Colombia:Disclosures of a link between paramilitary death squads and Colombia's intelligence services have badly damaged President Alvaro Uribe, writes Juan Foreroin Santa Marta.
Zully Codina was a mother, veteran hospital worker and union activist.
The last role was the one that cost her her life at the hands of paramilitary death squads, whose records show they collaborated with the country's intelligence service to liquidate her and other union activists.
Codina was killed on November 11th, 2003, when a gunman pumped three bullets into her head moments after she kissed her family goodbye and walked out of her Santa Marta home. Her murder remains unsolved, as do those of the vast majority of the 400 union members killed since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002.
"For me, her death has been irreparable," said Rafael Sanchez, Codina's husband.
Recent disclosures about the purported role of the Colombian intelligence service, the Administrative Security Department (DAS) in the murder of Codina and several other union leaders has ignited a political firestorm here that is reaching Washington just as the Bush administration is fighting for congressional approval of a free-trade pact with Colombia, the third-largest recipient of US aid.
Some US legislators have already voiced concerns. "You cannot put together a free-trade agreement when there isn't freedom for workers in terms of their basic international rights," says Sander M. Levin (Democrat, Michigan), chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade.
The Uribe administration's efforts have been hurt by the February arrest of the DAS's former chief, Jorge Noguera, who was charged with working with paramilitary members as they infiltrated the political establishment and silenced adversaries along the Caribbean coast. The illegal militias, organised a generation ago to fight Marxist rebels, have morphed into a Mafia-style organisation dedicated to drug trafficking and extortion.
A clandestine paramilitary operative named to DAS by Noguera said in a recent interview that the intelligence service compiled lists of union members, along with details about their security, and handed them over to a coalition of paramilitary groups known as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia.
"This list went to Jorge Noguera and he made sure it reached the Self-Defence Forces," said the operative, Rafael Garcia, now in jail and working with prosecutors. "The DAS knows the movements of union members."
Noguera co-ordinated Uribe's run for the presidency in coastal Magdalena state in 2002 and was rewarded with the top job at DAS when Uribe won the election. As the scandal enveloped the agency, Uribe vigorously defended Noguera, calling him "an uncontaminated man and good person" and then naming him consul in Milan, Italy, when the allegations surfaced.
Uribe now says he did not know about Noguera's paramilitary ties. "When he left the DAS, there were no charges of ties with paramilitarism," Uribe told reporters last month, standing next to George Bush during his visit to Bogota.
Uribe's government is the Bush administration's closest ally in Latin America, and has received billions in US aid to curtail violence. But in the midst of intense lobbying in Washington for a trade pact, Uribe has been buffeted by a widening scandal that has linked two dozen current and former congressmen, most of them the president's allies, with paramilitary groups.
The disclosures are now also reaching two US firms here. An Alabama coal company, Drummond, is being sued in US district court by Colombian workers who accuse company executives of contracting with paramilitary groups to kill three union leaders. Colombian prosecutors are also going to investigate the smuggling of 3,000 assault rifles in 2001 to a Chiquita Brands International dock in northern Colombia; the weapons wound up in the hands of paramilitary fighters, according to an extensive report by the Organisation of American States.
The government says its recent disarmament of thousands of paramilitary fighters has reduced the killings of union members, with far fewer slain than in the 1990s, when in some years more than 200 died. A new unit in the attorney general's office is investigating 200 high-profile murders of union members, and a $25 million protection programme has three times the budget it had in 2002.
Even so, 72 union leaders and activists were murdered last year, making Colombia by far the world's most dangerous country for trade unionists, according to the National Union School, a labour research group in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city. Of 2,100 murders of union members since 1991, there have only been 30 convictions.
Interviews with union leaders across northern Colombia show that many activists had either been involved in thorny contract negotiations or had been publicly complaining of corruption when they were killed.
Union leaders say the latest developments have validated the widely held belief that the killing of union leaders was part of a systematic effort to silence critics.
Fabian Palacio, a leader in the hospital workers' union in Atlantic province, said: "The only way to shut us up is to threaten us or, more tragically, to disappear us."
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)