Returning

I returned to L.A. Saturday evening - the last few days were pretty harrowing. On Thursday we had a supper meeting with the human rights officer from the CUT the labor rights organization. I didn't know this during dinner but he had to bring along 2 or 3 bodyguards because of frequent threats of violence and a few attempts on his life. It's hard to image living like that.

On Friday we went to visit the Minister of Social Protection, a government agency meant to safe guard the rights and safety of workers, among other things. The Labor Ministry was eliminated under Uribe and all things labor were thrown into the Ministry of Social Protection's basket.

About 15 minutes into the meeting I was turning green and heading for the bathroom. Thank god for my trusty minidisc, cause from what I hear from the others it was a pretty impressive show of flailing hands, indignation and excuses from the somewhat (ok, very) flamboyant Minister (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Then reinforcements were brought in in the form of an attractive young woman (hey, were was the attractive straight guy?!). My compatriots remained unconvinced.

Due to my stomach troubles I missed the next meeting with the US Embassy and my minidisc was unable to attend as well. Everyone seemed to think this meeting was more satisfying in terms of responses and reactions. Though I tend to think he just may be a better lier.
But them again John Perkins writer of "Confessions of An Economic Hitman" came to the light while in Colombia.

So now that I'm home I'm going to be filling in a lot of the blanks I didn't have time to do while in Colombia. The meeting schedule was hella hectic, which is probably why I wound up getting sick. I'm going to transcribe my notes from the prison visit and listen to the Minister of SP's rant and try to pull it all together. There's a lot to think about here and about 20 sides to every story. Some of the unions were obviously in distress and worthy of support, some seemed like they had complaints similar to that of US workers - privatization, contracting out, use of temp. workers to get around giving benefits. Of course it needs to be remembered this is in a framework of a 60% poverty rate, the still-frequent murder of unionist and AFTA bearing down on them like a hurricane of economic destruction.

In the here and now in the catagory of "what YOU can do" is find out about AFTA, get mad and write your damn Congressman. It'll thrill his/her heart and it will make a difference, especially now with the poll numbers dropping like a lead Teho puck.

Charged with "rebellion"

We did our prison visit today. Later I´ll add another entry just on that visit. I´m trying to write and edit it on paper so I won´t spend time and valuable pesos on internet time. The basics are we split into two groups one went to the men´s prison and the other went to the women´s.

I went to the men´s high security prison with a Colombian human rights lawyer and Bob, one of the delegation escorts. The three men we visited are charge with ¨rebellion" which seems to mean whatever the government wants it to mean. Although Uribe claims there are no political prisoners, everyone refers to them as political prisoners including the prison officials and the lawyers.

These delegation trips turn into endurance tests after a while with all the traveling and meeting after meeting after mee....... I skipped out on one this afternoon to rest. My fellow delegates feeling obligated to go to every single meeting, met with these oil trade workers and fell asleep during his talk. Both of them. That´s what you get for scheduling meetings after lunch.

We flew back from Medellin last night and I´m still exhausted even after a little nap. So if my writing is at times less than coherent please forgive me. I´m trying to push the idea that sometimes less is more but apparently every union in Colombia wants to meet the American delegation. That does make sense considering how much involvement our country has in Colombia - I think I´ve gone through before: the millions of dollars from Plan Colombia and the upcoming AFTA vote.

So I´m going to try to write up the prisoner´s story and post it tonite, tommorow at the lastest.

Medellin

We´ve been in Medellin for almost 2 days now and we´re leaving in a couple of hours. Our delegation escort Alison just told me the teacher´s union are sending over some sort of television crew to do an interview with us!!! Ack! I hope I can get out of this - the not speaking Spanish thing should help.

I have to make this brief because as usual they have us on a super-tight schedule.

I was interviewed on KPFK on MayDay - they called literally as I was boarding the plane for Medellin. So I gave the workers of the world unite speech. No I was glad I got on at rush hour because more people need to be aware of the AFTA and what it means for the Andean region countries - more on that later.

Time for one small ancedote - we went to talk to CUT, which is a umbrella organization for unions. While the president of CUT was speaking he mentioned the previous president had been shot by paramilitary or Colombian government agents. Then he pointed to a hole in the table where we were sitting and told us the assisination happened right there, leaving bullet holes in the table and a nearby cabinet. It´s hard to image a world where your work could get you gunned down in your office. The term they use is "impunity"- and the paras in connect with the government (that the US sends millions of dollars to every year) acts with impunity to destroy any form of opposition.

