"Q-tip, Q-tip," Karen Cardona croons as she caresses the little white footed cat on the floor of a house in Little Village, a mostly Mexican neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest side. The 9-year-old is outgoing and ebullient as she trots around the house, taking breaks from her homework to pet Q-tip and a Rottweiler mix named Iris.
Like her father, Luis Adolfo Cardona, Karen loves animals. Cardona had, in fact, wanted to be a veterinarian in their home country of Colombia, where his house was filled with dogs, cats, hamsters and other animals. He also was an elite level soccer player who considered trying out for the pros but, because of concerns over supporting his family, ended up working at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in the town of Carepa.
And that job choice, ultimately, is what forced Cardona, his wife Luzmary and daughter Karen to flee their beloved home for a new life a continent away in Chicago. The Cardonas left Colombia fearing for their lives because 44-year-old Luis was a leader of the labor union at the Coke bottling plant. Cardona started working at the Carepa plant in 1984 after other workers recruited him to play on the company soccer team.
Two years later, the workers organized with one of the major unions in Columbia, SINALTRAINAL, to demand better wages, benefits and working conditions. The company owners and managers were outraged and employed members of one of the brutal, armed paramilitary groups, which operate with near impunity in Colombia to do their dirty work (see side story, "Paramilitary Violence").
As the union was being organized, members of one of the country’s most notorious paramilitary groups, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (UAC is the Spanish acronym), began threatening union organizers. They would make phone calls to their homes and leave threatening notes under their doors. "Then they came directly to the leaders at the union hall and said if you don’t leave, we will kill you," said Cardona, in Spanish. "That was happening at all the Coke plants in Colombia."
The bottling plants aren’t owned by Coca-Cola itself but by other companies that contract with the giant Atlanta-based beverage company. The Carepa plant is operated by the company Bebidas y Alimentos, which is owned by Richard Kirby of Key Biscayne, Florida. Kirby, through his lawyer, has denied all allegations that his company has sponsored the terror campaigns.
Paramilitary Union Busting
For decades, union members all over Colombia have been subject to intimidation, terror and murder by paramilitary members working at the behest of owners of both national and international businesses. The Colombian trade union federation CUT reports that 45 trade unionists were murdered in the first eight months of 2003, and 117 or more were murdered in 2002. (No later figures are available.)
In the mid-1990s, the campaign against the unions at Coca-Cola bottling plants heated up. In December of 1996, paramilitaries came to the Carepa plant in the morning shooting and killing the union secretary who was involved in on-going negotiations for a better contract.
That same day, paramilitaries armed with pistols kidnapped Cardona, who was the secretary of recreation and sports for the union — a minor leadership role that made him, nevertheless, a prime target. "They took me outside the town and said they were going to take me to a center where they torture and kill people," he recounts. "They said they were going to kill me. I was terrified."
Seven armed paramilitaries forced him into a car spiriting him away, and as they were exiting the car to get on motorbikes Cardona saw his chance to escape. "We had to cross the street, and as we were in the middle of the street I saw that I had to escape then or never," he said. Cardona was able to ditch the gunmen and ran to a nearby police station. Even though the police generally support the paramilitaries and grant them wide latitude, he noted, they couldn’t allow the paramilitaries to take him in broad daylight, so for the time being he was safe.
"When I entered the police station words had left me; I was so afraid," he said. "I couldn’t stop shaking." He ran home and got Luzmary and Karen, hastily packed some belongings and headed to the union’s national office in Bogotá.
Meanwhile that same night the union’s offices were set afire, destroying their equipment and records. And the next day heavily-armed paramilitaries descended on the plant, gathered the workers and told them if they didn’t quit the union by 4:00 pm they’d be killed.
With the company and the paramilitaries working in concert, Cardona said that once the workers were terrorized in this way, the company officials stepped in telling them that they had good pay and benefits, so therefore, didn’t need a union. "But we had gotten all of that because of the union," Cardona said. "If it wasn’t for the union we would have the lowest pay, the worst benefits."
Fearing for their lives, about 60 of the some 100 plant workers quit and fled the area. The union was crushed and new workers were hired at wages less than half what the union members had been making — the union wage of about $380 dropped to $130 a month, which is not a living wage in Colombia.
Paramilitaries camped outside the plant for two months, intimidating the remaining workers. Five more unionists were slain between mid-1994 and the end of 1996. The wife of a union leader was also murdered as part of the terror campaign.
Meanwhile Cardona spent nine months in Bogotá. He was in a protection program for victims of violence, but the program lasted only six months and then he was on his own again. He attempted to live in other cities but the paramilitaries would try to hunt him down. In 1999 he went back to Bogotá, still constantly under threat of murder. "They [the paramilitaries] were going from town to town asking about me," he said. "They were trying to kill me."
