Crónica 1 Sobre el asesinato de Juan Carlos Pérez_2013_English

7/29/2019 Crnica 1 Sobre el asesinato de Juan Carlos Prez_2013_English

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Labor Information Agency

- The assassination of Juan Carlos Perez, Sintrainagro union leader at the La Cabaa

sugar mill -

Requiem and rage at the death of a sugar cane cutter(Chronicle by Ricardo Aricapa)

Corinto, Cauca. (Special report by the Labor Information Agency). At 4:50 a.m.,in the early morning hours of January 28, Juan Carlos Perez Muoz stood onthe terrace of his house and saw two men standing at the corner with theirmotorcycles. These were the two men who, fifteen minutes later, wouldassassinate him.

He saw them while he finished his coffee, the coffee that he always drankbefore getting on the bus headed to the La Cabaa sugar mill where he workedas a sugar cane cutter. His drank his coffee with sugar, thats how he liked it.But at that moment he couldnt have suspected that those men were there toassassinate him, although their presence at that particular place and at thattime did seem strange to him. Thats what he said to his wife, Luz Aide Secua,


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who, like every other day, got up an hour before him in order to prepare andpack his breakfast and fill his water jug.

They must be good-for-nothings, she remembers him saying; it seemed tobother him. So much so that he took another route to the bus stop in order to

avoid walking by them. It was a useless precaution because they caught up withhim at the bus stop and then shot him eight times, seven times in the head.

Luz Aide says that she heard the shots (the bus stop is a block from theirhouse) but it didnt cross her mind that her husband was the target, in partbecause he was a good-natured person who didnt have problems with anyone(or at least that is what she thought) and in part because he hadnt told herabout having received any threats. On two occasions he had expressed fearabout the risks he was taking by trying to convince his co-workers to join theSintrainagro union and to fight for the reinstatement of almost one hundredworkers fired by the company, a task that he worked very hard on during the

last two months of his life.

I sincerely did not believe thatthe risk was so great,confessed Luz Aide, a shortand stout woman of coppercomplexion with roundshoulders and an impenetrablegaze, characteristics of herindigenous ancestry.

And yes, in Colombia there aremany risks that come withstarting a union, especially in aregion that is as hot asNorthern Cauca, where anyone

Luz Aide Secua (center) with family members at the burial.

could be the shooter and there are many people who do not look favorably onthe growth of a union like Sintrainagro. The FARC has some control in thisregion and there are other groups that operate outside the law. If this werentenough, the La Cabaa sugar mill has always strongly opposed workers claims

about labor rights violations and has opposed, with all its strength, the presenceof a union. This then is the challenge facing the State Prosecutor: to uncoverfrom this tangle the motives for and authors of the crime committed againstJuan Carlos. This will be possible only if this case does not become part of thelong list of cases of unionists who have been assassinated with impunity inColombia.

A sugar processing plant with no love for unionists

Every day at La Cabaa seven thousand tons of cane are converted into sugar;compared with the other twelve mills located in the Cauca valley, it a mediumsized mill. It employs 2,500 people, 1,500 of who are directly employed by themill and the rest are hired via three employment agencies. All of the sugar cane


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cutters live in the string of villages between Santander de Quilichao and Florida,Valle.

With regards to working conditions and unions, the La Cabaa sugar mill is aloose cog in the gears of the sugar industry. On both counts, it is significantly

different from the other mills in the region. La Cabaa and the Maria Luisa mill(which also fired 24 unionized cutters) would not agree to participate in theprocess of formalizing contracts by directly employing its workers, as per theagreements that arose from the Obama-Santos Action Plan for the approval ofthe FTA with the United States. Perhaps this is because the owners, the Seinjetfamily is not originally from the Cauca Valley and was unwilling to cooperate;they are a Jewish family and are not Colombian and they have a different wayof looking at things.

The most visible board member and, according to the union, the person who ismost harmful to the interests of the workers is Oscar Mora, the head of labor

relations; he is the companys strong man. He is a person that Mauricio Ramos,president of the union local, describes as aggressive and rough in his treatmentof people, allergic to anything related to unions and workplace complaints.People jokingly say of him that he cant even look at a unionist because it giveshim heartburn.

I think that he created this image of the toughguy so that people would be afraid of him andwouldnt protest. He has done a good jobbecause the cutters are all afraid of him, addsMauricio Ramos, who remembers that,following a long and arduous struggle of theCauca Valley cutters in 2008, the associatedwork cooperates were dissolved and mostsugar mills adopted a policy of directlyemploying their cutters, thereby guaranteeingthem stability and shifts that ended by 4 p.m.,freedom of association and the right tocollective bargaining, and other benefits aboveand beyond those established by law. Butthese changes were not implemented at La

Cabaa, which continues to use Mauricio Ramos

subcontracting agencies to hire its workers and which employs workingconditions that are considerably more precarious than those found in othermills.

