Guatemala: Free trade o
* Colombia brigade, battalion level and paramilitary units continues as envisaged by Order 200-05/91. Based on our interviews with witnesses and ex-members of the network, investigations by the government and the abundant material compiled by human rights groups and journalists, we believe that the top brass of the Colombian armed forces continues to organise, encourage and mobilise paramilitary units in a hidden war against those suspected of supporting the guerrillas.
In 1978, the American Anti-Communist
Action group emerged. "Triple A" was directly associated with the military's Intelligence and Counter Intelligence Battalion.
At the beginning of the 1980's, MAS, another paramilitary group was integrated into the process of repression and counterinsurgency in the Magdalena Medio region.
According to the High Commissioner for Peace, paramilitary groups are present in 450 municipalities. In north-western Colombia, the paramilitary units are the dominant armed force. And they no longer act in a dispersed manner. They are headed by the ACCU (Self-Defence Groups of Cordoba and Uraba) led by Carlos Castano.
In mid-1996, the paramilitary "Self-Defence Movement of Colombia" held its third National Summit. Apart from refining its citeria for capturing suspected guerrillas and kidnapping their relatives, delegates re-
"The guerrillas know that the paramilitary phenomenon is irreversible. They know all so well how hard we have hit them. But our movement continues to be outside the law and political life, even though many of our collaborators, administrators, supporters, financiers and advisors take part in political activity. The discrediting of the Samper administration presents us with a magnificent opportunity to increase our work as combatants of the anti-subversive struggle. One could say that the operational incapacity of the armed forces due to the pressure of human rights organisations and other institutions such as the Attorney General's Office and the Public Prosecutors places us in the vanguard of the struggle" a
There is an "almost perfect" correlation between the reduction of abuses directly attributable to government forces and the increase in abuses directly imputable to paramilitary bands. The paramilitaries stated aim is to establish themselves as the third force in the Colombian conflict, alongside the regime and the leftist guerrillas. There are also signs of a sustained offensive to pressure the population in many areas to elect mayors sympathetic to the paramilitaries in the October 1997) municipal elections. * *The author is a Colombian human rights activist Notes 1. Gallon, Gustavo. Autoritarsio en Ascenso, Comision Colombian de Juristas, 1996, p.i 2. Coordinacion Belga por Colombia, European Conference on Human Rights in Colombia. 3. Decrees 717 and 900 4. Gallon, Gustavo. Op. Cit. p.3 5. Human Rights Watch. Colombia. The Networks of Assassins in Colombia. The military-paramilitary association and the USA, Washington, Nov. 1996, p.7 6. Mimeographed Document. III Čumbre Nacional Movimiento Autodefensas de Colombia, p.6-7 12 International Viewpoint
Neo-liberal measures have escalated with a vengeance during the past decade as the war of the 1980s wound down. In December 1996, leftist guerrillas and Guatemala's military strongmen signed a peace treaty formally ending the America's worst genocide of the century. But as Cindy Forster* explains, the social war against the impoverished majority continues unabated. Peace in Guatemala may allow an era of limited rights for labour activists: before, they risked death or exile. But management is mounting more sophisticated union-busting techniques than ever before. And despite a few lone voices, the political elite has closed ranks in support of the neo-liberal policies of President Alvaro Arzu. In addition, the military remains a significant power. As the prospect of a less violent society glimmers on the horizon, forms of protest by the poor are being criminalised.
Ever since the military attempted to refurbish its image by turning over the presidency to civilians in 1985, the Guatemalan state has promoted a neo-liberal agenda. The current policies are different only in scale. In May 1996 the newly installed Arzu administration repealed public employees right to strike. By June 1996, Arzu's National Action Party (PAN) which controls the National Assembly, approved mass layoffs of state workers who had already suffered the loss of thousands of jobs. In the countryside, a new law dramatically increased the penalty for land occupations, one of the few tactics available to thousands of peasant farmers who have been sacked from the plantations.
The privatisation of the telephone company and electricity services are moving full speed ahead. Meanwhile, attempts have been derailed to reform the income tax scale - one of the most unequal in the Americas according to the US Agency for International Development (AID) - and the sales tax was raised from 7% to 10% to soak more from the poor majority.
"The government is trying to make us collapse from sheer exhaustion, and they're doing it with the help of the army and business," said Carlos Diaz of the independent labour federation Unsitragua. "They' ve shut down every legal avenue, leaving us no choice but to defy the law and take to the
As head of the sugar growers association and a member of the joint chambers of commerce, agriculture, finance and industry
(CACIF), Arzu has for years been promoting structural adjustment and privatisation.
