Bogotá, Colombia, 22-04-2009
Melbourne, Australia 23-04-2009

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From: National trade union of Workers of the food Industry of Colombia - SINALTRAINAL

Dear Australian comrades and resident Latin Americans in that country.

Receive a hug of Solidarity. We are proud to address ourselves to you with this brief message, conveying our impressions on some topics of interest. Allow us first of all, to be quite grateful to LASNET and to the initiators of the Colombia Demand Justice Campaign, who have supported for some time the solidarity with the Colombian people. They have made important endeavours in showing the workers, the trade union organizations and the Australian people what is happening in this part of the world.

We are immersed in a deep crisis provoked by the politics imposed on all the peoples and countries by the owners of big multinational financial capital. These companies have systematically reduced the income of all the workers of the world, they have impoverished big parts of the world’s population, sent them into debt, involving them in impressive speculative bubbles whilst at the same time increasing their exploitation without lifting levels of production. The motive being that consumption was diminishing while the debts of the workers, countries and even non-monopolistic capitalists were rising. The low wages and the unpayable debts, in the middle of an impressive short term rise of the profit of the big global conglomerates, caused an oversupply of goods at the high prices, especially in the sectors where speculation was rife, particularly in the real estate business. The bubble then burst, since it could not continue to be fed by its two fundamental sources: the extraction of high margins in the productive sectors and the plundering of natural resources of the countries of the Third World where the multinationals have an absolute control. The impoverishment experienced by the masses in all countries since the seventies were imposed by the international financial oligarchy on behalf of the capitalist machinery. For our part it will touch us the worst part. The financial oligarchy of the United States, which handles the most broken economy in the world – the one with the most foreign debt, largest trade deficit and highest fiscal deficit on the planet – it now, is endeavouring to unload its crisis in our countries. In the case of Colombia its effect is all the more shocking since it is the most economically dependent country, after Mexico, of the potency of the north. In effect, 50% of our country’s external trade is with this first world potency. Also it is the biggest creditor of foreign debt of Colombia and the nation of origin of the multinationals that control the domestic economy. Equally, the financial Yankee capital controls our strategic resources, financial markets and infrastructures. From this point it has implemented the Plan Colombia as form of occupation of our territory to assure the interests of its financial and multinational groups and simultaneously transform our country into the policeman of the South American region in the service of the empire.

The first objective has to do with the acute trans-nationalisation of the country, deepened immeasurably during the current period of government, a government that is fascist and narco-paramilitary in nature. Today, of the twenty biggest companies that exist in Colombia, 17 are multinationals. Equally, of the top 10 agro-business companies seven are foreign. Of the top 10 petroleum companies, nine are foreign. Of the top 10 telecommunications companies, eight are foreign. In the automotive industry, the top 10 are all foreign, just as in the mining, the iron and steel industries, the tyre and chemical industries. In the public services, eight of the top 10 companies are foreign, whereas in the finance industry five are foreign. This aberrant process of multi-nationalisation of the economy has happened thanks to the imposition of the war on the country.

Making use of a long internal conflict, which began in 1964, but actually is the continuation of the bloody dissolution of the agrarian reforms and the "modernization" imposed by the imperialist governments of the United States during the forties. The multinationals allied themselves with the local financial oligarchy, corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and narco-paramilitaries to form a long term alliance that allowed them to eliminate all social and political opposition. This was achieved by the imposition of a perpetual anti-democratic regime, dependency, widespread impoverishment, the suppression of rights of workers and peasants and other exploited and oppressed social sectors and the savage repression of those that protested.

