From Colombia, with True Grit
Two public employees from the nation most dangerous to progressive forces, spent months working with AFSCME Council 95 in Puerto Rico. They also spread the news about the perils back home.
By Roger M. Williams
SAN JUAN
There is no fear on the faces of Carlos Alberto Flores and Camilo Gutiérrez when they talk about returning from here to their native land, Colombia. But fear is detectable in their voices, and no wonder. Flores and Gutiérrez are labor leaders who live in what is certifiably the world's most dangerous country for trade unionists.
According to reliable estimates, approximately 200 colombianos and colombianas were killed last year "defending workers' rights," as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions puts it. Almost 2,000 have been killed or have "disappeared" in the past decade, says one of that country's top union leaders. At any given time, many others are in jail or under house arrest.
"It is like a war," says Flores — with all the casualties on one side.
Yet he and Gutiérrez have not only remained active and outspoken in behalf of workers' rights; they have also spent months in Puerto Rico to help our young and growing Council 95, the Servidores Públicos Unidos (SPU), organize Puerto Rican public employees and to spread the alarming facts about Colombia throughout the island. Twin dangers are inherent in those efforts: raising Colombian authorities' suspicions by leaving the country; and, worse, returning after having made something of a name by proclaiming the dangers.
Flores, 49, has for 21 years led the Public Service Workers Union of Colombia in the mountain town where he lives. When he took the Puerto Rico assignment, he was that union's secretary general as well as an operator at an electric-power station. Gutiérrez, 35, belongs to the municipal employees union in the city of Barranquilla. A clerical worker by trade, he was unemployed when the Puerto Rico assignment beckoned.
TIME TO LEAVE. Gutiérrez' unemployment stems directly from the perils of labor leadership in his native land. He serves on his union's exe-cutive committee, and "When one of our top people was killed, I was told that the same thing could happen to me. So I was ready to leave for a while."
Flores tells a similar story. "The threats to activists in my union started when we began fighting privatization and the growing power of multinational corporations. Both the drug lords and the government were against us, and so, of course, were the right-wing paramilitaries. In a year's time, we lost eight leaders, and last January, I learned that somebody was 'looking for' me, too."
Their travels materialized through the Colombia Trade Union Training Program run by the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center. Funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, the International Labor Organization and several AFL-CIO affiliates (AFSCME prominent among them), the program has thus far sent 27 Colombian labor leaders to work with their U.S. counterparts. AFSCME has played host to three of them, the third being a man who helped organize home health care aides in behalf of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees/ AFSCME Local 1199 in New Jersey.
The arrangement with the affiliates, says Brian Finnegan, program coordinator, calls for three days a week working for the particular union — mostly in organizing — and the other two undertaking "solidarity" activities. "But in the midst of an organizing campaign, the people usually wind up giving that six days a week — which is fine with us."
BLITZERS. With financial support from the Solidarity Center, Flores and Gutiérrez took courses for six months at Maryland's George Meany Center for Labor Studies. They arrived in Puerto Rico last November to hook up with SPU, which has enrolled some 23,000 commonwealth workers in an ongoing campaign targeting numerous government departments. The union's next challenge: to build the foundations for organizing the 50,000 municipal workers who are not covered by collective bargaining.
The Colombians quickly established themselves as broad-ranging and effective operatives. "They moved right into the mainstream of our organizing campaign," says José La Luz, SPU's founding director, "including blitzes we were conducting in the Consumer Affairs and the Juvenile and Corrections departments. They did house calls, went to worksite meetings and elsewhere across the whole island." They also made cultural adjustments, including smoothing over differences in Colombian and Puerto Rican Spanish.
In terms of effort and results, declares José Morales, SPU's organizing director, the Colombians "have set an excellent example for our own organizing staff." They've also stood up to obstructionist bosses. When Flores and Gutiérrez visited the headquarters of the parole board, the receptionist checked with the man-ager, then told the organizers curtly, "afuera" — do your business outside. They moved only as far as the building's steps, and ignored dirty looks from the manager when he passed by.
'WHY? WHY?' In addressing most of the island's AFSCME locals about their situation back home, Flores says, he and his partner have gotten "a very good reception. But people are amazed. They ask us, 'Why? Why?' We try to explain."
Change, the Colombians say, will come slowly and with great difficulty, especially given the current government's push to eliminate many laws favorable to workers and cut public-sector employment by 10 percent or more. Colombian labor organizations plan to counter that with a national strike and to enlist broad-ranging support from U.S. unions.
Flores and Gutiérrez returned home in late April, determined to play their part in the upcoming struggles. "If we don't win those," Gutiérrez declares, "it will be very bad for us."
