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Join the global protest against murders in Colombia

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Join the global protest against murders in Colombia

The TUC is urging British trade unionists to join a global protest against the brutal murder in March of Colombian bank workers' leader Leonidas Gomez Rozo, involved in a dispute with HSBC. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has written to Colombian President Uribe about that murder and two otherswhich occurred in March - Carmen Cecilia Carvajal Ramirez and Gildardo Antonio Gomez Alzate. The global action has been called by UNI, the global union federation to which Leonidas' union UNEB belong, and is being run by LabourStart.

Here is the text of an open letter sent by Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, to President Uribe of Colombia:

S.E Alvaro Uribe Velez
Presidente de la Republica
Palacio de Narino
Sante Fe de Bogotá
Bogotá DC
Colombia

Dear President Uribe,

Murders of and attacks on teacher and bank-worker trade unionists

Last month, two teacher trade unionists and one bank-worker trade unionist were murdered in Colombia and a further bank-worker trade unionist was attacked. I am writing to urge that you fulfil your international and moral obligations to protect trade unionists from murder and violent assault.

On 4 March - on the day that a UK Government and TUC-hosted Colombian trade union delegation led by CUT President, Carlos Rodriguez, was meeting British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells, Carmen Cecilia Carvajal Ramirez, a schoolteacher in Ocana-Norte de Santander and a member of ASINORT, was murdered on her way to work.

On 7 March, Gildardo Antonio Gomez Alzate, a leader of the Asociacion de Institutores de Antioquia-ADIDA was murdered and Rafael Boada, President of the bank-workers union UNEB-Bucaramanga was attacked in his car by individuals who made off on motorbikes.

On 5 March, our colleague Leonidas Gomez Rozo, national leader of UNEB and a member of the National Education Team of the CUT and a member of the Bogotá district leadership of the Polo Democratico, disappeared. On 8 March he was found, brutally murdered, in his apartment - he had been stabbed a great many times.

TUC officials met UNEB officials in Bogotá in December 2007 and again in London in February 2008, with colleagues from our largest affiliate UNITE, which represents HSBC and other bank-workers in Britain. A main item of discussion was the strike at HSBC in Colombia and the continuing concerns of UNEB members that security guards had taken photographs of them on picket lines during the strike. HSBC in London has so far refused to meet with our colleagues from UNITE to discuss these matter, but we are copying this letter to the bank because of our deep concerns about the implied threat the existence of photographs and video recording pose to UNEB members and leaders.

These three murders bring the total for 2008 already to nine, an average of one per week. We note again that a third of the 2574 colleagues murdered since 1986 have been school teachers - to which two more were added with the killing of Carmen Carvajal and Gildardo Gomez.

While we welcome the 86 convictions of murderers of trade unionists that have resulted from the ILO's cooperation with the Fiscalia in the investigation of 176 emblematic cases, we are painfully aware that these convictions represent still only a minute percentage and that impunity still prevails.

Despite the signing in 2006 of the tripartite ILO agreement for freedom of association and democracy in Colombia, your Government is still far from fulfilling its commitments under that agreement or its obligations in international law, arising from ratification of ILO Conventions 87 and 98, to protect freedom of association, the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining.

We trust that there will be immediate investigations into these three murders and the attack on Rafael Boada, that the rule of law and due process will prevail and that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

Yours sincerely,

BRENDAN BARBER
General Secretary, TUC

Urgent action:

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