A Mystery That Continues to Confound, But Also To Instruct: Colombia, Coal & Murder
February 08, 2012
A Mystery That Continues to Confound, But Also To Instruct
Colombia, Coal & Murder
by DANIEL KOVALIK
~snip~
On the evening of March 12, our delegation met in Bogota with representatives from a number of Colombian mining unions, and listened to their stories of losing union brothers and sisters to murder by right-wing paramilitary groups. As we discovered the next morning, at around the same time we were at this meeting, the two top union leaders at the coal mine of Alabama-based Drummond Company were murdered by paramilitaries in the department of Cesar.
Upon learning of these murders, and after hearing of the suspicions of some Colombia unionists that Drummond may have had something to do with them, we went to the U.S. Embassy asking for an investigation into this crime. However, we were quickly shut down by the human rights attaché at the Embassy, Mari Tolliver, who would not even deign to meet us in her office, but instead met us in the cafeteria near the vending machines. Mari, whose ostensible job involved human rights, told us point blank that the Embassy’s job is not to investigate U.S. companies for alleged human rights abuses, but, instead, to facilitate business for them. So much for Mari’s job description.
The facts of the murder of these two individuals – union president Valmore Locarno and vice-president Victor Orcasita – are undisputed. Thus, on the evening of March 12, 2001, the Drummond bus taking Valmore and Victor home from the mines was stopped by armed paramilitaries. These paramilitaries then boarded the bus, asked for Valmore and Victor by name and pulled these two individuals off the bus. The paramilitaries shot Valmore in the head at close-range killing him almost instantly. Meanwhile, these same paramilitaris took Victor away to a river bank where they tortured him before taking his life.
What remains a mystery is who ordered the hit on Valmore and Victor. Gustavo Soler, another Drummond miner who succeeded Valmore as union president, gave an interview to The Nation magazine in late August of 2001 in which he stated, “We think that some person from the mine had contact with the assassins because they knew exactly which bus (Locarno and Orcasita) were on.” Shortly after making this public declaration, Gustavo Soler was pulled off a bus taking him home from the mines by paramilitaries who then proceeded to kill him.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/08/colombia-coal-murder/
