BY WHITNEY EULICH
On an April night ten years ago, Luz Ortiz took the bus home from the local university after wrapping up a union meeting. It was 10:30 p.m., and the streets of Cali, Colombia were quiet, dark. When she stepped off the bus, someone called out her name. Ortiz turned expecting to see a friend or neighbor.
“I always tried to be alert of my surroundings,” Ortiz said. But the call was a distraction. In a matter of seconds she was pushed from the poorly lit street into a white, four-door sedan that had pulled up beside her.
Ortiz’s kidnappers, two men, shoved her onto the floor of the car between the front and back seats. One of the men reached over from the passenger seat pointing a gun at her head as they drove out of town. The kidnappers parked alongside a deserted country road, and waited, ignoring her pleas for information. They received two phone calls but spoke in code so Ortiz couldn’t follow their conversation.
Ortiz worked as a sindicalista, which translates to trade union worker, but in Colombia signifies something closer to a human rights advocate.
Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists, said Jeff Vogt, AFL-CIO Global Economic Specialist. “For a long time Colombia had more union workers assassinated annually than every other country in the world combined.”
Union workers in Colombia are often associated with far left political ideals, and government officials have openly accused them of working with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). The perceived association between union workers and guerilla groups has served as an excuse for paramilitaries, in conjunction with large corporations and at times local government, to target trade unionists and union leaders.
President Alvaro Uribe, who has been in office since 2002, is well known for improving the Colombian economy and reducing rampant violence. His administration claims to have demobilized over 35,000 paramilitary fighters, and as of 2006 allegedly eradicated paramilitary organizations from the country.
However, there are new emerging groups that are inflicting nearly identical violence on Colombia as the demobilized paramilitary groups, according Claudia Lopez of the Colombian NGO Nuevo Arco Iris. “The new criminal gangs are on the offensive and are targeting community and social leaders, just as paramilitaries did before them,” Lopez said during a May 3 panel discussion at Columbia University on Colombian security.
The attack on Ortiz is part of what experts call the Colombian government’s history of stifling criticism and dissent. “There is a systematic effort to limit Democratic activity in Colombia,” said Mary Roland, professor of history at Hunter College in New York. If the government suggests individuals or groups have undermined the country’s stability, paramilitary groups and their successors stand ready to inflict vigilante justice, Roland said. “There needs to be a forum for criticism without ramifications or long term consequences. These are huge limits on civil society,” Roland told the audience at Columbia University.
A decade after Ortiz’s kidnapping, union workers in Colombia still face terrifying repercussions for unionizing. Colombia has been in conflict since 1948 when a civil war between conservative landowners, the Catholic Church and liberals began. Since 1963 Colombia has documented 71,100 fatalities and 4.5 million internally displaced people. Presidential elections were held on May 30, 2010, resulting in a runoff election slated for June 20. Though Uribe was not up for reelection, his former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos will take part in the runoff.
Santos served as Defense Minister during the 2009 “False Positives” scandal. The Colombian army killed civilians, then dressed them in rebel uniforms or gave them guns to present them as guerrilla or paramilitary fighters. These bodies allowed the army to fabricate results on the progress of fighting rebel violence in Colombia. Many question whether the election of Santos would improve human rights violations identified under the current administration.
On that April night in 2000, around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. one of Ortiz’s kidnappers got out of the car and opened the back door. He pulled Ortiz out of the vehicle. Scared for her life, Ortiz couldn’t stop shaking. But, they were letting her go. As the door closed behind her, Ortiz’s kidnappers yelled, “Son of a bitch! We’re going to leave you alone tonight, but stay quiet! We’re watching you.’ The men drove off, leaving her alone on the roadside.
“I don’t know why they let me go. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me,” Ortiz said.
In 1980, approximately 35% of the Colombian working population was unionized, however today only 9% are actively engaged in union work, said Hernan Posada, a former Colombian union leader now living in New York. “The population of union workers is being destroyed, erased from the maps,” Posada said.
Posada and Ortiz met while she sought refugee status from the NGO Safe Horizons in New York in 2002. Because of their shared background in the trade union movement, and experience with violence in Colombia, they became close friends. They bring their families together often to discuss the trade union movement and violence that, according to Posada, seems to have no end.
On the night that Ortiz narrowly escaped death, she waited for what felt like hours after her kidnappers fled, before getting up and walking toward the dark highway. She feared her kidnappers were watching her from afar, ready to come after her again. Ortiz hitched a ride with a truck driver who drove her into town and dropped her at a friend’s house. She was still shaking, but didn’t want to tell the driver what had happened.
Because of the kidnappers’ car color and model, she suspected they were associated with the local government. “The person who grabbed me acted like a soldier, I don’t know how to explain it,” Ortiz said. The car was small, and her vision limited from the floor, but she could see their military-style haircuts.
Reporting the kidnapping to the police would have only made matters worse. Instead she called on the leadership within her union, Sindicato de Empleados Publicos, to help register an anonymous complaint. “I knew people who had registered complaints with the local police, and they were murdered,” Ortiz said. “I never could have gone on my own and it wasn’t until at least two months later when I was already in the United States that my complaint came up for review.”