Businessmen recognised his efectiveness by "investing" 100 million quetzales (US $17 million) to install him in the National Palace, according to union leader Adolfo Lacs.
Arzu rode to victory on a wave of anti-government retoric. But the rich are not leaving the political scene. Instead, they are restructuring the state and severing its ties to the poor. Politicians share increasingly closer links with the economic elites who benefit from neo-liberalism. At the end of the 20th century, 17 families control the lion's share of the nation's wealth.
The tight knit agro-industrial and financial-military elite includes those who have made fortunes in drug trafficking, the civil war, and the Bomba Monetaria, the "monetary bomb" of the 1980s, the brainchild of the generals then in power, who paid exporters two-and-one-half to four times the value of every dollar they earned in foreign exchange with the idea of boosting the value of the Guatemalan currency. With this, the generals hoped to keep the Quetzal on a par with the dollar. The attempt not only failed, but substantially contributed to the country's current financial woes.
The government's loss was the private sector's gain. It was a piñata (gift) for the rich, in and out of uniform. Different sectors of the elite - industrial, agricultural, commercial, military - formed new banks to invest the bonanza, and to offer low-interest loans to themselves in their various corporate guises. Today, many of these banks manage or co-manage agro-export plantations serving the US and European markets. They stand in the forefront of applying neo-liberal strategies — downsizing, speed-ups, and replacing permanent with temporary labourers.
Economist Jorge Gonzalez del Valle, a former World Bank official who ran for election as vice president on the "Frente" (Democratic Front for a New Guatemala) ticket in the elections that brought Arzu to power, said "Guatemala must not return (for the fourth time in its history) to the perverse cycle of governments that privatise what does not belong to them.". The "Frente," a new left coalition, won third place in the presidential elections, their first electoral challenge, despite scant funds and several assassinations of militants.
In Washington, free trade has replaced the Cold War as the force driving US policy in Latin America. Its chief aim is to deregulate national economies in preparation for free trade agreements, which inherently give the advantage to the stronger over the weaker economies. According to AID, Guatemala's entry into the free trade club is "essential for its sustainable development, and a major US foreign policy objective."
the heels of genocide
Both the US and the European Union are using their General System of Preferences to pave the way for free trade by widening the number of tariff-free products. Many observers argue that it was the international lending agencies that forced the Guatemalan military to make peace with the guerrillas.
Central America is slated to sign a free trade agreement in the year 2005. Before then, Guatemala and El Salvador plan to eliminate all customs duties and create a single market embracing half the Central American population. The technocrats of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are holding rounds of talks to form a "northern triangle" of Central American nations, and hence a stronger unit to negotiate free trade with Mexico, the nearest northern giant. Mexico and Guatemala have also created a joint program for their border economy, an area that happens to embrace the heartland of the Zapatista rebellion, which erupted in part to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ominously, the Guatemalan military and its murderous elite troops, the Kaibiles, have directly engaged in counter-insurgency against the Mexican rebels. Silent scourge in the countryside
The most well-hidden story of the neoliberal onslaught in Guatemala is taking place in the countryside. The agro-export elite are gutting job security and calling it "modernisation.' Agricultural workers are being sacked and driven out of their plantation housing by the tens of thousands. They are forced to beg for work, often on the same plantations where their parents grew old and their grandparents are buried. Sugar workers are cutting up to eight tons of cane a day where in 1980 they were cutting one or two tons, according to University of CaliforniaBerkeley doctoral student Liz Oglesby.
Guatemala's economy remains overwhelmingly agricultural. And across the plantation belt, landowners are replacing a labour force of year-round workers who enjoy traditional rights to housing and a corn plot, with temporary workers, usually contracted for two-week stints, and employed for a maximum of five months during the year. Plantation owners have created a vast, chronically under-employed and migrant pool of workers. In the process, they have systematically degraded working conditions in the agro-export industry, the main "motor" of the national economy.
In cases where it is possible to track falling wage rates, workers forced from permanent into temporary status are working longer hours, and doing more work, for the same daily pay.
Mass layoffs represent a new dynamic -a new war - alongside the extreme levels of labour abuse planters have always felt entitled to practice. The ensuing battles enter the news as land occupations, because the planters take their former tenants to court on charges of criminal trespassing.
