The Nestlé logo.
Photo Credit: Nestle/Wikimedia Commons
May 17, 2013
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On the night of September 5, 2005, two paramilitaries from the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia hijacked Luciano Romero’s taxi as
he drove through his home city of Valledupar. They took him to a nearby
farm, where they tortured then murdered him. His body was found the
next day, dumped behind an army garrison, with a handkerchief stuffed in
his mouth and 50 stab wounds; one more victim in Colombia’s dirty war
against trade unionists.
However, seven years on, and while
Romero may only be one of approximately 3,000 victims of that war, his
murder is now taking center stage in a legal battle to define corporate
responsibility in conflict zones. This battle is taking place not in
Colombia, but in Switzerland, home to one of the world’s biggest
multi-nationals and Romero’s former employers – Nestle.
The
struggle to hold Nestle accountable for its alleged role in Romero’s
death began with the 2007 conviction of Romero’s killers – itself a
rarity in a country with a 95% impunity rate in unionist murders. When
passing sentence, Judge José Nirio Sánchez ordered an investigation into
the intellectual authors of the crime that would scrutinize the role of
not only the paramilitary warlord who commanded Romero’s killers, but
also the management at the Nestle subsidiary where Romero worked.
While
that investigation has yet to show any sign of progress, the case has
been taken up by Romero’s union, SINALTRAINAL, and human rights group
the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). In
2012, the organizations filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland
demanding the prosecution of Nestle for Romero’s murder.
The
powdered milk factory where Romero worked, CICOLAC, was Nestlé’s first
investment in Colombia, when it opened the site in 1944. The
multi-national sold CICOLAC in 1982, only to buy it back again in 1998.
At the time of Nestlé’s return to Valledupar, the northern state of
Cesar, where the city is located, was under the control of the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary army.
According
to the testimonies of demobilized AUC leaders, the paramilitaries had
been invited into the region by members of the region’s economic elite,
who were tired of the campaign of constant harassment, kidnappings and
extortion waged by leftist guerilla groups. Cesar became a fiefdom of
Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias ‘Jorge 40,’ a member of Valledupar high
society whose paramilitary empire stretched across north east
Colombia.
The Cesar paramilitary block commanded by Jorge 40 was
financed by the region’s cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other land
owners and economic interests. Among them was CICOLAC – according to AUC
Leader Salvatore Mancuso, who named the company in the hearings that
followed the demobilization of the AUC in 2006.
The paramilitaries
in Cesar employed their favored terror tactics in the battle against
the guerrillas, and launched a dirty war against anyone they deemed a
guerrilla “collaborator” – community leaders, leftist activists,
educators and, above all, unionists.
In 1993, Harry Triana became
the first CICOLAC unionist in Valledupar to fall victim to that war when
killed in front of his children and work colleagues. The next came in
1996, when José Manuel Becerra Pacheco was beheaded and Alejandro Matias
Vanstrahlen was shot. The following year, Toribio De La Hoz was shot
while celebrating his 42nd birthday in his home and in 1999 Victor
Mieles and his wife were abducted in front of one of Nestlé’s Cesar
factories and later murdered.
Despite the violence, Luciano Romero
emerged as a leading figure in the local union movement. “He was a
person who had really absorbed the union’s values,” said Alfonso Baron, a
friend of Romero’s and a local SINALTRAINAL leader who has worked at
CICOLAC since 1986. “He was a good friend, a good companion, he showed
solidarity and fraternity, he was respectful, a hard worker and he
looked out for others.”
However, Romero’s activities soon
attracted unwanted attentions. In 1988, the Colombian judicial police
abducted Romero and tortured him in a secret prison for a week,
according to a legal statement submitted by the unionist. By the late
nineties, Romero’s work at the union and social activism had attracted
the attentions of the paramilitaries, and he started receiving death
threats.
The relationship between Romero and CICOLAC was strained.
