Inter Press Service
September 11, 2001
By David Bacon

WASHINGTON - The proposed energy policy of the George W. Bush administration is bringing to light an economic reason for the United States' growing involvement in Colombia's civil war. It is not drugs, but coal.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the energy policy before taking its August recess. The policy now faces Senate debate. It envisions greater reliance on coal, the most widely used fuel in U.S. power plants. Colombia is a major source of that coal. Despite its civil war, Colombia is the world's fourth-largest coal exporter. It shipped 30 million tons in 2000, worth $ 794 million, making coal the country's third-largest source of export earnings.

By many accounts, Colombia is one of the most dangerous places to be a trade unionist. More than 40 union leaders have been slain so far this year. Last year, 129 were assassinated. Colombia's non-governmental National Labor School reports that 1,500 union officials have been killed in the past decade. Hector Fajardo, general secretary of Colombia's largest union federation, the Unified Confederation of Workers (CUT), says 3,800 trade unionists have been killed since 1986.

U.S. labor organizations increasingly point to a network of administration policies that they say contribute to the targeting of Colombian unionists.

Plan Colombia, for instance, provides more than one billion dollars in U.S. aid to Colombia's military. Officially, the program supports anti-narcotics activities. However, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented that aid provided by Plan Colombia is used to support right-wing paramilitary groups. Trade union leaders have been among their primary targets.

The Bush administration's energy plan has drawn similar concern.

The plan calls for 1,300-1,900 new electrical generating stations over the next 20 years. Most will run on fossil fuels, so a vast increase in coal consumption is virtually certain. The U.S. market for Colombian coal could mushroom.

The document also promotes a broad policy agenda designed to increase U.S. and foreign investment in industries such as Colombia's coal sector. Such policies have provoked a wave of resistance by Colombian workers. Their strikes and demonstrations have been met with violent repression.

The Cerrejon Norte mine, formerly state-owned, is now operated as a joint venture between the government and U.S.-based Exxon Corp., a unit of ExxonMobil. In 2000, it produced 18.4 million tons of coal -- half of Colombia's total output. Half of this went to Exxon, which sold 17 percent of it to two southeast U.S. utilities.

The Colombian army provides security for the mine and has a history of involvement in labor disputes. In the early 1990s, tanks occupied Cerrejon Norte after the government ordered the military to break a miners' strike. Other U.S. energy corporations, like Occidental Petroleum, also depend on the Colombian army to provide security in their oilfields.

U.S. labor groups, long suspicious of their foreign counterparts, now say human rights abuses abroad have a direct impact on U.S. workers and union members: In Colombia and elsewhere, a low-wage workforce whose labor rights are attacked and leaders murdered gives U.S. companies a low-cost advantage in moving production there.

After developing Cerrejon Norte in the mid-1980s, Exxon began cutting its U.S. coal production and reduced its U.S. coal-mining workforce to 321 people, from 1,600. Its Colombian operation now accounts for over half the company's coal production worldwide. Other companies have followed suit.

Increased foreign investment has done nothing for the longevity of Colombian union officials.

In mid-March, miners Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita were riding from their jobs at northern Colombia's Loma mine. Owned by U.S.-based Drummond Co. since 1994, it is the country's second largest coal facility.

Locarno and Orcasita were chairman and vice-chairman of the union at the mine. As the company bus neared Valledupar, some 45 kilometers from the mine, 15 gunmen, some in military uniforms, stopped it. They checked the workers' identification papers and pulled the two union leaders off the bus.

According to fellow passengers, Locarno was hit in the head with a rifle butt and shot in the face. Orcasita was taken into the woods at the side of the road. When his body was later found, his fingernails had been torn off.

Provincial police commander Hugo Alfonso Cepeda, in a televised announcement, attributed the murders to the rightist paramilitary United Defence Groups (AUC).

The AUC had issued death threats against union leaders at Loma, accusing them of collaborating with the country's main leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), says Ken Zinn, North American coordinator for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions.

The region surrounding Loma has seen intense conflict between the FARC and the AUC. The FARC allegedly levies a 10 percent tax on coal moving by rail out of the mine. Drummond has refused to pay and the 340-kilometer rail line to Puerto Drummond on the coast was bombed five times in the past year. Company President Gary Drummond visited Colombian President Andres Pastrana last year to demand increased protection.

"In the conflict, a lot of assumptions are made quickly," says Rafael Albuquerque, who represents the International Labor Organization in Colombia, "One of those assumptions is that many union leaders support the guerrillas."

Roberto Molino of the Colombian Commission of Jurists adds that, "in the case of the paramilitaries, you cannot underestimate the collaboration of government forces."

Last year, five million tons of Colombian coal entered the state of Alabama, Drummond's home base. Alabama exported 13 million tons of coal in 1996, mostly from Drummond mines. Last year's exports totaled only three million tons. At the Loma mine, production rose four million tons in 2000, to a total of 11.8 million. The company expects to sell 15 million tons next year, and 25 million tons by 2006. U.S. jobs have been cut.

Drummond transferred operations to Colombia "knowing that country's hostile political climate and egregious human rights violations," says United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Vice-President Jerry Jones.

For Drummond, the transfer has resulted in substantial savings on labor costs. A union miner in Alabama earns $ 3,060 per month, plus benefits. At Loma, workers earn between $ 477 and $ 955 per month.