Even though there is overwhelming evidence of collaboration between the police and paramilitary successor groups at the local level, the Colombian government often turns a blind eye. “There is a lack of attention by the Colombian government,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Dirctor of Human Rights Watch Americas Division, “but it’s easy to see why. If the government acknowledges that paramilitary groups still exist, the administration is acknowledging that their demobilization campaign didn’t work.”
Despite the assassinations or disappearances of friends and colleagues, the murder of her 17-year-old brother and the near kidnappings of her pre-school aged daughters, Ortiz decided to flee Colombia as a political refugee only after her kidnapping in 2000.
Since 2001, The Colombian Ministry of Social Protection has helped protect 4,492 trade unionists, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Ortiz left Colombia through this program, and received political asylum in the United States in 2002. As of 2008 there were 26,450 Colombians seeking refuge in the United States.
Protection by the Colombian government doesn’t turn out so well for everyone. Many union workers are relocated within Colombia, others simply given a new cell phone number or bulletproof vest. Ortiz received a plane ticket and $200 from the government. More than 2,706 trade unionists have been murdered since 1986, when the Colombian Confederation of Workers (CUT) first began collecting data.
When Ortiz first agreed to interview for this story, she didn’t share her phone number until two hours before our appointment. She insisted on meeting on a busy street corner in Brooklyn. She was accompanied by her friend and activist, Hernan Posada, an unexpected addition to the interview. Though Ortiz fled Colombia a decade ago, she still suffers debilitating post-traumatic stress; she is unable to hold down a job. She volunteers with recent Latin American immigrants to the United States, and sees a psychiatrist regularly.
Ortiz is not alone in her struggle to recover from kidnappings, attempted assassinations and threats. Posada, the leader of a bankers union in Colombia, fled the country in 1998. “I was the victim of three assassination attempts, but really, I owe my life to my daughters,” Posada said.
One afternoon Posada stopped his car at a red light. A man ran up to his window, gun extended, aimed at Posada’s head. “The only reason he didn’t shoot was he realized my three daughters were sitting in the car with me,” Posada said. A few months later the scene repeated itself, but this time the gunman shot at Posada and his adult passengers, injuring his sister-in-law.
“I was always paranoid someone was coming for me,” Posada said, “I saw so many friends killed or disappeared, surely my time was coming.”
Though the assassinations of union workers in Colombia have decreased from 200 in 2002 to 49 in 2009 according to the National Labor School (ENS), this does not account for the documented 497 death threats, three cases of torture and 154 forced displacements of union workers in 2008 alone.
Ortiz doesn’t expect to see drastic changes in security for union workers in Colombia as a result of the upcoming election, though some do retain hope.
“When you have a government who is demonizing people who are trying to bring about change in the country, it creates a hostile environment,” said Vogt. He believes the new administration will have the opportunity to change the tone of the conversation about union workers, and in turn diminish violence toward this group.
Regardless of who wins the June 20th Colombian presidential run-off election, many human rights observers are concerned about the legacy of Uribe policies such as The Justice and Peace Law, which passed in 2005 in an effort to disarm paramilitaries. The law allows former paramilitaries the benefit of a maximum sentence of eight years in prison if they contribute to the “discovery of truth, justice and reparations for victims.” Though many former paramilitaries have admitted to murdering union workers, few have been convicted for their crimes.
“The law has been an utter failure,” Vogt said. Paramilitaries are often tried in absentia, which means the perpetrators are still at large, and according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights only 20 people have been partially indicted under the law. No one had been convicted as of September 2009.
Many “demobilized” paramilitaries are now joining paramilitary successor groups, or teaming up with drug traffickers, according to Human Rights Watch. The paramilitary successor groups continue to target social leaders and union workers.
Wendy Luers, founder of the Foundation for a Civil Society explained there is a lack of job training for demobilized paramilitaries, and high levels of fear amongst local business leaders deter them from hiring those who have completed the demobilization process. “So they are turning back to what they know,” Luers said in an April 13 interview in New York. “They are picking up their guns and going back into the mountains, and this will continue until a well-rounded demobilization process is in place.”
Ortiz says she is rarely on the phone with family or friends in Colombia. “There aren’t many people left to talk to,” she said. “Many have moved. Many more have been assassinated. Some are in the US but in other states. But in Colombia, I know very few [people].”
There were more than 600 union workers assassinated during President Uribe’s eight-year administration. “Though the government claims paramilitary groups no longer exist, the same types of abuse, murder, threats and intimidation continue toward social and community leaders,” said Vivanco of Human Rights Watch.
According to Posada, “People in the U.S., Europe, and around the globe need to understand the character of violence people live through in Colombia. We’re not here to pursue the American Dream. I’m lucky to be alive, yes, but I’ve been uprooted and expelled from my country.”
“When you count the different stories, you remember that what has happened to one person in Colombia, has happened to all of us,” Posada said.