Colombia’s key role in Latin America

Berta Joubert-Ceci WW photo: G. Dunkel

Compañero Sam Marcy, the founder of Workers World Party/Mundo Obrero, wrote an article during the first presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1983-84 about the right of self-determination and the class struggle.

“In Marx’s time,” he wrote, “the slogan, as stated in the Communist Manifesto, was: ‘Workers of the world unite.’ To this slogan Lenin added the oppressed peoples. So now it reads: ‘Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite!’ It introduced a substantial difference in the approach to the oppressed peoples abroad and, no less important, the super-exploited and oppressed people at home in the internal colonies. While many decades have passed since Lenin’s formulation of the question, it now more than ever needs a proper application since the assault of monopoly capitalism becomes ever more onerous and threatening day by day.”

Twenty-five years later, neoliberal globalization has made this formulation even more relevant and urgent. And though it applies to working and oppressed peoples of the entire planet, I would like to address its significance to the peoples and the struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean. [Joubert-Ceci spoke of the many struggles in the region, then focused on Colombia.]

Obama’s victory was celebrated throughout the world and also in the Americas. In Colombia, for example, which has the second-largest population of Afro descendants in Latin America after Brazil, there were car caravans, honking and dancing, just like in my neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Nowhere in Latin America and the Caribbean have the masses been struggling more fiercely and steadfastly than in Colombia. Women, youth, human rights advocates and trade unionists defy the criminal and repressive forces of the fascist regime of President Alvaro Uribe—its police, its army and its paramilitaries.

Colombia is now a center for U.S. imperialism in the region, the Israel of Latin America. Colombia is the hope of the Pentagon and the ruling class to undermine the progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. It is the U.S. corporations’ hope to continue reaping huge profits and natural resources from the Colombian people, particularly through the Free Trade Agreement.

But two recent and still ongoing struggles, in the face of a severe financial crisis in that country, have made it very difficult for both the Uribe paramilitary government and several of the U.S. corporations to conduct business as usual. And what is most crucial is that these struggles are being fought by the two sectors of Colombian society that have been the most excluded, the most exploited: the Afro-Colombians and the Indigenous people.

Last September, when attempts to negotiate with the bosses failed, 12,500 sugarcane cutters went on strike in the southwest of the country. They work in eight refineries that produce both sugar and ethanol for the benefit of the Colombian oligarchy and the U.S. companies Cargill and ExxonMobil. The vast majority of sugarcane cutters—known as “corteros”—are of African descent. Their existence in this highly subsidized industry is, as one worker said, “like slavery, only that we no longer have chains.”

The workers cut sugarcane for 12 to 16 backbreaking hours a day in order to receive a monthly pay of $150 to $300. Of the 12,500 workers, only 485 are direct employees. Some 9,500 are subcontracted through the infamous Cooperatives of Associated Labor (CTA). CTAs are nothing but an effort to undermine and replace unions and exploit even further the Colombian workers.

Under a CTA the worker is a “partner” of the company, not a worker, has to pay for his or her health care, and has no benefits, no vacation time, nothing. They even have to get their own transportation and tools for harvesting sugarcane.

There are 10,000 CTAs in different industries throughout the country. Ending these so-called cooperatives has been one of the demands of the corteros. They also demanded Sunday and holiday pay, a direct work contract, labor stability, health care, education and housing.

At this time, after 56 days on strike, after intimidation by paramilitaries at the service of the companies, after the use of police to clear the mills of striking workers, after the arrest of several leaders and after even the aid of a progressive senator who supported the strike, the workers in seven of the eight refineries have settled.

Not all their demands were met, but as Adolfo Tigreros, an advisor to one of the unions, said: “The most important achievement was to put the CTAs in the public eye, so that [people] realize that they are a model for undermining labor rights and unions in Colombia.”

Throughout the strike and mobilization, the corteros received great solidarity from unions, from social organizations and from the Indigenous people who were conducting a “minga,” a peaceful gathering and protest. On Oct. 12, the Indigenous people of Colombia started a brave walk throughout the same regions where the cutters were striking—the southwest.

They walked hundreds of kilometers to try to meet and confront President Uribe with their demands: no to the FTA with the U.S., agrarian reform, and the end of state terrorism against Indigenous people, labor and social leaders. The agenda is not only for the Indigenous, it is a people’s agenda.

Three times they tried “walking the word” (caminando la palabra), long walks through the southwestern region. The first time, the police killed three people and injured dozens in a confrontation. When the walkers—more than 30,000 Indigenous people and their supporters— reached Cali to meet with Uribe, they waited three hours. After that, most left.

Uribe finally arrived, but by then there were only a couple hundred people. Uribe called them terrorists.

The walkers tried again to meet with him in La María. Uribe made empty promises, no land returns, nothing. Now the Indigenous are walking again, this time to Bogotá. They expect to get there on Nov. 21.

These have been not only long walks, they have been efforts to organize and join with the different social movements. The Indigenous people have demonstrated great solidarity with the corteros and have included the corteros’ demands in their own. They call this a “minga” of social and community resistance.

Uribe’s government is being exposed by the people in Colombia and by the international community as having close links to the paramilitary, to drug trafficking, to the many massacres and assassinations of Indigenous, Afro-Colombians, peasants, labor and social leaders.

A recent report from Amnesty International says that under Uribe in the year 2007, some 1,400 civilians were killed and 305,000 displaced, more than in 2006. So far this year, 45 union leaders have been assassinated. Last year 39 were murdered.

The struggle of the people in Colombia is our struggle. In these times of globalization, more than ever, the slogan “The workers’ struggle has no borders” holds true.

Let us say, as they say in Puerto Rico, “Que la crisis la paguen los ricos.” Let the rich, the capitalists, pay for the crisis. That is what the workers and oppressed in Colombia are doing.

Let us here, in the heart of imperialism, absorb the lessons of struggle of our brothers and sisters south of the Rio Grande. Let us unite and together fight this oppressive regime of exploitation.

Workers and oppressed of the world, let’s unite!