In this way they conceived the systematic genocide of large sectors of the population by the use of the paramilitary forces in order to clear land so as to hand it over to the multinationals and local financial groups. Mines, lands, strategic territories used to construct infrastructure or to be exploited for tourism were cleared by means of brute force on the part of narco-paramilitaries, those whose acts were protected directly by the state armed forces. Nevertheless, they haven’t limited themselves to expelling from these lands the peasants, indigenous peoples and afro-descendants but they have also repopulated these zones and from there they constructed a political power base expressed in multiple political parties of a fascist tendency, which later were allied to Álvaro Uribe Vélez as president of the republic. The cost to the Colombian population has been enormous. More than 300 thousand dead persons in the last ten years, 4.000 of them trade unionists, more than 30 thousand missing persons, more than 3.500 extrajudicial executions committed by the army during the present government, thousands of exiles and 4 million displaced, almost the half during the government of the current president. It, the government, has agreed to guarantee “the investment confidence” required by the big multinationals, which also guarantees that these same companies take out of the country via routes, almost 30 billion dollars per year.

In the middle of the bacchanal of blood imposed by the empire in Colombia, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has provided the country with more than 10 billion dollars in military aid since 2001, about 4.500 military advisers and has built at least five military bases. These numbers have increased with the use of easily dismantled bases that have popped up recently in Ecuador, with the permanent presence of the South Command, the division of the army of the United States who deals with Latin America, the redeployment of the IV fleet in the Caribbean Sea and the creation of another fleet located in the South American Pacific Ocean. The Colombian government shines as the shame of the subcontinent. Governments of other countries neither act in concert with or want the help of the United States, nor submit easily to its interests. Nationalist, anti-imperialistic and democratic forces have all made gains in all these countries, all except in Colombia, where the infamous use of extreme violence by the multinationals and the local oligarchy supports them to maintain the line.

The popular forces in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia have significantly changed direction towards the left, without even outlining a socialist programme, that have gone about this by implementing measures to nationalise natural resources and infrastructure, protecting the most oppressed and exploited populations and unleashing new economic programmes different from the neoliberal ones. These countries also develop Latin American unity through very important treaties and commercial unions such as MERCOSUR and the ALBA, energy integration by founding Petrosur, financial union through the creation of Banco del Sur, political union with the foundation of UNASAR and the military integration by means of the Treaty for the Defence of South America. Along with these countries there also exists a block of countries that are more timid in their support of social movements of the left, they move between the forces of popular pressure and the ones orientated more to a social-democratic programme. The oligarchies of Brazil, Argentina and Chile have taken the first timid steps to get rid of the stranglehold of the empire. Countries such as Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and even Honduras do not seem to be ready to follow these countries and begin playing some role, which may not be very clear, in the liberating currents that figure on the continent.

This is the panorama, we who have been acting on behalf of and been part of the Colombian trade union movement, have found ourselves in. Due in part to the extreme dependency that has been imposed on us by the financial groups of the United States and Europe, the brutal war that they have imposed on us, the elimination of the individual and collective freedoms and the suppression of political freedoms in our country, which have been enshrined in the current laws. The extreme poverty to which the majority of the population has succumbed, 30 million Colombians are poor, 18 million are indigent, six people a day die of hunger, 90 % of the Colombian workforce earns less than 400 dollars a month and in the present the economic climate unemployment and underemployment has been measured to be 14 million Colombians which is 60 % of the labour force of the country.

The country lives in isolation on the continent due to a foreign policy imposed by the current regime, which is pro imperialist and openly aggressive against its neighbours. It was the only one in this part of the world that supported the invasion of Iraq; it attacked Ecuador militarily and shamelessly intervened in Venezuela. We have proposed to fight for the sovereignty, democracy, peace, well-being and the integration with the rest of Latin American with the establishment of a democratic republic by means of a government which is sovereign, democratic, popular, that wants unity and a programme of national reconstruction, which wishes to call for an new popular constituency which develops a new suitable judicial framework to solve the most crucial problems that the country has at present.

Carlos Olaya
SINALTRAINAL

Message of Sinaltrainal of Colombia to the participatory Forum on Colombia being realised in Melbourne today Wednesday, the 22nd of April (Colombia) and on Thursday, the 23rd of April (AUSTRALIA).