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‘COLOMBIA: More than 900 unionists murdered since 2000. Protection now! No to impunity!’
Excerpts from an article by Lori Wallach, Director of the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch:
Shame on the Obama administration: Two years after it announced its “Labor Action Plan” to grease passage of a Bush-negotiated Free Trade Agreement (FTA), death threats against Colombian unionists persist unabated.
Now, a full two years after the Obama administration announced the Labor Action Plan, Colombia remains the world’s deadliest place to be a union member. Unionists in Colombia received 471 death threats in the year after the Plan was launched — exactly the same yearly number as in the two years before the Plan, according to the Escuela Nacional Sindical, the group recognized in the Plan as an authoritative source of monitoring data. This number is even more shocking when one considers the diminished ranks of unionists in Colombia, where more than 3,000 union members have been assassinated since 1986 and many have fled to exile. Meanwhile, many of the accused in the more than 2,000 unionist murder cases remain free.
If that wasn’t enough, violent mass displacements...