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RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Caught in the Crossfire

Mario Osava

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jul 30 2004 (IPS) - It was incredible that she was not injured and no one was killed. Gloria Ramírez had just left her office and got into her car, accompanied by two bodyguards, when the shooting started. Miraculously, only one of her bodyguards was wounded, in the hand, despite the countless number of rounds fired.

Ramírez was the president of the teachers’ union in the central Colombian department (province) of Rizaralda when the attempt on her life occurred, in 1989. She had got involved in the trade union the year before, just after giving birth to her first son.

In fear for her life, she fled from her hometown to Bogotá, and continued to be active in the union while giving classes as a volunteer. In 2000 she became the first woman president of the Colombian Teachers’ Federation (FECODE).

Ramírez said it was about time that the union representing a profession which is made up of 75 percent women, and which was founded in 1959, had a female president.

The constant threats ”made me a high-risk figure,” which meant she was always accompanied by five bodyguards, lived in an ”armoured apartment”, drove an armour-plated car, and found it impossible to live a normal life ”just because I was a trade unionist,” she told IPS during a break in the Jul. 28-31 World Education Forum in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

In September 2003 she received a warning that she had ”better leave the country and give up labour activism.” The threat gave her an Oct. 10 deadline to do so.

She decided, nevertheless, ”to continue in the struggle, in defence of the right to work, and of the constitution,” until a week later she received an even more strongly-worded threat, which also targeted her family and ”10 colleagues.”

FECODE decided to send her into ”temporary exile” in Madrid, where she could work to raise awareness on the violence and human rights violations in civil war-torn Colombia, and call for international solidarity. She is living there now with her two children, ages 12 and 17, and her husband, who is also a high school teacher.

Her hope is that a global campaign, an ‘SOS’ by the international labour movement against the attempt to ”annihilate” trade unions in Colombia, will help produce the conditions allowing her to return to her country someday.

The global mobilisation will culminate in a Sep. 15-18 public hearing in Bogotá which hopes to draw representatives from around the world, to urge the authorities in Colombia to provide guarantees that would allow trade unionists to carry out their work in safety.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have stated that ”one of the most dangerous professions in the world is to be a trade unionist in Colombia,” said the charismatic Ramírez, 47, who speaks enthusiastically about her ideas and has an undergraduate degree in physics and math and a masters in social and educational development.

The armed conflict in Colombia, a South American country of 45 million, has led to the forced displacement of three million people – the third-largest population of ”internal refugees” in the world, after the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, she pointed out.

The labour movement is one of the main targets of the violence in Colombia, and of what activists suspect is a campaign aimed at annihilating the movement, through selective killings of trade union leaders, harassment and intimidation of their families, and the ”stigmatisation” of activists by the attempt to depict them as ”privileged people who are acting against national interests,” said Ramírez.

More than 3,500 leaders and members of the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT), Colombia’s main trade union confederation, have been murdered in the past 10 years.

Teachers have not escaped the violence. Over the past decade, 642 teachers have been killed, including 41 last year, and another 2,000 have been forced to flee their jobs and their homes due to threats.

They are caught ”in the crossfire” between the army and right-wing paramilitaries on the one hand, and the leftist guerrillas, which have been active for over 40 years, on the other, said Ramírez.

”What can teachers do if army troops decide to sleep in their school? What can they say if the paramilitaries leave their weapons in the school, or if the guerrillas convene a meeting of parents there?” she asked. Obeying one of the sides can lead to reprisals by the other, she added.

That situation has led to a movement demanding that schools be recognised by all parties to the conflict as neutral ”peace territories”. The armed groups could accept that if there is enough international pressure, and that could even form the start of peace talks towards a negotiated solution to the conflict, Ramírez dreams.

But she has no illusions with respect to the government of President Alvaro Uribe, which she described as ”ultra-right” and an active supporter of the ”pre-emptive war” theory adopted by the United States after the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.

In Colombia, anyone ”suspected of being a potential terrorist” can be arrested or have their house searched under the Anti-Terror Statute, which was approved by Congress last May and is already being implemented despite the fact that it has not yet been codified, Ramírez complained.

The main victims of that policy are social and human rights activists. And as part of the government’s police state, a network of paid informers has been set up all over the country, taking advantage of the 18 percent unemployment rate, which makes people desperate for a source of income, she said.

In Colombia, ”modern-day values coexist alongside codes imposed by the armed groups,” and while the armed forces must respect ”due legal process”, that is not true for the paramilitary militias, which were created precisely to break the law, said Ramón Moncada, the head of the non-governmental Corporación Región, based in Medellín, Colombia, and a member of the International Council of the World Education Forum.

By putting top priority on its ”democratic security” policy, the Uribe administration has ”accentuated militarism and spending on the war, at the expense of social spending,” he told IPS.