Must go - this is costing me $2500 an hour!

May Day, moonshine and exploding bar games

Today was a fun day all around. Great march, big numbers, no police violence and barbeque and moonshine at the end.

We got out to the street around 9:30 - I had called KPFK to do a live call-in but we never got a call to the cell phone. Could be a bad connection. The delegate leader Alison gave her cell phone number but international cell phone calls are iffy. Even domestic cell phone calls from a "foreign" phone are pretty iffy.
As for the march - the numbers were huge. Hundreds of thousands - one guy said up to a million but we{ll see. There is so much oppression of various kinds people are pissed. There were anarchist, communist and trade unionists as well as people who had lost relatives to police and state violence. A new campaign specifically against riot police was lauched today because it{s the anniversary of a young student being beaten to death by police last May Day.

When everyone got to the main plaza - Plaza Boliver there were a few speeches and then the sky opened up and dumped a few hours worth of rain on us in a coupla minutes. Both good and bad because it may have prevented any build-up of tension between the cops and the people.

Then some electrical workers took us to this barbeque place where they feed us hunks of chicken and this strange vinegary tasting corn alchohol called.....oh, don´t remember. Thats how good it was. But the best part was the exploding bar game called TEJO - see, that I remember - thats how good IT was.}

Somebody called it exploding horse shoes and thats about right. You get a weight from say 2-5lbs and you toss it underhand toward this target. The target is a box filled with clay andset up at an angle. Before you toss they set up these little triangles of pink paper filled with gunpowder at four point along this metal hoop in the center of the box. That s so when the metal puck hits against the metal ring it explodes the little gunpowder packets. And you re throwing from like, at least 15ft away. So the drunker people get the poorer their aim gets until.....let s just say there was a big, gaping hole in the ceiling.

I m building one in my backyard when I get home.....

So we are off to Medellin in about 15 minutes. I write from their as I m able . forgive weird mistakes in punctuation - Colombian internet cafe keyboards can be hard to navigate.

Colombian Police are Friendly

Or so my fellow delegate Dennis thought - so he decided to go over to the police hanging out on the side of the road opposite the meeting hall where the flower worker´s union march ended and say "thanks guys for your support." Our interpreter David was game so I watched as Dennis, dressed in his union logo polo shirt (international brotherhood of electrical workers) went äcross the street to give a friendly Atlanta Georgia "hey y all". The police looked quite confused but as David said their orders at this point were to stand around and scratch their balls. So they all just smiled and thought Americans really are a buncha wack jobs.

Not only is Dennis a great character but he saved my journalistic ass by coming up with a microphone I could use for my minidisc, which I forget in the haze of international travel (that´s my excuse and I´m sticking to it).

As I said before tommorow is the big May Day march and then we´re off to Medellin that evening, so who knows if I´ll be able to write. I may be reporting live on KPFK if we can coordinate.

Hasta manana.....

Doubletime

The May Day march will be much bigger and there is a proportionally greater chance of police violence. When we got to the town square we went to this small meeting hall where we - the delegation - were lead onstage and asked to give a little speech. No warning, either. Totally unfair. This morning we already met with a group that talked a mile a minute about water privitization, internal displacement of populations by the paramilitary for the benefit of international corporations, the reduction of worker´s rights and protections and more. Don´t have time to be detailed right now because we´re off to another meeting soon. I´ll try to add more this evening.Well, just like the other trip the organizers are keeping us constantly busy at meetings -

¿Who´s worse - Bush or Uribe?

That was the question of the day yesterday. Although our first speaker apologized for opining that Uribe is ¨"mas intelligente". No one was up for defending Bush in our group.

We have a very small delegation - only three people. One of our group Dennis Rocque is a part of the Electrical Workers Union in Atlanta, Georgia. He speaks no Spanish, has a heavy southern drawl and went into the army right after high school. He eventually held several offices in his union, including chapter president came because he couldn´t stand the thought of fellow union members (or "sindicales" as they´re known here) being shot in cold blood for trying to have a decent standard of living. It´d be easy to peg him as a stereotypical southern good old boy until he starts talking politics - can´t stand Bush, interested in international worker´s rights. Í´ll have him drinking lattes before the trip is up.

