After deliberating for less than four hours, on July 26 a 10-member jury in US District Court in Birmingham, Alabama, found the locally based Drummond Co. Inc. coal company not liable in the 2001 murders of three unionists at its La Loma mine in northern Colombia. The unionists' families and their union, Sintramienergetica, had charged that Drummond supplied fuel, vehicles and shelter to the rightwing paramilitary group that murdered Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita in March 2001 and Gustavo Soler seven months later. The International Labor Rights Fund and the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers (USW) filed the federal civil suit in March 2002 under the 1789 Alien Tort Statute. Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund, said the plaintiffs "will be swiftly appealing."

Some 1,700 indigenous people participated in a July 23-27 caravan to Bogota from Santander de Quilichao in the southwestern Colombian department of Cauca to demand peace, to call for popular unity and to oppose a "free trade" agreement (TLC, from its initials in Spanish) that the government of President Alvaro Uribe has signed with the US. Organized by the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), the caravan included 25 buses with representatives of the Nasas, Coconucos, Totoroes, Siapidaras, Eperaras, Pastos, Embera Katios and Yanaconas. Security was provided by 300 guards armed only with traditional "rods of authority." There were also four doctors, six nurses, a number of traditional doctors and three ambulances to handle any health problems along the way.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Far-Right Militias Survive "Peace Process" and "Para-Politics" Scandal

by Memo Montevino, WW4 REPORT

Colombia's imprisoned paramilitary warlords July 24 announced an end to cooperation with prosecutors investigating massacres and other atrocities, throwing into question the country's peace process. The move was taken to protest the July 11 ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice that paramilitary fighters and "parapolíticos" (politicians who collaborate with the paras) are not automatically charged with "sedition"—meaning politically motivated violence, carrying reduced penalties under the legislation establishing the peace process. The peace process has led to the disarmament of some 31,000 paramilitary fighters, but has not yet secured reparations for their victims or won major confessions from some 60 imprisoned warlords.

Colombia has offered to host US military operations currently run out of Ecuador, once the lease for the base there expires in two years, according to a senior Pentagon official who spoke to reporters in July. Such a change would consolidate Colombia's position as the Latin American country most militarized by the United States.

The Wayuu indigenous people of Venezuela sent a message saluting the "Encuentro of the Pueblos Zapatistas with the Peoples of the World," which has just opened at the village of Oventic in Chiapas, Mexico. The message was harshly critical of the Hugo Chávez government, which it accused of "continuing the neoliberal policies" under the guise of a "double discourse," indicating a "lack of respect for the [indigenous] communities, a manipulation, and in the final accounting, a genocide." It said the Venezuelan state "has blocked with the transnational imperialists to enter indigenous territories throughout the country to exploit mineral, hydrocarbon, gas and petroleum resources, against the wishes and the decisions of the indigenous communities of Venezuela." (La Jornada, July 20)

Labor unrest, infrastructure problems and charges of corruption at Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA have reached the point of a "significant operational emergency," PDVSA vice president for exploration and production Luis Vierma told the National Assembly's comptroller committee July 18. The warnings of crisis come just as PDVSA is embarking on an ambitious course of taking greater control over Venezuela's oil industry from foreign companies.