1. A catastrophic situation

Colombia is a country with immense natural wealth. However, its population lives in poverty. Around 30 million out of its 43 million inhabitants can't satisfy their basic needs and live below the poverty line. In the last two years three million people have joined this group. At the same time, a further eight million are destitute and another four million starve to death in a country situated among the earth's ten hungriest in spite of having abundant agricultural resources. Part of the misery and hunger in Colombia is the responsibility of those who have promoted the destruction of the nation's agricultural production of basic goods and the massive importation of the same. In the past three years we've imported an annual average of seven million tonnes of food. It is also the responsibility of those who have concentrated the property of land in such huge terms, with just 3% of owners owning 75% the land, and with 46% of it in the hands of drug lords. It should be remembered that almost three million hectares are in the hands of just two of them.

Meanwhile, in 2001, unemployment reached 20%, underemployment 35%, with a total of 60% of Colombia's labour force finding itself in the informal sector. Out of those who receive a salary, 50% earned the minimum, the current equivalent of US$150, while 30% received amounts below this figure, and 35% of these workers had no access at all to social security. Nevertheless, the policies of the government, the transnational companies and Colombian capitalists, has aimed, since 1990, to obtain increasingly significant reductions in the wages of workers, forcing successive labour and pension reforms which authorised the payment, in some areas, of up to 80% below the minimum legal wage, abolished social security benefits, overtime payments, and penalties for night work, Sundays and public holidays, ignored the eight hour day (Colombia's average working week is 48 hours) and eliminated bosses' social security contributions. The incoming government aims to extend these reforms throughout the country. Arguing that the labour costs are excessively high (comparatively, in Latin America the only country where labour is cheaper is Ecuador, placing it below that of the remaining countries of the subcontinent), the extreme aim is to reduce workers to hunger and rob them of their pension rights. In effect, the new reforms, already agreed to with the IMF, extends the age of retirement by five years, raises workers' contributions by 1.5% of the total wage and reduces pension payments to 50% of the monthly wage. If we take into account that the vast majority of workers today are employed on a temporary basis and that you need to work for 40 years to obtain the minimum pension of US$150 per month, it is practically impossible to achieve this since very few workers manage to work a full ten years in permanent employment in the one company. Only 3% of them manage to reach this length of time.

2. The rich get richer and richer and the poor get poorer and poorer

In Colombia, well known has been the existence of a deep disparity in the distribution of wealth and income. At the end of the 1990s, five large economic groups had wealth the equivalent of almost 60% of the country's internal gross domestic product, and the three richest men in Colombia possessed a personal fortune of almost US$4 billion. While in 1990 the richest 10% received forty dollars for every dollar received by the poorest 10%, by 2000 that richest 10% was already receiving eighty dollars for every dollar received by the poorest 10%, and this in spite of the fact that national gross industrial production has grown by less than 1% per annum and that gross product per capita had fallen from two thousand one hundred dollars to nineteen hundred dollars during the decade. Ten years later there was less to share but those on top received proportionally double in relation to what the poorest received at the beginning of the 1990s.

Likewise, two hundred and twenty companies, linked to multinationals, controlled a good deal of the country's production and both internal and foreign trade. But the basic products of the economy were dominated by very few. Oil by Occidental, Texas Petroleum, British Petroleum, Shell, and lately Chevron; coal by Exxon and Drummond and gold by Corona Gold Mines and Frontino Gold Mines. Coffee by Nestle, Kraft-General Foods, Cargill and Protect and Gamble, African palm production by Unilever, bananas by Dole and Chiquita Brands, flowers by Dole, sugar cane by Tile and Lyle, dairy by Nestle and Parmalat, biscuits by Danone, Kraft and Nestle, drinks by Coca-Cola and agricultural materials by Monsanto and Singenta.

Further, Colombia is a country that is falling deeper and deeper into debt. By 1990 external and internal debt totalled US$15 billion, today it is over US$50 billion, reaching almost 60% of its domestic gross product. It is also a net exporter of capital.  It is estimated that all up some US$15 billion are leaving the country every year, among it some US$3 billion in capital flight. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly dependent on foreign investment. By 1990 just short of US$400 million were entering the country every year, but in the last three years of the decade, in the midst of war, an average US$5 billion entered the country per annum, almost all of it from the United States and Spain. Both countries want to protect their strategic investments in Colombia, the former in the natural resources and raw materials sector, the latter in those of services and infrastructure.