It´s kind of difficult to know where to start because Colombia´s conflict has such deep roots. I´ll give a very brief explination and then add a link to a more thorough history. The current conflict goes back as 1948 with the assination of presidental candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, eventually leading to ten years of warfare called ¨"La violencia".

From this the FARC and ELN were formed. The FARC, the much larger insurgent group grew out of campesino rights movements. The ELN with only a few thousand members came from radical student movements.
The paramilitaries, by far the worst violators of human rights, was formed with the help of drug lords and the Colombian military as an self defence group in response to insurgent violence.

At this point most of the danger to Colombian citizens is for those living in the countryside and jungle areas, mostly poor campesinos. Union members and social activists are targeted by the paramilitary for being "leftist" even though they are not part of and do not support the guerillas. Targeting is a literal term here - Colombia averages 70 union member deaths a year and this year so far 32 member have been killed. They´re sometimes torutured before they´re killed.

Here is the link to wikipedia´s history of the armed conflict - it tries to be neutral but it softpedals the right wing violence and the Colombian governments role in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_Armed_Conflict

A recent scandal is a perfect example of the government´s complicity in the violence against anyone remotely considered left-wing. The delegation visited the teacher´s union (teachers are targeted for violence more than any other union) after getting throughthe metal detectors and the bullet-proof glass we met with union officials that explained how government officials were caught protecting drug lords and helping target union members and activists. The scandal caused Uribe´s poll numbers for the upcoming presidential election to drop by 14 points. Here is a piece from Fellowship of Reconciliation report - FOR has had a precense in Colombia for many years, they´re part of a network of international activist groups:

Intelligence agency scandal rocks Uribe governmentIt’s as if FBI director Robert Mueller were publicly charged by other FBI officers with erasing the criminal investigative files of key members of Al Queda, of getting its sleeper cell members into flight school, and of delivering electoral fraud on behalf of terrorist groups. Only a few weeks before the vote for his re-election on May 28, President Alvaro Uribe, Bush’s strongest ally in Latin America, faces a fierce scandal over links between his government and right-wing terrorist groups. The scandal involves collaboration between the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) –the Colombian equivalent to the FBI and Immigration Service- and the paramilitary groups operating in the Colombian Caribbean region. The revelations originated in an interview of a former DAS official, Rafael Garcia, published by the widely respected magazine Semana and Herald Tribune. According to Garcia, former DAS chief Jorge Noguera maintained close links with paramilitary capos operating the Caribbean region, including a commander known as Jorge 40. Noguera is accused of giving Jorge 40 a 10% commission of DAS contracts and lending him a bullet-proof SUV equipped with electronics that allowed him to pass through police and military checkpoints. Most chilling is the accusation that DAS gave paramilitary groups a list of labor leaders and leftist intellectuals, several of whom were later assassinated by paramilitary squads. Shortly after the killings, families of the victims accused DAS of participation in the murders, calling them state crimes. Garcia himself has been in prison since last summer for erasing the records of criminal investigations into paramilitary terrorists and narco-traffickers. Also prominent among the accusations is the charge that DAS facilitated a fraud in the 2002 elections that gave President Uribe 300,000 votes in the Caribbean region and secured the victory of Uribe supporters associated with paramilitaries into the Congress. DAS is also said to have been involved in a plot to assassinate several Venezuelan officials, in an attempt to destabilize the Chavez government. Noguera was Uribe’s campaign manager for the Caribbean province of Magdalena and was later appointed head of DAS.

Please feel free to e-mail me or comment here about anything that needs clarification - Í´ll try to write every day but the delegation has a crazy schedule. I didn´t go to this mornings meeting so I could write and recuperate. After flying for 10 hours plus layovers they had us getting up at 6:30, which with the time change was 4:30am to me. No wonder I´m not feeling great.

This afternoon we´re scheduled to go on a march with the flower workers - if you saw Maria Full of Grace the protaganist works in a flower factory before her turn at being a "mula". We´re told tear gas is a possibility - but really what´s a protest without tear gas?

Hasta mañana.

First Things

I leave for the airport in a few hours - this entry is just to get the blog address out there. I'll probably post next from the hotel sometime Friday. I've burned a few CD's and cleared out my camera, got my minidisc ready and watched some badly dubbed movies in Spanish. I'm ready.

I decided to move today too. Big Day.