The Big Lie: Venezuela and Labor

[Judi Lynn]

August 5, 2010

The Big Lie
Venezuela and Labor
By DANIEL KOVALIK

The biggest obstacle to the attempt first by the Bush Administration, and now by the Obama Administration, to achieve passage of the long-stalled Free Trade Agreement with Colombia is that country’s long-standing shameful reality as “the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists,” to use the words of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the largest union confederation in the world, representing 176 million workers in 156 countries and territories.

Since 1986, over 2800 unionists have been assassinated in Colombia. The clear and ever-present danger to organized labor in Colombia is the most salient and undeniable fact about the U.S.’ favorite nation in the region.

Incredibly, it appears that adherents of the FTA may have commenced an effort to smear Venezuela with the same “danger to labor” brush in order to advance the prospects of the Colombia agreement by using bare statistics without elaboration or explanation to suggest that Colombia is no different. Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to the ITUC’s 2010 Annual Survey, of the 101 unionists assassinated in the world last year (2009), 48 (almost half) were Colombian. And, a recent, July 8, 2010 press release from the AFL-CI0 indicates that another 29 Colombian unionists were assassinated in the first half of 2010.

It is well-known that the assassination of unionists in Colombia is largely carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups linked to the Colombian government or by Colombian security forces themselves. Indeed, according to a 2007 report by Amnesty International on Colombia, “around 49 percent of human rights abuses against trade unionists were committed by paramilitaries and some 43 percent directly by the security forces.” And, the Colombian government up to its highest reaches, including President Alvaro Uribe himself, regularly (and quite falsely) stigmatizes unionists as “guerillas,” thereby knowingly setting up union leaders for paramilitary murder. Indeed, when I personally met with President Uribe as part of an AFL-CIO delegation in February 2008 at the Presidential Palace in Bogota and confronted him about this stigmatization, his proffered “defense” was that, when he was a student (presumably decades ago) his experience was that union leaders, student leaders and members of the press were in fact “guerillas.” In other words, in trying to fend off the claims that he stigmatized trade unionists, he merely repeated the stigmatization.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/kovalik08052010.html

The author: Daniel Kovalik is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Law and Senior Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO, where he has worked for over 17 years.

[Vincardog]

1. K & R

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thanks for the rec. I saw it earlier. Someone snarfed it. Hope the article was useful. n/t

[Peace Patriot]

3. K&R! This is a very, very important article...

It makes the critically important distinction between OFFICIALLY-CONNECTED murders of trade unionists in Colombia and the internal problems in the labor movement in Venezuela for which the Chavez government has no responsibility whatsoever. It also gives the lie to that CIA rag, the Washington Post, which published an anti-Chavez hit piece by Juan Ferero in July of this year, which tries to minimize the murders of trade unionists in Colombia--nearly half of which have been committed by the Colombian military and the other half by its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads--by equating it with the non-government connected violence in Venezuela!

---------------------

"...Forero presses on, attempting to suggest that the killings in Venezuela are in fact politically motivated, and somehow the fault of the Chavez administration.

A close examination of Forero’s own piece, however, belies this claim. The most concrete example Forero gives of these 'intra-union killings' is by way of an interview with Emilio Bastidas, a leader of the UNT, who talks of the murder of 8 union activists from the UNT in recent years. Bastidas himself is quoted in the story as saying that “We believe it is political to debilitate the UNT and cut us off from projecting ourselves.” While Forero explains that the UNT represents 80 unions, what he fails to tell the reader is that the UNT is a pro-Chavez union formed after the coup against Chavez in 2002. This is an incredible omission, for this obviously cuts against Forero’s premise that Chavez is somehow responsible for the violence. After all, why would Chavez want to interfere with the growth of a pro-Chavez labor federation?

From my own discussions with unionists in Venezuela, which I visited at the end of July and where I attended the third annual “Encuentro Sindical de Nuestra America” (Union Meeting of Our America) pro-Chavez unionists are much more often the target of the violence described in Forero’s piece than anti-Chavista unionists. As Jacobo Torres de Leon, Political Coordinator of the Fuerza Bolivariana de Trabajadores Dirrecion Nacional, responded to my questioning of him about the Forero piece, “there are no political killings like in Colombia.” Jacobo further emphasized that the unionists recently killed were his (pro-Chavez) comrades – a fact inconvenient to Forero’s well-publicized thesis. I should also note that President Chavez addressed the Union Meeting of Our America and was well received by the over 300 unionists in attendance from almost every country of the Western Hemisphere. At this meeting, Chavez called on workers to take control of the factories in which they work – good advice for us all.

There is an old saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” It seems an appropriate prism through which to view this most current attempt to rescue the Colombia FTA from that nation’s own continuing and indisputable status as the number 1 country in the world for anti-union killings."

http://www.counterpunch.org/kovalik08052010.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. It almost looks as if someone gave Forero an assignment to mangle the truth

in such a way people might imagine their first perception of the violence in Colombia was all wrong, to manipulate the information until it completely LIES about the direct line between the Colombian government and the unforgiveable murderous hostility toward Colombian people struggling for better than brutal, dangerous, and utterly exploitive work at the mercy of multinational employers.

[bvar22]

5. Rec...back UP to +5.

VIVA Democracy!