In 1999, a bomb went off at the factory, injuring one person – Luciano
Romero. The company CEO, Carlos Fajardo, accused Romero of planting the
bomb. The implication – that Romero was working with guerrillas – did
not go unnoticed. It was a slur the union heard time and again from the
company management, and especially from Fajardo.
“When someone
says we are guerrillas it is dangerous,” said Baron. “In this country
saying these things publically is risky because you don’t know who is
there, who is listening, who is talking.”
The smear persisted even
after Romero’s death but was finally laid to rest by the judge in the
trial of Romero’s killers, who dismissed attempts to link Romero to the
guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) as unfounded.
As
well as the accusations the union worked with the guerrillas, Fajardo
also hinted at his own connections to the paramilitaries. “To ingratiate
himself with the union he would ring us up and warn us to be careful
because we’re going to ‘see some things’” said Baron. Fajardo warned
union members several times that Romero was on a death list, once saying
he could protect the unionist as long as he remained at the company,
according to witnesses.
The relationship between Romero and the
company began to break down terminally in 2002, when Romero led taut
negotiations over an expiring labor agreement. What should have been
standard negotiations quickly descended into a crisis. “It was a very
tense situation,” said Baron. “The company launched an attack to strip
away all our social and economic rights.”
The union began to
prepare for a strike. Within days, the paramilitaries began running
night patrols and distributing threatening leaflets, and word reached
the unionists that if they went on strike they would be killed. Rumors
of a death list with Luciano Romero’s name on it began to circulate.
According
to witnesses, notorious paramilitaries appeared at the factory when the
union was holding protest meetings. Among them was Hughes Rodriguez
Fuentes, also known as “Comandante Barbie.”
Rodriguez was a
finance chief for the AUC’s Martierres War Front of Cesar – the
paramilitary unit that Romero’s assassins belonged to. The authorities
in both Colombia and the United States believe he was a trusted ally of
Jorge 40, and one of the warlord’s principal money launderers and fund
raisers. He was also one of CICOLAC’s milk suppliers, and, according to
witnesses, a personal friend of Carlos Fajardo.
During the labor
dispute, the CICOLAC management told Rodriguez and the other milk
suppliers that the union’s labor demands would push down milk prices
while a strike would lead to the closure of the plant.
Also among
those CICOLAC milk suppliers was Hernando Molina Araujo, a future
Governor of Cesar, whose term was cut short after he conspired with the
AUC to assassinate a local university professor. Another was Gustavo
Gnecco, member of an infamous family of local power brokers who moved
easily between the worlds of legitimate business and the drug trade,
politics and paramilitarism.
With tensions building and violence
looking likely, the union cancelled the strike. Not long after, Romero
was one of nine workers, six of them union leaders, fired by CICOLAC –
illegally according to the union. Ten months later, the company fired
99% of the workforce, and sold CICOLAC to DPA – a company jointly owned
by Nestle and New Zealand based Fonterra. The workforce for the renamed
DPA-CICOLAC was forced to accept reduced terms, and for many of them,
temporary contracts. According to Baron, ten years and two rounds of
labor negotiations later, workers still earn less than they did in 2002.
Despite
the end of the dispute and Romero’s sacking, the threats against the
union continued. In 2004, he went into exile through a protection
program. However, he returned to Valledupar in 2005. “I would imagine
his return was influenced by the emptiness of not being with his family,
of not seeing his wife and children,” said Baron. “Being away from your
home country is a form of slow death.”
By September, Romero was
preparing to denounce Nestle as witness at the Permanent Peoples
Tribunal in Switzerland. He was also working on the complaint he had
filed against the company for unfair dismissal, and organizing a protest
to commemorate the second anniversary of the mass lay off of the
CICOLAC workers.
Just days before the protest was scheduled to
take place, Jose Ustariz Acuña and Jhonatan David Contrera received
orders from their AUC commanders to abduct, interrogate and murder an
ELN guerrilla pretending to be a taxi driver by the name of Luciano
Romero.