The state overwhelmingly supports the landowners. Congress recently increased the penalty for occupying plantations to six years in jail. In effect, this law renders illegal a critical weapon in the organising arsenal of rural labour. A few embattled rural unions have held the line against layoffs while thousands of other workers have succumbed. Across the south coast, tractors are bulldozing the old plantation housing, burying an era that began in the 1870s with indentured servants, and that was softened in the 1940s with legal obligations and labour protections that are now being demolished.
The mainstream press is uninterested in this devastation in the countryside. It is, however, reporting the consequences: a flood of some 200,000 Guatemalans - up to 3,000 a month - who have gone north in search of work on the Mexican side of the border. Many migrants to Mexico cite the growers' widespread practice of refusing to pay back wages, which the owners usually admit they
Some attacks on rural labour rights are linked to strategies of modernisation. Others are merely gratuitous. Some of the richest individuals in Guatemala are locked in battle with campesino unions over payment of the minimum wage. Increasingly, farm and plantation owners have constructed facades of corporate ownership to circumvent the labour law. This summer US trade unionists were told that Finca La Torre's banker owners
Guatemala have idea" who, in fact, owns the plantation. At the same time, the banker-planters were telling their *employees that they would be fired should they continue to sell corn to local trade unionists. In the words of the farm administration, "Let them die of starvation." Neo-liberal union busting
In the countryside, bosses are more ready than their urban counterparts to resort to violence because they consider the peasantry's blood to be cheap, without political cost or economic consequence. Urban management strategies are not so straightforward. The owners of the Rayo-Vac battery factory employ psychologists to persuade workers to compete against each other. Maquilas often hire human relations personnel, sensitive to the workers' feelings, to balance out the line supervisors who yell insults and slap people. Banks, meanwhile, are signing up droves of temporary workers. They frequently limit new hires to one-year contracts, in order to starve out existing unions. In the new private companies that repair all the nation's paved roads, now that state road maintenance utilities have been privatised, only temporary workers are hired. which means unions are a virtual impossibility. Elsewhere, total quality management circles promote individual competition, and when this fails, workers are urged to join solidarista associations, a version of company unionism.
Solidarista associations are as ubiquitous in the countryside as in the capital. They offer interesting evidence of the unified strategies of urban and rural employers. The associations operate on the old patronage
May 1997 #288 13
* Guatemala model, parcelling out cheap appliances and mountain bikes to workers willing to quit their unions.
In the neo-liberal economy, the presence of cheap and abundant labour in Guatemala's rural hinterland plays the same role as rock bottom wages in places like Haiti. Many maquila owners have shut down city operations and opened up in Mayan villages.
Unfortunately, rural and urban workers often conceive of their struggles as a world apart. Much of this can be attributed to the apartheid of race. Most rural Guatemalans belong to indigenous communities, with their own language and traditions. Most city dwellers aspire to a Spanish-speaking, mestizo (mixed race) identity.
Poverty runs so deep on the plantations that many of the urban poor view the agro-export zone as their worst competition, a kind of inferno that drags down labour standards. The opposite is closer to the truth. Farm worker strikes since the late 1970s have mobilised the nation's largest workforce and, indirectly, slowly driven up the minimum wage for city jobs. This is a chain reaction not lost on Guatemalan managers, who hammer at cultural and ideological differences to fracture the working poor. State workers and the guillotine
"Our heads are already on the guillotine," says Raul Cerezo of the road workers union. Arzu shrank a 12,000-strong workforce of road workers, 97% unionised, to just 600 workers. Then the government urged the laidoff workers to apply for their old jobs under new, private employers, at a wage cut almost in half, from Q28 to Q15 a day. Most refused the offer. "The government argues the necessity for decentralisation, but we say it's all a ruse to carry out a very well-structured plan to crush state workers," said Cerezo. Adding insult to injury, union workers have been called in to redo the new companies shoddy road building.
The state is doing its best to undercut the effectiveness of public workers. A smear campaign in the media calls state workers "bureaucrats" and "incompetent." Meanwhile the cost of newspaper and radio ads has doubled and quadrupled, so unions must resort to leaflets as their only medium for informing the public.
Despite this assault, a number of public sector unions have crafted imaginative strategies against downsizing. In place of privatisation, they advocate decentralisation to open up the field to private competitors, while maintaining the state companies. Telephone workers drafted a de-monopolisation plan based on trained workers, protecting a proportion of union jobs, and keeping some measure of public ownership to safeguard the public interest in affordable phone service. At the agricultural development bank, the union has advocated the bank's transformation into a user co-operative for thousands of small farmers, an idea that delighted customers but
Some public sector unions view their demise as inevitable, while others are persuaded they can save the patient even if they 14 International Viewpoint lose limbs. Mario Antonio Cristales of the electrical workers union, for example, questions the validity of the anti-strike law, saying, "We've had a strike every year although there was always some kind of law prohibiting it. We should see this new law as reason to charge up our batteries and confront privatisation head-on."
