DETROIT
Unions slam Colombian death squads
Fifty angry workers, led by the textile union UNITE, marched
outside the Metropolitan Uniform store across from Police
Headquarters in downtown Detroit June 20. Detroit's City
Council recently approved a contract for Metropolitan to supply
uniforms for 5,000 police officers. What the council didn't
know was that the uniforms are to be manufactured in
Colombia.
Speakers from many unions exposed that union activists in
Colombia face execution by death squads, often hired by
corporate management. They explained that the United
Steelworkers filed suit last year against Coca Cola for the
death squad killings of two union organizers in one of its
bottling plants there. Leaders of miners and oil workers have
also been targets of U.S.-financed killers.
Hundreds of Colombian unionists were killed last year, and
up to 4,000 have been murdered in the past 15 years.
The U.S. government supplies billions of dollars in aid to
the Colombian military, which has close ties to the
paramilitary death squads.
-David Sole
Reprinted from the July 4, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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