To facilitate foreign investment, the Colombian state not only deregulated labour relations and wages, it has also allowed changes in the productive structures of goods and services and the restructure of distribution for factories and areas of production, leading to the closing of many of these, while violently introducing modern administration theories that have resulted in the mass expulsion of workers from factories (around one and a half million workers have lost their jobs during the 1990s, four hundred thousand of them in the construction industry, three hundred thousand in agriculture and eight hundred thousand in mining, manufacturing and the services sector). But as well as this, tariffs and other barriers, capital taxes, legislation limiting the export of utilities, environmental protection measures, regulation on the exploitation of natural resources, and the payment of royalties to the state have been abolished, while the import and export of goods and services by transnationals has been stimulated through the handing out of state subsidies for internal trade within these firms.

The framework of violence in which the offensive against the unions by the state, the transnationals and the national monopolies has taken place is frightening. In the past fifteen years there have been half a million deaths through violence, and few have been the combatants fallen in the war among the general numbers of deaths, two and a half million internally displaced, one million emigrated to other countries, almost five thousand disappeared, over three thousand political prisoners and the huge number of people affected by the violence carried out by the oligarchy against the population. The trade unions are viewed by those behind these policies as the most organised and immediate opposition and, as such, must be eliminated. For this it turns not only to the absolute partiality of government institutions, but also to the automatic dismissal of any worker who wants to join a union, who is placed on a black list that is circulated among employers in order to document those who promote the organisation of workers. Obviously, he or she is never again employed. But they don't stop at this. Those who are organised, and specially those on the left, are permanently harassed by the state's security organisations, jailed, at times indefinitely, tortured, raided and their families pressured. Further, they are the victims of attacks by the paramilitaries, who assassinate them in total impunity (almost four thousand dead in the past fifteen years, all of those members of the Unitarian Central Organisation of Workers, CUT), set fire to or bomb their union offices, promote the mass resignations of workers or ban the existence of unions, kidnap leaders (last week five of them were kidnapped) and their families, issue death threats to them on a permanent basis or force them to go into internal or external exile. The national and international consortiums who benefit from these practices, while unions and their attained rights disappear in an instant, have never issued a single statement in regard to these nor have they sought to find effective ways to protect their workers. Likewise the state has not proceeded to capture those responsible for this genocide nor bring them to justice. All of these crimes enjoy absolute impunity.

On the contrary, there is evidence that links private and state companies and the armed forces with these paramilitary groups and with the murder of trade unionists in Colombia. Human Rights Watch has described them as the Sixth Division of the Colombian army. In the attempted assassination of Wilson Borja, leader of the state employees' union, the cellular phone number of the dead hired gun was found to be connected to all of the national networks of the army's intelligence organisations and the national police. Also very well known is the case of the navy's intelligence network, ran by current general of the navy infantry in active duties Rodrigo Quiñonez, who murdered in the city of Barrancabermeja over fifty people, among them several leaders of the Workers Trade Union, the oil workers union. Similar actions were carried out by army general Rito Alejo del Rio, who assisted paramilitary groups on a permanent basis in Uraba, and who is today accused, though free, in Colombia for this reason.

Dole and Chiquita Brands are known to have given support, directly or indirectly, to these groups in  Uraba, similarly British Petroleum in Casanare, Texas Petroleum in Cundinamarca, Magdalena Medio and Putumayo, Drummond in Cesar and Coca-Cola in several places throughout Colombia.

Rally against Coca Cola on July 22, 2004 in Melbourne

4. The case of Coca-Cola: The systematic violation of the human rights of its workers 

The Coca-Cola bottler in Colombia is called Panamco de Colombia. It is part of the third largest bottler in the world, which operates in Mexico, several countries of Central America, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. It's based in Panama and its generic name is Panamerican Beverage Inc., and its headquarters are in Miami, Florida, in the United States. Its two principal shareholders are companies originating in North American and The Coca-Cola Company, with 18% of total shares. There is another company closely linked to Panamco de Colombia S.A., which is Coca-Cola Servicios de Colombia, which directly represents the interests of The Coca-Cola Company in the country and provides the concentrate, syrup, to the bottler, advices it and subsidises its publicity and, in certain cases, allies itself to it in order to undertake new business projects.

The bottler used a number of trade names in Colombia, but beginning in 1997 it reduces these to five: Panamco de Colombia S.A., Embotelladora de Santander S.A., Embotelladora Roman S.A., Embotelladora del Huila S.A. and Friomix del Cauca S.A. It also has investments of approximately 40% in two more companies, one making soft drink bottle caps and another packaging for all types of drinks. Why didn't it centralise all of these companies in a single one? Firstly, because in the second and third mentioned there is a combative, left wing union, that has managed to keep a relatively good collective work agreement, and thus has found its membership numbers reduced dramatically in the last 10 years. In second place, because the Huila bottling plant has a shareholder that is not part of head office, but an independent bottler, and thirdly, because Friomix del Cauca dedicates itself to the production of refrigeration equipment, dispensers, or other types of cooling infrastructure o public bottle dispensers.

