National X Forum for Human Rights, Democratic Liberties and a Political Solution to the Conflict
National Court Against Impunity
Bogotá, April 24-26
The Unitary Center of Colombian workers (CUT), extends to the all people from different places in our country and the world who work for human rights, political liberties and understand the internal conflict in our country, a brotherly greeting and a cordial welcome to this event and to our country.
A product of National Encounter of Solidarity and Human Rights, which the CUT carried out on the 3rd and 4th of the present month, we present an assessment about the topics that concerning this National X Forum:
… The depth and degradation of the social and armed conflict, the drug trafficking establishment, the economic crisis to which the country has been submitted because of the impositions of the IMF and the policies of privatization of the government of Doctor Álvaro Uribe Vélez and the inability of the State to protect and guarantee fundamental rights, show how, in the current political moment, the rights of workers and of the people in general have worsened.
…The situation of civil and political rights is even more critical and one can appreciate how 2002 was characterized by massive and systematic violations of these rights. The crimes against humanity are constant: extrajudicial executions continue, massacres and homicides of an individual and selective character, acts of torture, cruel and unhuman treatment and disproportionate use of public force, forced disappearances, illegal and arbitrary detention, illegitimate hindrances of freedom of movement and forced displacement.
…The situation of economic, social and cultural rights has revealed itself more every day in the growing economic and social exclusion, the high degree of poverty and ample inequities shown by the high unemployment rate, insufficient coverage in the educational field, privatization of social services to the home, upon which private capital has imposed rates that communities cannot pay, the deterioration of social security and the lack of any social policy by the State.
…The non-recognition and the lack of guarantees of the rights of women and children, or any integral policy on the subject of gender, existent forms of discrimination and marginalization and the persistence of sexual violence.
…In terms of the International Humanitarian Law one can perceive an increase in war crimes and the high rate of victimization of members of the civilian population in comparison with 2001. Some of these acts could be seen as crimes against humanity, infractions against IHL, including many of massive and recurrent crimes such as homicide, death threats, attacks against the civilian population, offences against personal dignity, taking hostages, forced displacement and attacks against medical missions. The depth and degradation of the armed conflict has contributed powerfully to the use of methods and means prohibited by IHL.
…The clearing away of a social state of law and the implementation of a communal state by the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez has led to the application and execution of a policy according to a national security doctrine, translated today into a State of Internal Upheaval and the declaration of rehabilitation and consolidation zones giving powers to public force beyond and above the authorities legitimately elected by the people. One could say that to some degree, these policies have contributed to the strengthening of paramilitary groups with which the Government has initiated a process of conversations and negotiation, an attitude contrary, of course, to that adopted in relation to the insurgency, one that closes the doors to a political solution to the social and armed conflict in the country.
…With the pretext of solving problems of governability and the repeated failures to apply the law and consolidate a true justice, the Government seeks the creation of a supra-prosecution and the unification of the three powers in total dependency on the President of the Republic, contrary to the constitutionality that supposedly reigns in this country.
…Today the President of the Republic is playing two cards to impose and legalize a fascist policy that guarantees the decisions of the Pentagon and the imposition of the International Monetary Fund: a referendum on one hand and also his political reform in Congress. Neither of these initiatives takes into account the need to build a true democracy. The judicial reform intends to suppress the Judicial Counsel, it limits the faculties of the Constitutional Court, the range of legal guardianship, liquidates the proxies, ends the media of control and blocks political opposition. Furthermore, ministries and official entities are being fused together or suppressed in the name of the rationalization of public spending.
…We emphasize how multinational corporations are each day decisive actors and permanent factors in the violence against workers and the rest of the civilian population. This situation has materialized because lawyers of these corporations are the ones who have formulated mining, oil, environmental and worker legislation. In addition to this fact, these lawyers have collaborated in the creation, financing and maintenance of paramilitary groups, mercenaries and other forms of "territorial protection" of their projects.
…The war and the violation of human rights in Colombia has a direct relation to the implementation of the neo-liberal model and the intention of looting natural resources and the handing over of profitable companies of the State to the multi-national corporations, to which few nationalist voices have been raised to defend the vital resources of this country. However, we find worker organizations from some unions and other brotherly organizations that have stood up to the construction in their regions of mega-projects of exploitation of extractive mining industries or of hydrocarbon and of the construction of transportation infrastructure, which are handed over for formulation, execution and administration to the transnational companies that respond to neo-liberal globalization.
To establish the material violations of the Human Rights of union organizers during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, one must only take a look at the directives and sub-directives of all the unions in the country to realize that the vast majority of these organizations and their leaders have been under threat. These situation has grown worse since August 7th of last year, without any effective response by the programs of protection of union organizers and human rights defenders, headed by the Ministry of the Interior and the Adminstrative Department of Security (DAS).
According to the Inter-Institutional Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Human Rights of Workers, that has had among its objectives to unify the statistical information related to the violations of the human rights of union organizers, between 1991 and 2000 there were 820 victims of homicide; in 2001, 192 union organizers were murdered; in 2002, there were 148 crimes against the lives of union organizers. If one takes as a base the above information from the Inter-Institutional Commission and adds the data from 2001 and 2002, the resulting sum is more than 1,100 violent deaths of unionized workers, a situation recognized by the human rights ombudsman in a resolution last year. To the date of the elaboration of this report we unfortunately have suffered: 11 killings, 7 cases of breaking and entering, 18 threats, 2 attacks, 2 disappeared, 5 cases of harassment, 8 detentions and more than a half hundred of jailed union organizers, 43 in the prison "La Picota" brought from Arauca department and others under house arrest.
