-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 20, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Colombia's workers open general strike
By Shelley Ettinger
The workers of Colombia opened the biggest national strike in 20 years on Feb. 11. In the first hours of the action led by government employees, unions reported that some 800,000 workers had walked out, shutting down most government operations.
Tens of thousands poured into the main plaza in Bogota, the capital city. There they demonstrated outside the national legislature.
Strikers demanded a pay raise that keeps pace with inflation-and an end to the government's austerity program, cutbacks, layoffs and selling off programs and services to private enterprise.
There were early reports of armed clashes between riot police and strikers and students. Workers set up barricades and hurled chunks of pavement at troops.
Public schools and universities were shut down because teachers were on strike. Traffic was gridlocked, with public-transport workers off the job.
Hernando Hernandez, head of the USO oil workers' union, said the strike was "total" at Ecopetrol, the state-run oil company. Ecopetrol's private partners like British Petroleum claimed to be unaffected. But Hernandez said pumping, production and refining had been cut by one-half to two-thirds.
The strike grounded flights from Bogota's airport three days before Valentine's Day. That hurt the Colombian flower industry, which exports about $8 billion of cut flowers to the United States annually.
The walkout also hit coffee exporters very hard. Colombia is the world's second-biggest coffee producer.
U.S.-based passenger airlines, including Continental and American, canceled all flights into and out of Bogota.
Military on state of alert
In the days leading up to the strike, the government of President Ernesto Samper had ordered the Colombian military on a state of alert.
Workers prepared to defend the strike from a military attack, while government officials baited the unions, saying they are operating in cahoots with drug dealers and/or in concert with leftist rebels.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is waging an armed struggle against the U.S.-backed government, to bring the workers and peasants of Colombia into power. For two weeks before the strike began, the Colombian army and right-wing death squads had carried out a terror campaign against rural villagers accused of sympathizing with the FARC.
On Feb. 11, Amnesty International-not a friend of socialist armed struggle-reported that "a paramilitary group of about 100 heavily armed men wearing army-issued clothing ... detained and interrogated about 25 people. ... At least one was allegedly tortured.
"The paramilitary group is reported to have a list of names of people they consider to be guerrilla sympathizers or collaborators and who the group intends to kill."
On Feb. 3, three peasants were found dead on a country road. AI reports: "The bodies showed signs of torture and the victims had been castrated. Witnesses state that they were killed by the paramilitary shortly after a skirmish with guerrilla forces near the farm where the men worked."
Two days earlier, there were reports of heavy fighting between the FARC and the army. FARC guerrillas reportedly mounted a fierce assault in Meta province, 30 miles east of Bogota.
That is very close to the capital.
With the workers in motion at the same time the guerrillas are in action, Colombia's bourgeois class and government must be very nervous. The unease undoubtedly is felt in Washington, too-especially at the Pentagon, where plans to send more U.S. troops to Colombia in the guise of the "war on drugs" are being prepared.
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