses, desperate to stifle any attempt by workers to organize, are paying armed groups to carry out these atrocities.
They point to the fact that threats and attacks tend to spike at times when businesses and unions are in wage negotiations.
But as many of the attacks go unpunished, it is difficult to know who exactly is to blame.
“In the Cauca Valley there are such a lot of completely different armed teams you by no means actually know who’s behind the assaults, who’s carrying them out, who’s ordering them,” says Zenón Escobar, another sugar cane worker and local representative of Sintrainagro.
The threats in the Cauca Valley are not limited to the sugar industry.
“In 2007, I used to be in a van, and guys drew up subsequent to us on a motorcycle and requested for me, after which opened fireplace,” recalls Jimmy Núñez, the leader of a union that represents street traders in the regional capital Cali.
“My colleague who was sitting subsequent to me was killed, and my spouse was injured. In 2010 they attacked me once more, on the street between Cauca and Cali.
“They opened fire on my car. In 2012 we were attacked in a shopping centre in Cali and one of us was killed. And in 2013 my family had to leave Cauca due to threats.
“In this nation social leaders and commerce union leaders are killed daily.”
The government says it is doing what it can to protect trade unionists. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, heads a left-wing administration that is broadly sympathetic to the country’s workers.
In 2023, it took a step towards redressing the past by formally recognizing the trade union movement – collectively, and for the first time – as a victim of Colombia’s conflict. That gives victims a greater chance of having their cases investigated.
“We contemplate this as an necessary step to acknowledge the violence towards commerce unionists in Colombia, which was not the case earlier than,” says Luc Triangle of the ITUC.
He also says foreign companies with operations in Colombia must do more.
“If I have been the CEO of a multinational, I’d query my actions in Colombia,” he says.
“There is a big duty for multinational firms. They can’t have a pleasant code of conduct, and on the similar time stay silent when commerce unionists are killed.
“That’s not acceptable. Global companies and foreign investors in Colombia must step up.”
Additional reporting by Immie Rhodes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j715l2d6no