Drummond union: Govt. muffled key witness

A federal jury found on July 26 that Drummond, an Alabama-based coal company, was not liable for the deaths of three union leaders at its mine near La Loma, Colombia, in 2001. The case, which ended after a two-week trial in Federal District Court here, was the first of its kind to go to trial under the Alien Tort Statute, a 218-year-old law that labor unions and human rights advocates have recently used to sue US corporations over abuses in developing countries. Drummond, a subsidiary of the Drummond Company, began mining coal in Colombia in 1996. It now operates the world's largest open-pit coal mine there, where last year it extracted about 25 million tons of coal. In March 2001, right-wing paramilitary troops pulled two union leaders–Victor Orcasita and Valmore Locarno–from a company bus that was taking them home from the mine. Gunmen killed Locarno by the roadside and Orcasita's body was found later with bullet wounds to the head and signs of torture. About six months later, Gustavo Soler, who had succeeded Locarno as president of the union, was found shot to death. Lawyers from the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund sued the company on behalf of the union leaders' families under the Alien Tort Statute. The suit contended that Drummond had taken sides in Colombia's 40-year civil war and that the company had given material assistance to the paramilitary groups in exchange for the murder of the union leaders. However, the jury dismissed the plaintiffs' accusations. Francisco Ramírez, the president of the Colombian union conglomerate Sintramienergetica, which helped bring the lawsuit to the United States, said he was not surprised by the decision since several witnesses were not allowed to testify. He added that the union was organizing a boycott of Drummond's coal. ''We're just getting started,'' he told The Miami Herald. "We are going to multiply our efforts to start a boycott. It's the only way to get justice in this case.'' News of the verdict stunned a close relative of Soler, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. "There were a lot of witnesses and evidence to show that the company does collaborate with the paramilitaries," she said. "We went to the United States because we thought there would be justice." The union activists suing Drummond said deliberate foot-dragging by Colombian authorities prevented the jury from hearing their star witness. The witness, Rafael Garcia, is in a maximum-security Bogota prison Garcia says he witnessed Drummond's top Colombian executive hand over "a briefcase full of cash" to an illegal right-wing militia to have two of the three union leaders slain. The executive, Augusto Jimenez, vehemently denies the accusation and is suing Garcia for libel. Garcia's testimony against key Uribe allies has helped put several congressmen in jail and exposed alleged close ties between the murderous right-wing militias and Colombia's ruling elite. The former technology chief of Colombia's domestic security agency has pleaded guilty to charges including money laundering and erasing the records of wanted drug traffickers. He claims to have engineered a massive vote fraud in 2002 that favored Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and congressional candidates also supported by the paramilitaries. Garcia's former boss, Jorge Noguera, was a regional Uribe campaign boss that year and Uribe later named him chief of the DAS domestic security agency. Now in jail on criminal conspiracy charges, Noguera is the highest-ranking Uribe administration official to be embroiled in the so-called "para-politico scandal." Witnesses for the plaintiffs said Drummond regularly paid the paramilitaries, provided them with sport utility vehicles and motorcycles, fed them and let them gas up at its coal mine in northeastern Colombia. Drummond knew exactly what it was getting into when it decided to mine coal in one of Colombia's most conflictive regions, Garcia told the Associated Press. Similar lawsuits are pending against several other US corporations, including Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and Chiquita Brands International. Earlier this year, Chiquita, the US banana giant, pleaded guilty to paying $1.7 million in protection money to Colombian paramilitaries between 1997 and 2004. That case never went to trial. Drummond employees say they continue working under the shadow of paramilitary violence. "We still have a lot of concerns regarding our security," said Raul Sosa, president of the Drummond branch of the National Union of Mining and Energy Workers of Colombia. "This decision is a hard blow for us."