On September 14, Colombia’s labor unions called a 24-hour national strike that drew massive public support, with an estimated 25 million people participating. Assaults by military and police patrols in working class areas turned the strike into the biggest social upheaval since the “Bogotazo” in 1948 when Colombia was thrown into a virtual civil war. According to one of the more conservative union leaders, the unions could not “prevent an unarmedpeople from defending itself against the assaults of authority. ” In two days of disturbances, eighteen people were killed, hundreds injured, and thousands detained in Bogota’s bull ring, coliseum and velodrome. There, military tribunals dealt summarily with strikers, using the provisions of the state of siege that had been imposed by President Lopez Michelsen. On September 19, in the aftermath of the upheaval, the unions announced they would initiate another national strike if the arrested workers were not released and their salary demands met. Following is an article NACLA received just prior to September 14 describing the conditions and issues that led to the strike. A Colombian maxim says: “Palo porque bogas, y palo porque no bogas” (They hit you if you pull, and they hit you if you don’t). Lately, it applies to Colombian workers. The country is at the end of a two-year coffee bonanza. World market prices for coffee, which repre- sents over half of all Colombian exports, have tripled since 1974. Yet due to annual inflation of over 40 percent, real salaries are at their lowest level in years and organized labor continues to be locked in an intense struggle with the government of Liberal President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen. The construction industry has been paralyzed for nearly two months by a strike of workers at eight cement factories calling for wage hikes of 40 percent. Two hundred thousand teachers of the Colombian Federation of Teachers stopped work from August 21 to September 3 to protest the recent closing of every state university in the country, and to demand payment of past wages and passage of a new Statute of Education. On August 25, 5,000 members of the Workers’ Syndical Union, which unites 12,000 workers of the state petroleum industry, abruptly put down their tools after the government revoked the union’s legal registration and authorized the firing of several union leaders. The strike has cut into production at the nation’s principal refinery, and the whole country is short of fuel. On August 12, amid the clamor of strike announcements and warnings of “severe sanctions” from the hand-line Minister of Labor, Oscar Montoya, the four largest labor federations, representing the entire political spectrum, called for a 24-hour general “civil halt.” Set to take place in early September, the strike will demand an end to repression and a general wage boost of 30 percent. Though Colombia is already in a State of Emergency, Lopez Michelsen’s legal measures to quash the national strike are unprecedented in their extremity. On August 18 he established rigid control over television and radio broadcasts, outlawing any discussion or publicity of the impending halt. A Presidential Decree on August 44 NACLA Reportupdate * update . update . update 26 established prison sentences of up to 180 days for strikers, thereby officially suspending the constitutional right to strike. On September 3 alone, over 400 workers were arrested under this provision. Also for the first time, Lopez secured authoriziation from the Supreme Court for the creation of labor tribunals, which would hand down binding solutions to strikes. Persistent repression, and Lopez’ refusal to implement a law passed in 1959 obliging the government to adjust wages to inflation automatically once every six months, pushed both the Conservatives’ Colombian Workers Union (UTC), and the Liberals’ Colombian Confederation of Workers (CTC), to join forces with two other leftist federations (the CSTC and the CGT) for the national protest. Lopez has already faced two labor crises in his three years in office, the most recent in April of this year. The current one is the most generalized and the largest. Why hasn’t the coffee boom enabled the government to meet the workers’ demand for wage increases that compensate for inflation? The extensive monopolization and the uneven economic development that characterizes Colombia have meant that only a privileged few have benefitted from the coffee bonanza. The national government (through taxes), private exporters, and the Coffee Growers Federation (FEDECAFE, which represents some 2,000 large-scale coffee growers) alone pocketed over half of the total income from the bonanza. FEDECAFE also granted illicit concessions to foreign buyers estimated to have totalled 39 percent of the entire income from coffee in 1975, about $250 million. Meanwhile, the small farmers who are the majority of the coffee growers, earned an average of only $173 in 1975, one-fourth of the national minimum wage. A limited middle group of coffee farmers who experienced important income increases did not have large enough plots to make improvements through investment, and so dispersed their surplus in consumer goods, thus aggravating inflation. Only the largest growers were able to employ profits to expand production. So, in all, the bonanza contributed to increasing the power of a small group within the coffee sector. Thus, while an elite few benefit from the coffee boom, the rest of Colombia suffers from severe inflation and a decline in their standard of living. This is what has so outraged labor and has provoked the Colombian labor federation’s call for a general strike.
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