Neither the union nor ECCHR accuse Nestle of ordering
Romero’s murder. However, they insist the company is responsible for his
death. “The paramilitaries punished us precisely because we made
demands of the company,” said Edgar Paez, a member of the union’s
national leadership. “They have a very close relationship that does not
permit us to exercise our right to organize, to unionize.”
Responsibility
not only lies with the CICOLAC management but also with the Nestle
parent company, according to Claudia Mueller-Hoff from ECCHR. “They are
culpable because of omission, they had a duty to act, they had a duty to
protect,” she said. “This risky behavior of the subsidiary is something
where the Nestle parent company should have intervened because it was
brought to their attention on several occasions.”
Nestle is far
from the first multinational to be linked to anti-union violence and
paramilitarism in Colombia and there have been investigations into
subsidiaries of Chiquita, Drummond and Coca Cola. Mueller-Hoff though,
is hoping this case will be different as it has the potential to help
define what a company’s obligations are in conflict zones. “Parent
companies need to look into their impact worldwide even if it’s an
impact that is generated through their subsidiaries,” she said.
Nestle
firmly denied it shares responsibility for Romero’s death. In a written
statement for AlterNet, the company said: “We have never used violence,
nor have we associated with criminals. We have no responsibility
whatsoever, directly or indirectly, neither by action nor omission for
the murder of Luciano Romero.”
However, Nestle declined to comment
on the relationship between the CICOLAC management, the milk suppliers
and paramilitaries, or on the accusations of reckless slander against
the management, and the events of the labor dispute. It also declined to
comment on Salvatore Mancuso’s testimony that CICOLAC had funded the
AUC.
Progress in the case has so far been hampered by legal
wrangling. In early May, the five Nestle executives named in the
complaint avoided the possibility of prosecution when the statute of
limitations for the crime expired after the Swiss courts had argued over
jurisdiction for a year. “It seems to be an attempt to avoid dealing
with the important legal questions at stake,” said Mueller-Hoff. “The
Swiss public prosecutor has even fallen behind our relatively modest
expectations.”
However, the ECCHR, SINALTRAINAL and Romero’s
family are still optimistic the second target of the complaint – Nestle
as a company – can still be prosecuted. Under Swiss law, the statute of
limitations only begins for a company when it ends the practices it is
accused of. According to SINALTRAINAL, this has yet to happen.
While
Jorge 40 and the AUC have now demobilized, paramilitary successor
groups, often led by former mid-level commanders, continue to terrorize
unionists working at Nestle today.
In 2011, Roberto Gonzalez
became the 13th Nestle unionist to be murdered when he was shot in the
back in Valledupar. In 2012, 23 SINALTRAINAL members who are current or
former Nestle workers received death threats.
“Every time there is
a labor dispute, there is a leap in paramilitarism,” said Paez. “The
threats come, people are followed, there are some really difficult
security situations.”
Some of the threats received last year
directly referenced protests SINALTRAINAL had led against Nestle,
including one promising to “exterminate” the union for their campaign at
Nestlé’s Bugalagrande factory. The tone of the threats has changed
little since the paramilitary heyday and recipients remain, as in one
threat sent by neo-paramilitary group the Urabeños, “guerrilla sons of
bitches disguised as unionists.”
Paez believes the links between
paramilitarism and the landowning elite who supply DPA-CICOLAC with milk
have also changed little. “DPA is still buying milk and they buy this
milk from these men, who in some way have connections to
paramilitarism,” he said.
While the struggle to hold corporations
accountable for their role in Colombia’s dirty war continues, those on
the front lines of that war have little doubt as to who it has benefited
from the violence. “In Luciano’s case who won?” said Baron. “The state
won because there is one man less in the struggle, the company won
because they benefited directly and above all, the bosses won because
they managed to show that with violence you can bring an end to
unionism.”
James Bargent is a freelance journalist based in Colombia.
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