He sought protection from the government and the union, but there were no adequate programs. "The union gave me a bulletproof vest," he said, and a government ministry gave him a cell phone. "But if someone’s looking to kill you, what will a cell phone do?" he lamented.
Then he found out about a program sponsored by the AFL-CIO in the U.S. to protect Colombian union members. The program, which continues to be active, brings union members to the U.S. for a year to give them respite from danger. Cardona applied for the program and was accepted, arriving in Chicago in April 2002. But since his family couldn’t secure visas, they remained in Colombia.
He appealed to the United Steel Workers of America while in Chicago hoping that the union would help his family escape. He worried about their safety since the threats of violence were on-going. He realized his family was in serious danger when he, at one point, called them and someone else answered — but didn’t say anything. It was soon after that, that the United Steel Workers came through with helping him secure tourist visas for his wife and daughter who joined him in Chicago some six months after he had arrived.
The family recently applied for political asylum and was accepted, making them permanent legal residents of the U.S. Cardona will also likely be able to bring his ailing mother to the U.S. shortly. He has two other adult children still in Colombia, but he says they aren’t in danger since they live in another city (Medellin) and they aren’t as widely-known as his kids.
Staying in Touch
Most of his friends from the bottling plant either moved to other cities or renounced their union association, no longer making them a target of violence. While none of Cardona’s acquaintances are in grave danger now, other unionists at the bottling plant in Colombia continue to be threatened with murder.
These days, Cardona communicates by e-mail with workers at other unionized Coke bottling plants and spends virtually all of his time in the U.S. fighting for labor and union rights for trade unionists in Colombia. He constantly travels to give speeches related to the "Campaign to Boycott Killer Coke" organized by the Chicago-based Colombia Action Network and various labor and human rights groups. In his activism, Cardona has helped students at various colleges convince their institutions to break contracts with Coke, including Lake Forest College near Chicago which switched to PepsiCo products earlier this year.
On a blustery winter afternoon as Karen played with Q-tip, Cardona was preparing to leave for North Carolina to speak to students there. He was also anticipating an upcoming meeting with a Coca-Cola representative that was being set up by a local university. So far, he says, Coca-Cola has given him no answers or even apologies.
A letter written "on behalf" of Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Douglas Daft to the public, stated that there was "no evidence" to support "outrageous allegations against the company and its bottling partners."
But Cardona believes Coke could hold its bottlers accountable if the multinational corporation really wanted to. "Coke says they have nothing to do with events in Colombia, that these are about social problems," he says. "But it’s their responsibility. And the owners of the plants are North Americans. They don’t want unions because they’ll have to pay higher salaries, so they tacitly endorse the violence against unionists."
Meanwhile, now that they have asylum, Cardona can look for a steady job and get the family an apartment of their own. He wants to find full-time work as a union organizer, but if that doesn’t pan out he might do construction or something else. "The most important thing is supporting my family," he said. "Sometimes people get so dedicated to the union struggle that they forget about their family."
His family is relieved to have obtained asylum in order to start a new life here, but the situation is bittersweet as they look forward to the prospect of moving back to their country. However, one of the provisions of the asylum is that they can’t return to Colombia for five years — and, even at that, Cardona fears it will still be too dangerous.
Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based writer, a reporter for The Washington Post and an instructor for the Urban Youth Int’l Journalism Institute.
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Paramilitary Violence in Columbia Though the current government of President Alvaro Uribe has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the armed, highly organized paramilitary groups who are held responsible for hundreds of murders and acts of violence each year, it is common knowledge among human rights groups and others familiar with Colombia that the groups continue to act with near total impunity. This summer the largest paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, agreed to lay down its arms. But human rights groups don’t take this claim seriously and say paramilitaries are still perpetrating acts of violence against rural communities, trade unionists and political dissidents. Paramilitary members are rarely prosecuted for their crimes, and there is much evidence showing they are partially-funded and armed by the government and/or the Colombian military, which is known to act somewhat autonomously of the government. Uribe’s government, including the municipal police, does take steps to protect victims of paramilitary violence, as Cardona’s story shows. But most Colombians know this protection is limited since governmental corruption is so rampant and links between government forces and the paramilitaries are a well-known secret in civil society. Close to 4,000 people are murdered for political reasons in Colombia each year, and the Colombian Council of Jurists says that three quarters of these murders are committed by paramilitary members. In Sept. 2002, U.S. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said, "The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [and members of the two other major paramilitary groups] practice indefensible, illegitimate acts of terror." — KL |
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