2-12-08, 9:17 am

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.

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.