Panamco Colombia begins in 1991 its general restructure, closing three plants, withdrawing two franchises from independent bottlers, and modifying radically its production structure. Where it previously carried out directly production operations, plant maintenance, distribution and commercialisation, vehicle maintenance, storage, publicity and services, it henceforth began to carry out these activities through ways such as subcontracting, out sourcing, or contracting of workers cooperatives, which in turn reduced enormously its labour costs. It is estimated that for every dollar received by a stably employed worker covered by a collective agreement in 1990, a worker employed by a cooperative, at the end of the 1990s, received just 25 cents of a dollar. The company had reduced costs by two thirds. Meanwhile, its utilities had multiplied astoundingly. While for every dollar it invested in 1990 it made a profit of 50 cents, by the end of the decade for every dollar invested it now earned another dollar. That is, it had doubled its rate of profit in spite of the fact that in 1999 its sales had been reduced by some 15% in relation to the previous year. It sold less, but proportionally earned more.

At the same time, the number of its workers with job security, approximately ten thousand in 1990, had been reduced to two thousand by 2001. The number of workers with no job stability had gone from practically zero to eight thousand over the decade, and the union membership had been reduced in the same period from one thousand six hundred workers down to approximately seven hundred. How was the company able to achieve this in such a short period of time? With the assistance of paramilitary groups which, among the many violent actions carried out against the union (which fall into all of the categories of general methods of operations of paramilitaries described above), we can highlight that which they carried out in 1996, in the factory of Carepa, in the Uraba Antioqueño region, when they began by assassinating the local union secretary, Isidro Segundo Gil, and continued by forcing all members to resign from the union by entering the plant bearing rifles, threatened the workers, and forced them to sign a letter of resignation from the union. They then set fire to union headquarters. They had already murdered several workers and had forced twenty five union leaders to flee the region. Plant owner Richard Kirby, a North American citizen, was both general manager of Indega, previous name of Panamco de Colombia, and share holder of Inversiones Medellin, one of the companies associated to, in fact wholly controlled by, Panamco.

It is worth noting that the more the human rights of Coca-Cola workers were violated, the more the companies profits rose, labour costs fell, and the number of stably employed and unionised workers were reduced.

To fight back against the company's violent offensive, to let the world know what is happening in Colombia, to demand justice and punishment for those who committed these crimes for which no one has been detained and which take place in a context of total impunity, and so that these events are not forgotten, the National Union of Food Industry Workers of Colombia has accused The Coca-Cola Company, Panamco, and United States citizen Richard Kirby, in the South court of the city of Florida, of being responsible for these actions. The suit has been accepted and its instructive stage is almost at an end. It will also carry out an world wide campaign against the company, already composed of a series of actions, among which can be highlighted the public hearings that will take place on 20 July in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, on 20 October in Brussels, Belgium, and on 5 December in Bogota, Colombia. It will also hold an international day of action against Coca-Cola on 22 July, an initiative originating from the Porto Alegre Social Forum. It will hold a world wide campaign publicising the anti worker policies of Coca-Cola through the use of posters, stickers, badges, disapproval labels to be placed on bottles, postcards, etc. It will promote the sending of letters and other forms of protests to The Coca-Cola  Company in Atlanta, Georgia, Panamerican Beverage Inc. in Panama City and Miami, Florida, and to the presidency of the republic of Colombia, in Bogota.  

It will seek as much publicity, solidarity and economic support as possible from those organisations willing to support us to continue this struggle. It will work together with trade unions, the international trade union left, the Continental Social Alliance, the antiglobalisation movement and all other manifestations in the struggle against these transnationals, committing ourselves to firmly denounce and mobilise against attacks carried out by them around the world. It will provide its active solidarity in the struggle waged by workers throughout the world against the neoliberal model and capitalist globalisation.

National Food Industry Workers Union, Coca-Cola Campaign 
Distribute in Australia by Colombia Solidarity Committee Sydney, Colombia Action Group, Mothers Plaza de Mayo Support Group, Chilean Popular and Indigenous Network.
P.O. BOX 813, North - Melbourne, VIC 3051
Phone/Fax : (03) 9481 2273 ,
Mobile: 0401 558373