Belching Out the Devil (6 page)

 

News travels fast and when Giraldo gets to work everyone is talking about what has just happened. The shock of Enrique's kidnap circles the plant, disbelief and confusion growing with the telling. The deliverymen, production-line workers - all of them try and grasp the facts and speculate on why Enrique was picked up in this way. But the gossip quickly turns to mourning. Another man arriving for work has seen Enrique's body dumped at the side of the road.

Giraldo has lived with the story of his brother's murder for twelve years and betrays little emotion when he says, ‘they contacted the body collectors in the area who went in search of the body.' No one was charged with Enrique's murder. He was dragged from the motorbike and executed, his body left at the side of the road, and as far as the authorities were concerned that was that; it was an unpleasant incident that generated a little paperwork. ‘There wasn't very much of an investigation,' says Giraldo. But a definite pattern emerged when almost a year to the day another Sinaltrainal leader working at the Coca-Cola plant in Carepa was killed. His name was Enrique Gómez Granado and on the 23 April 1995 he was shot on his doorstep in front of his wife and children. It seems almost indecent to mention the end of this man's life and the searing horror endured by his family in so brief a sentence. But it is with brutal ease a man's life becomes a statistic. So Enrique Gomez became the third Sinaltrainal leader murdered in just over a year, leaving the unavoidable link between union organising at the Coke plant and being killed.

 

When the surviving union leaders were threatened and intimidated it became blindingly obvious that there was a campaign against the union at the Coca-Cola plant. These men were followed as they left work, cards and letters delivered to their homes that read ‘Go now or face death!' The entire union leadership opted for the first option and fled to Bogota en masse, which left the workers with no effective union in the Carepa plant, a situation that appeared to suit the management just fine. Giraldo claims that, ‘some of us had been working for the company for nine or ten years but the company would call us in one by one and say to us, “Come on, look, the union has fallen…the union doesn't exist any more so you need to do what the company tells you to
do”.' As the union was attacked and its leaders murdered, managers at the plant were making it crystal clear that they intended to take full advantage of this situation.

 

So the workers remaining in Carepa meet in secret. ‘We agreed to set up a new underground union,' says Giraldo. The president was Luis Hernán Manco Monroy (Manco). A few days after talking to Giraldo at the old table in the Sinaltrainal office in Bogota, I speak to him. At 1.9 metres he is a tall man with receding black hair and a maroon coat that looks like a battered driving jacket. But the thing that catches your attention when you meet Manco is the way he holds himself. He has a cautious swagger, his whole frame seems to bob slightly, like a boxer. He is sixty years old but has the awkward twitch of a man who expects to be hit.

 

As president of the newly formed union leadership he helped draw up a collective agreement, the terms and conditions they wanted the company to negotiate over. Then the union came out into the open. ‘We informed Coca-Cola that we had new leadership and so we started having meetings with the management at the Coca-Cola plant.' The manager at the time was a man called Ariosto, who, they allege, not only knew but socialised with the paramilitaries. On one occasion, Manco said Ariosto sat drinking with the local paramilitary commanders outside the plant. ‘There was a meeting with Cepillo and Caliche [the commanders] at the kiosk, they were drinking with Ariosto and he said that if he wanted to end the union, it would be very easy.'

 

Giraldo recalls another instance when Ariosto said, ‘“The union exists because I let it exist, if I don't want it here, that will be the case”, but we didn't think about this because we didn't know how bad it would get…'

They didn't have to wait long to find out. On 6 December 1996 Carepa's darkest day begun.

The body of Isidro Gil lay inside the plant. The first bullet had hit him between the eyes. The remaining five shots were fired out of spite or anger or bravado - who knows, perhaps it was just a way of saying ‘We are here!' But he died where he fell in the courtyard. No one touched him until his brother Martin arrived. Crying, he held Isidro in the courtyard as the Coke workers looked on until the police came to take them away. It was just after 9am, and he was the fourth Coca-Cola union leader to be killed in Carepa.

 

The two paras who killed him had arrived on a motorbike and gone to the security hut by the main gates, where Isidro was working. As he opened the large iron gates to allow a delivery lorry to leave the paras saw their chance, slipped past the office, through the gates and shot him. Giraldo ‘was 10 metres away from him when they shot him, and then I ran inside because I didn't know what…' His voice trails off. ‘When I heard the first shot, I was walking nearby the entrance. Those of us who were nearby ran off.'

 

Manco looked up when he heard the first shot. ‘the machine that I was working on was quite near the door…When I heard the shots, I looked behind me because the door was behind me, and Isidro had already fallen to the ground.'

 

Aristo the manager had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. So without knowing what to do or directions from the company the men hung around the plant. ‘We didn't know where to go and we were waiting for [the police] to come and take the body and tell us that we could leave,' said Giraldo.

Even when the men were finally told to go home they didn't. ‘The production line stopped,' said Manco, ‘but we stayed there in the afternoon because we were too scared to leave…not working, just waiting there.'

 

Eight hours after Isidro had been killed the men finally left the plant to go home. They were right to be fearful. One of the worried men was a trade union organiser called Adolfo Luis Cardona, nicknamed El Diablo. El Diablo was a local footballer of some renown, a former champion in fact. He too had seen Isidro killed and that afternoon, while his friends and workmates waited in the plant, he went to Carepa. The paras spotted him and called out that the local para commander Cepillo wanted to see him, ‘Come with us, Cepillo wants you…Come, nothing will happen. Get in the lorry we will drive you there.' But this lorry was of some local infamy. It was said people got into it but did not return alive. ‘Come and get in we will take you to meet the Cepillo,' the paras insisted.

 

There and then El Diablo made the most important decision of his life. He ran. He took off running down the village street screaming ‘
Van a matar a mí!
' They are going to kill me! He ran and ran and ran towards the police station four blocks away. There were few cars but the road was full of people, fetching, carrying, hustling, bustling, shopping, walking, working people. Into the oncoming crowd he ran, dodging anything that came towards him, twisting his body to avoid a collision, his legs churning and scuttling to keep upright. On he ran through the narrow streets crying, panic filling every part of him as he screamed to onlookers, ‘They are going to kill me! They are going to kill me!' Behind him the paras gave chase, one on motorbike the rest on foot charging after him, all pretence of normality thrown away. They were hunting him down in broad daylight. The bike weaved its way through the
traffic of people as the foot soldiers bumped and jostled those in their path. No one said anything. No one did anything. What could they do? How could they stop the paras stalking a man in broad daylight? But the assassins lacked the adrenalin of a condemned man and the instincts of a footballer. El Diablo burst frantically into the police station begging for protection and sanctuary.

 

The police all but shrugged: ‘What can we do?'

 

This is what they managed to do: they escorted El Diablo home, waited while his family packed and then drove them to the airport. There they went first to Bogota and then on to the USA, where El Diablo lives today. In this case Colombian justice was no more than a taxi service into exile.

 

The morning had seen the murder of Isidro Gil, the afternoon the attempted abduction of El Diablo and that night saw the final event. Sinaltrainal's offices in Carepa were firebombed. Metal bars had smashed the doors apart, files and papers were scattered around the building, joining the litter of the broken tables and chairs. And then the entire building was burned to the ground. A blazing beacon shone out in the night as the union office crackled and smoked in the flames, a warning beacon, to which the message was clear: your union is finished, go or die!