On the other hand, on relative terms, the National Union School (ENS) points to that between January 1991 and December 2001, 1,741 union organizers were murdered, leading to an average of 174 homicides per year; analyzing by gender, we found that 17.2% of the cases are women and the remaining 82.7% of the victims are men. The level of impunity reaches 99% in the cases of homicide against union organizers, an impunity that occurs as a result of the legal obstruction of the National Prosecutor¹s Office. This obstruction makes investigations stay in preliminary stages, be suspended, filed or resolved precluding a real investigation. This is without counting the cases in which there is no penal investigation. From the total of registered cases, 3% have no investigational report and of the cases registered in the investigational entity, 82% do not move beyond preliminary stages before being declared resolved and filed.
As a conclusion one can determine that it is the labor and productive sectors where Colombian unions have been hardest hit. The situation of educators affiliated to FECODE is alarming; they have been the most affected sector, suffering 36% of the homicides. The next hardest hit, in order, are: the public sector of workers affiliated with ANTHOC, with 20%, the agrarian sector with 8%, workers with the administration of justice, 7%, the industrial branch, 5%, the workers for the Colombian oil company ECOPETROL affiliated with USO with 4%, transportation and mine workers, 3%, community working mothers with 2% and 1% in the banking sector.
The Unitary Center of Colombian Workers (CUT) demands that the National Government fulfill and asks that international organizations make the government fulfill the recommendations for Colombia in 2003 in the report of the High Commissioner of the United Nations for Human Rights. In the same manner, CUT calls upon the Colombian government for the materialization of the Andean Deed for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, for which Colombia is signatory in the Presidential Andean Council realized in Guayaquil, Ecudador on July 26, 2002.
In spite of the OIT agreements to which Colombia subscribed, an abundant legislation already exists harmful to the rights of workers such as the substantive and procedural work codes as well as the 50, 60 and 100 laws. In general, all of the normative orders that have been established on the subject in the 90¹s, until today, that compose the normative body, are insufficient to counter-arrest and repair the social and economic crisis that our nation is going through. Laws have been approved in the Congress of the Republic that make concrete structural changes with the cynical message of being the solutions that the country is waiting for to resolve health, social security and pension problems. We see that today that the scene of lies repeats itself with the pretext of creating jobs. In 1991, the unemployment rate was 9.8% and today the rate surpasses 22%, one of the highest rates in Latin America with an underemployment of 35% and a constant in informality of 61% in the urban area and almost 100% in rural areas. The reform is presented with the supposedly altruistic justification of reducing unemployment and improving the conditions of workers, ignoring the true causes of unemployment in Colombia live privatizations, structuring, fiscal adjustments, investment in the war and profit motive by businessmen and transnational corporations.
In the 13 years of economic liberalization 43,000 commercial records have been cancelled according to the House of Commerce, which means the liquidation and the closing of an equal amount of businesses and/or large, medium and small companies. Even with the constitution during the same period of 19,000, the representation of the industrial area of the internal brute product went from 23 points to less than 11.5 currently. In other words, there has been a process of deindustrialization with the consequence of an increase in social injustice. More than 35 million Colombians of the 43 million inhabitants are living below the poverty line and nearly 11 million of them in indigence.
The restructuring of the State imposed by the IMF has resulted in the firing of hundreds of thousands of workers with a successive series of laws to such a degree that the OIT in recommendations about case 2151 referred to the laboral massacre in the district:
a) The Committee asks the Government to take into account the principle according to which priority should be given to the representatives of workers regarding the continuation of work in the case of the reduction of personnel.
b) The Committee asks the Government to investigate if in public entities implicated in the present case have brought about the judicial process concerning the privilege of union leaders (obligatory in legislation), and if this is not the case, take measure to reintegrate them at work without a loss of salary or compensate them completely.
c) Profoundly lamenting that in certain cases the authorities have not consulted or tried to reach an agreement with the union organizations, the Committee urges the Government to take measures so that in the process of restructuring in the future the appropriate union organizations are consulted.
d) Concerning the allegations of the plaintiffs about the subcontraction of the fired personnel under the modality of the contract of rendering services, which implies, according to the plaintiffs, that they cannot affiliate themselves with the respective unions, the Committee remembers that, with the Agreement number 87, all workers without distinction should enjoy the right to affiliate themselves with organizations they deem convenient. The Committee asks that the Government secures respect for this principle, and
e) Regarding other allegations of anti-union discrimination:
a. The firing of the leaders of SINTRABENEFICIENCIAS for having constituted
a union organization in the governing of Cundinamarca, and
b. Rejection of union licences and the firing of the leaders of SINTRASISE
in the Secretariat of Transportation, the Committee asks that the Government
realize an investigation and if, the truth of the allegations is confirmed,
take measures for the reintegration of those fired and the right to
union licences.
The above recommendations only refer to case number 2151. Other cases of the violation of economic, social and cultural rights remain pending. The cases denounced by the Colombian union movement multiply by 5 the number of complaints of the rest of the continent, to give you an idea of the criminal and permissive attitude of those with economic power in our country.
We would like to finally that the Labor Reform recently brought into effect, means benefits to private companies and the establishment by order of 8.5 billion pesos during the period of Alvaro Uribe Velez, which will depress even more, internal demand and the economic crisis that this nation has suffered since the promulgation of neo-liberal measures will either be maintained or will deepen.
DOMINGO TOVAR ARRIETA
Director of Human Rights Department
ALFONSO VELASQUEZ RICO
Director of Judicial and Labor Relations Department