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VENEZUELA: Shootings of Unionists
Continue Unabated
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS (IPS) - Two shots to the head,
fired from a van, put a sudden end to the
life of Argenis Vásquez, the organising
secretary of the Toyota assembly plant
workers' union in the city of Cumaná, 400
kilometres east of the Venezuelan capital,
as he was leaving his home at 09:00 local
time.
But his death was just one of the cases that
marked the start of another bloody month for
Venezuelan trade unionists.
The day before, on May 4, 29-year-old Keller
Maneiro, a delegate of the Union of
Construction and Lumber Workers in Ciudad
Guayana, 500 kilometres southeast of
Caracas, was murdered in the parking lot of
a supermarket.
A few days later, Sergio Devis, leader of
another construction union in Ciudad Guayana,
was intercepted along a rural road by men
who roughly forced him out of his car and
dispatched him with shots to the head,
according to witnesses.
Vásquez had organised a strike at the Toyota
plant in April, and immediately after he was
killed a group of enraged workers attacked
the factory, destroying gates, windows and a
security booth. They set two cars on fire
and assaulted one of the supervisors as well
as reporters covering the event.
The state governor, Enrique Maestre, of the
governing United Socialist Party of
Venezuela (PSUV), to which Vásquez also
belonged, said he was "concerned that hired
killers should have reached our state of
Sucre," in the northeast of the country.
Some of Toyota's workers say the company is
responsible for Vásquez's murder, while
others blame a power struggle within the
union.
The national chief of the judicial police,
Wilmer Flores, is conducting an
investigation, but veteran police agents
say, based on experience at Ciudad Guayana,
that if hired killers are involved it will
be difficult to establish connections
between the victim and the assassins.
The area around Ciudad Guayana is a centre
of heavy industry, where iron ore, bauxite
and precious minerals are mined and there
are steel and aluminium works and
hydroelectric plants. Bridges, dams and
other infrastructure are also under
construction.
So far this year, four activists belonging
to different construction industry unions
have been murdered. One was shot inside a
hospital in Ciudad Guayana.
Pedro Moreno, human rights officer in the
Venezuelan Workers' Confederation (CTV),
which is aligned with the opposition and has
long faced accusations of corruption, told
IPS that in the last decade "more than 150
trade unionists have been killed.
"Together with Provea, a human rights
organisation, we have prepared a report to
take before the International Labour
Organisation (ILO)."
Provea said that in the period from October
2007 to September 2008 there were 29
homicides related to union activity – lower
than the 53 murders during the period from
October 2006 to September 2007.
"As well as being heinous crimes, they are a
sign of the weakening of the trade union
movement and a threat to the effective
rights of workers," Marino Alvarado, the
head of Provea, told IPS.
In Moreno's view, "these crimes are
committed by organised groups within the
unions created by the ruling party, which
hand out jobs to workers in exchange for
their first month's salary and other
payments. Then when labour activists oppose
these practices, they settle the problem
with their guns."
In November 2008, three union activists at
the Colombian-owned Alpina food company in
Villa de Cura, 100 kilometres west of
Caracas, were murdered, presumably by hired
killers.
They were active in the Classist Unitary
Revolutionary and Autonomous Current (C-CURA),
a group that supports the administration of
Hugo Chávez, with reservations, within the
National Union of Workers (UNT), a
pro-government central trade union.
In January, in the eastern state of
Anzoátegui, governed by Tarek Saab of the
PSUV, police fired upon picketing workers
who were occupying a Mitsubishi assembly
plant. Two workers were killed.
"Two workers dead. That is a blow I feel
deep down in my heart," President Chávez
said on that occasion. "Those responsible
must be sent to prison."
Orlando Chirino, the head of C-CURA,
retorted that "it is not enough to make
speeches promising thorough investigations
and severe punishment for those responsible.
What has happened is a systemic problem of
workers being targeted in violent attacks,
not just an isolated incident of excessive
force by police."
"What's happening in some Venezuelan labour
sectors is basically a result of the chaos
that followed the near-dissolution of
political parties," Francisco Iturraspe,
head of the department of Labour Law at the
Central University and a leading figure in
the Latin American Association of Labour
Lawyers, told IPS.
Ever since the 1930s, when political parties
and trade unions were organised, "the
parties, especially the social democratic
Acción Democrática (AD), exercised
discipline over the labour movement through
its union bureaux, but this collapsed when
the parties unravelled during the past
decade," according to Iturraspe.
He quoted Enrique Tejera París, foreign
minister in the second government of former
President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and
1989-1993), as saying that "without the
tutelage of AD, trade unions in Venezuela
would start a war over access to their share
of oil revenues."
But the PSUV "has no apparatus to control
the workers' movement, which has been of
secondary importance in its strategy of
power, and this can be seen in the different
currents vying for control of the UNT,
multiplying the number of unions to the
point that in Ciudad Guayana there are
nearly a dozen pro-government unions in the
construction industry," Iturraspe said.
William Lizardo, secretary of the Federation
of Construction Workers, said "the Labour
Ministry is responsible, because it
permitted and encouraged the creation of
unions headed by people who are criminals or
have been dismissed from companies for
wrongdoing, in a bid to displace the
traditional unions."
He said there were 24 unions in the
construction industry in 2002, one for each
region of the country, but now there are 150
unions, "each vying for their members to be
allocated jobs on some construction site."
"This is very clear in Ciudad Guayana, where
unemployment is twice the official national
figure (of 7.3 percent in March 2009), and
thousands of workers gather at the gates
seeking work. They fall prey to unscrupulous
mafias operating under the cover of the
profusion of unions," Víctor Moreno,
president of the regional union federation,
told IPS.
Meanwhile, Labour Minister María Cristina
Iglesias said "when we entered government
(in 1999) there were approximately 1,300
unions. Now we have close to 6,000. This
means we are a country where there is trade
union freedom.
"Never have there been so many union
organisations, and never have they been
listened to as they are now.
"These organisations are maturing, trying to
build a different reality, which involves
demands for better wages and conditions, and
also means making the political leap toward
having a say in the management of companies
and making decisions about production. In
other words, it means taking on their role
as the working class in the building of
socialism," the minister said. |