Occasionally the privatising mania has sown new militancy among workers. For instance, when the state fired 1,500 forestry workers, including half the union's executive committee (which is illegal), the remaining non-union workers were furious and organised a far more powerful union than the one that had been busted. For them at least, adversity has built union loyalty among the rank and file that have allowed for broader strategies and weathered heavier attacks from management. The not-so-quiet war on trade unionists
Fewer trade unionists are being killed or tortured than in the past when thousands, if not tens of thousands, gave their lives in the struggle whose death toll reached 150,000 since the 1960s. Today, instead of outright murder, plantation and factory owners are using different methods. Thousands of workers are being laid off, phased out, and categorically denied access to unions by the juggernaut of neo-liberal reforms. "As trade unionists we need to become far more agile and astute since the repression is not occurring with bullets so much as through technical strategies," says Carlos Diaz of Unsitragua union federation.
Free trade initiatives have forced business to clean up Guatemala's reputation as one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a trade unionist. Under the General System of Preferences with the US, a clause promising that labour rights shall be honoured has led to repeated warnings against the Guatemalan government, owing to gross violations of child labour, pay and safety laws documented by the Chicagobased Guatemala Labour and Education Project (GLEP). The US refused to lift the probation this year, until the Guatemalan government shows that unions have been given the chance to evaluate the new labour code being steamrollered through the National Assembly.
The GLEP has moved mountains working together with the union in the factory that sews Phillips Van Heusen garments. This is one of the few maquila unions that has survived. In March 1997, after years of struggle, the union won an agreement from the company to negotiate in good faith. This will be the only union contract in the industry, achieved through the difficult chemistry of union strength inside the factory, and grassroots pressure from US labour and human rights activists.
As with human rights violations more generally, those committing the abuses are being forced to act with greater subtletv Maquila workers report that supervisors still hit workers, but less frequently. Managers fire potential troublemakers more quickly, to avoid any possibility of organising unions.
"Fear of management retaliation has grown so strong that it's become extremely difficult to even say the word "union"" in most factories and maquilas," says Diaz. Victory, of a sort
International attention has achieved a very odd but important victory: the management and military types who plot attacks on labour seem to work harder to cover their trail, or else try to disguise their attacks as common crimes. Union leaders are experiencing a tidal wave of assaults and car thefts. These attacks are suspicious because most of the stolen cars were ready for the junk heap, while the assaults have occurred without robberies. The victims request anonymity, because they fear public denunciations will escalate the attacks, and eventually force
Less has changed than the Arzu administration would have the world believe. In 1995 two trade union leaders were murdered, while in June 1996, a shantytown dwellers association leader was shot twice, but miraculously survived. In 1996 a leader of the now-defunct union of the Urban and Rural Development Ministry was kidnapped during the union's struggle against privatisation, but
Trade unionists believe military intelligence continues to work in tandem with individual business or plantation owners. The Campesino Unity Committee says the plantations are crawling with G-2, government spies who often moonlight in death squads. Death threats are routine; the same is true for trade unionists in maquilas, banks, owned construction, gas and electric companies. All members of the co-ordinating committee of IUTE, the public sector employees federation, have received personalised threats.
For businessmen this kinder, gentler terror - as opposed to the physical mutilation and constant deaths of the recent past - yield very real rewards. Threats have driven a number of union officers out of their workplaces. When the threats fail to achieve their purpose, employers resort to the old tactics. For example the bank workers' leader, Reynaldo Gonzalez, gambled on publicity. but in 1996 escalating threats against his life, and his sister's abduction, rape and torture forced him into temporary exile. Carlos Salguero, Public Works Union general secretary, is another who denounced the threats against him; last December he fought off attackers and briefly went into exile. In early 1997, union leaders at the Mi-Kwan maquila factory were seized by armed men who entered the factory, then took them to a police station where they were beaten.
Human rights violations are becoming less vicious and less numerous. But few Guatemalans are being fooled, because the violence bears all the traditional trademarks. Labour organisers have survived the worst of the death-squad terror, only to face neoliberalism. Justice remains a distant vision. * * The author teaches Latin American and labour history in Southern California, and works with the labour solidarity committee California Trade Unionists in Support of Guatemala