The Labour Situation in Colombia and Human Rights

Abstract

The Labour Situation in Colombia and Human Rights Omar Romero Díaz (bio) Colombia, a country where for more than two hundred years it has been added to absolute poverty, since independence, a historical process that ended the colonial stage by the Spanish Empire, since the appearance of unions in Colombia that the Colombian State broad sectors of the political, economic and business class have been unable to recognise the role of the trade union movement in the defence of labour rights and union freedoms and its leading role in the different scenarios of a democratic state. This is what explains the wave of systematic violence since its appearance at the beginning of the last century, referenced in the “Masacre de las Bananeras” (English: “Massacre of the Banana Workers”) in 1928, with the murder in the central park of Ciénaga, of more than 3000 workers of the American United Fruit Company by the machine guns of the national army, for demanding better wages and job guarantees. Similar behaviour has occurred at various times of confrontation with trade unionism as some cases worth mentioning: on 23 February 1963, 11 workers and an 11-year-old girl died in the Municipality of Santa Bárbara, Antioquia, when there was a strike by the workers of Cementos el Cairo, the military attacked the camp of the strikers; in 1969, in the National Patriotic Strike against the administrative reform of Lleras Restrepo; the same in 1977 in the realisation of the National Civic Strike recorded as one of the largest mobilisations in national history; the strikes of the USO Workers’ Union in defence of Ecopetrol; of the Telecom Workers, led by SITELECOM, to prevent its sale; the innumerable teacher strikes under the direction of FECODE in defence of public education and the rights of teachers; the public sector strike in 1998; and many more battles of Colombian workers, many of them recorded in national history; such as the recent National Strikes of 21 November 2019, and 28 April 2021, which led to a social rebellion, which others call a social explosion. This violence against the trade union and social movements, of expressions of protest and popular uprisings is consigned, indisputably, in the first place, by the struggle in defence of life, land, workers’ rights, food sovereignty, peace with social justice, health, and defence of the environment and natural resources and, secondly, for the submission of the country’s rulers to the United States and its strategies of confrontation in the cold war with the former Soviet Union. Violence and anti-communism In the Treaty of Versailles, the triumphant imperialist powers to counteract the triumph of the Russian revolution and its influence in the labour sectors founded the ILO in 1919 and recognised workers’ rights through fundamental agreements, several of them ratified in 1933 in Colombia. In the vision of combating communism, we will mention that the violence of the late 1940s was engineered and directed by the United States against democratic movements. It is worth remembering that, in December 1952, through Legislative Act 01 of 9 December, the Congress of the Republic convened a National Constituent Assembly of fascist orientation and by legislative act 06 of 14 September 1954, decreed: “The activity politics of international communism. The law will regulate the way to make this prohibition effective”. Likewise, the partisan violence that worsened around 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, a dissident political leader of the Liberal Party who sponsored the debate on the Banana Massacre, is based on Truman’s crusade since March 1947 against international communism and all forms of popular mobilisation to maintain US domination and contain the Soviet Union, which intensifies with the triumph of the Cuban revolution. The struggles from the workers were stigmatised in this anti-communist strategy by the Washington doctrine. In the context of the peace processes of Belisario Betancur, successful with some insurgent forces and unsuccessful with the FARC, there is the appearance of the Patriotic Union and the exacerbation of the most conservative sectors of the national scene with the creation of paramilitary armies, which sharpens the violence against the democratic and leftist sectors from the mid-1980s onwards. This...