Violence Against Central American Trade Unionists Surges

Violence against trade unionists in Central America has surged this year, with at least four trade union-related murders and a gang rape in Guatemala since the beginning of 2008, a top union leader murdered in Honduras in April, and a union leader shot to death in Panama in February. Four other trade unionists were murdered in 2007 in Guatemala, along with two in Panama.

There have now been at least eight trade union-related murders in Guatemala in the less than two years since the implementation of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in July 2006. In the two years before CAFTA implementation, no trade unionists were murdered in Guatemala.

Violence against Guatemalan trade unionists this year has included:

• On March 2nd , Miguel Angel Ramirez Enriquez, a co-founder of a banana union at the Olga Maria plantation was murdered and on February 2nd, Sandra Isabel Ramirez , the daughter of the general secretary of the same union, SINTRABANSUR, was gang-raped. The plantation is owned by one of Guatemala’s most powerful families and is a major supplier to Chiquita.
• On February 29th, the son and nephew of Jose Alberto Vicente Chavez, a Coca-Cola union leader, were murdered while waiting for Mr. Vicente to return from Guatemala City where he had filed a complaint about being threatened. His SITINCA union represents Coca-Cola workers at a bottling plant in Retalhuleu and an instant coffee processing plant in Guatemala City both owned by the INCASA company. SINTINCA has been under attack before; in January 2006, USLEAP helped expedite the departure to the U.S. of Jose Armando Palacios who was nearly killed following months of threats against him and his family.
• On January 22, 2008, Rosalio René González Villatoro, the General Secretary of the San Benito Independent Farmworkers Union (SBIFU), was gunned down as he got out of his car on his way to lunch.
• On New Year’s Eve and again in March, gun shots were fired at the homes of top union leaders. Most recently, on April 29th, Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, another SITRABI (Del Monte union) member, was shot and killed during his lunch break.

Meanwhile, no progress has been made in arresting and prosecuting those responsible for four 2007 murders of trade unionists, including that of Marco Tulio Ramirez Portela, a member of the SITRABI Executive Committee, in September 2007, and that of Pedro Zamora, the General Secretary of STEPQ, the union of Puerto Quetzal workers, in January 2007.

Honduran Union Leader Assassinated

Honduras has in the last two decades generally escaped the level of violence that has characterized other countries in the region but on April 24, the general secretary of the Workers’ Confederation of Honduras (CTH) was shot 16 times by six masked men and killed, along with another trade unionist and her driver on a well-traveled road east of San Pedro Sula.

The Honduran murders of Rosa Altagracia Fuentes and her fellow union leader Virginia García de Sánchez have been denounced by the international trade union movement which, along with the Honduran trade union movement, is demanding a full investigation.

U.S. Leverage Weak

While there is no evidence of any direct connection between CAFTA implementation and the rise of violence against Central American trade unionists, it is clear that post-CAFTA U.S. trade policy lacks the same leverage that existed prior to CAFTA implementation. As USLEAP and others argued long before CAFTA was passed, the worker rights provisions of CAFTA represent a significant reduction in the ability to apply U.S. trade pressure to address worker rights violations.

This is particularly apparent when contrasting what the U.S. government was able to do, and did, the last time the SITRABI banana union in Guatemala faced extensive violence when its leadership was threatened with death in 1999 and eventually forced to go into exile along with their families.

Then, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative exercised its power to put Guatemala’s duty-free trade benefits on probation and hold a public hearing in Washington, DC. The U.S. trade pressure led in 2001 to the first modern day convictions for violence against trade unionists in Guatemala.

Now, authority for implementation of CAFTA is vested in the U.S. Department of Labor which can, under certain conditions, request consultations with the Guatemalan government that might, eventually, lead to fines. Similar consultations with the Mexican government provided for under NAFTA have not achieved any meaningful advances on worker rights in over ten years.

First CAFTA Complaint Filed

On April 23, the AFL-CIO and five Guatemalan trade unions filed the first CAFTA worker rights complaint since the agreement came into effect in 2006. The complaint uses five case studies to demonstrate a pattern of worker rights violations in Guatemala, including the rise in violence against trade unionists. The CAFTA complaint was accompanied by the release of a two-page fact sheet on recent violence, both of which are available on the AFL-CIO website.

The Guatemala complaint provides the Administration with its first test to demonstrate that the worker rights provisions of CAFTA can be effectively used to advance worker rights. Based on the repeated failure of the NAFTA worker rights provisions to achieve positive results, worker rights advocates are skeptical.

Colombia FTA Implications

The upsurge in violence against Guatemalan trade unionists should have important implications for the Congressional debate about the pending Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, where pro-FTA supporters have been pointing to a decline in murders in 2007 and 2006 as evidence of progress. In an April 3, 2008 press release, USLEAP warned that passage of an FTA with Colombia could follow the pattern in Guatemala and lead to a sharp reversal of the decline in murders.