The company also has much tighter security than that found at other mills in thearea: it has its own security guards plus security that is provided by the nationalarmy; on the mills property there has been, for some time, a milita rydetachment housing soldiers who are there because of the existing conflicts in

Cauca but also, says the union, in order to discourage worker protests.


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In fact, the La Cabaa cutters were the only mill workers that did not participatein the historic strike of 2008. At that time, perhaps naively, they decided tosupport the company because, in exchange for their agreement not to strike,the company promised to give them the same benefits and guarantees thatwould be won by the workers participating in the strike. In other words, they

would get the same benefits, but without a strike. So they decided not to strike,in part because the company set up camps inside the sugar mill where theylived, which quarantined them from other workers, and they worked withoutleaving the company property for the duration of the strike. This so that theother cutters would not mistreat them or, worse still, contaminate them with theprotest virus.

But in the end it meant nothing. The company did not live up to its promise andit continues to pay workers the same wages and maintain the same workingconditions that they endured prior to 2008 without any guarantee of stability.The workers work shifts of 12 or more hours; there is no vacation pay, Sunday

premiums, or overtime; they do not receive their full clothing bonus; andmostinfuriatingthey are at the mercy of the company with regards to the weight ofthe sugar cane that they cut.

The cutters work at a piece rate, which means that they earn their salariesbased on the weight of the cane that they have cut and it is the mills themselvesthat certify this weight. But in La Cabaaaccording to the unionthe realweight of the sugar cane is manipulated in order to keep workers salaries low.If there are days that the workers cannot work because the company decidesthat they shouldnt cut that day or for reasons that are out of the cutters control,the workers are not paid anything that day. Nor are the workers guaranteed aminimum wage when they are cutting cane from a field that has some kind ofproblem and for which the weight of the cane is less, different than the practiceat other mills. This explains why, at another mill, a skilled cutter can earnbetween 800,000 and 900,000 pesos a month while at La Cabaa it is difficultfor the workers to earn 700,000 pesos, even though they work longer shifts.And if they protest this situation, they are fired.

This series of abuses and the obvious inequality were the reasons that leadJuan Carlos Perez Muoz to join the newly formed union and to accept thespecific task of organizing the cutters who were contracted by the same

subcontracting agency that employed him.

A union in turbulent waters

The La Cabaa local union, which is part of Sintrainagro, was formed onNovember 28 and was clandestine because there was no other way toorganize. Its founding members included Juan Carlos and it was an experiencethat baptized him into unionization because he had never had the opportunity tolead an organization and he did not know what a union was or what it wassupposed to do.

Joining this effort changed his life, says Luz Aide; after he joined he gave hisheart and soul to the cause. He was always looking out for the union and


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making sure to attend the meetings with his colleagues. He would come home,change his clothes, eat, and then he would leave again, she adds.

It turned out that he had a natural ability for organizing people. His conviction tothe justice of his cause together with his innate ability to find the exact words to

clearly express his ideas in a way that could be understood allowed him toeasily increase the union ranks. Without a leader like Juan Carlos, Sintrainagrowould surely not have been able to get 560 cutters at La Cabaa to join itsranks in only one month. Amidst the clamor of this struggle, he was discoveringhis vocation as a unionist. But this only lasted for two months: he wasassassinated on January 28.

Sintrainagros presented a bargaining petition to the company on December 17that included demands for working conditions found at other sugar mills. For Mr.Oscar Mora this list of demands was a hard pill to swallow. And, in fact, he didnot swallow it. He made the announcement that he was not willing to negotiate

because the mill did not directly employ the workers. And he went further still:he waited until the end of the year when the workers contracts expired and thenhe started to fire the unionized cutters. The details of the contract helped himthey stipulated that both parties could unilaterally end the contract with onemonths notice, a legal loophole that, in practice, allows for employers to firetheir workers and change the legal name of their business whenever they wantto, which may occur as many as three or four times a year. For example, at thebeginning of 2012, one of the subcontracting agencies was called Sociedad

Agropecuaria Duque Botero. By the middle of the year it was known as CaacorSAS and as of January 1, 2013 it was known as Agricosechas SAS. This isdone in order to free the company of its responsibilities to the workers, eliminatethe workers seniority, and rid the companies of unions. Cutters who haveworked at the mill for 15 or 20 years have to start from zero every four monthsbecause their documents reflect a different employer than the one they hadbefore, even though it is actually the same employer.

This is the legal loophole that the employment agencies used when, in January,they did not renew contracts and effectively fired 86 cutters, all of whom wereunionized, including the entire leadership committee, many of whom hadworked for the company for fifteen years or more. Who knows why Juan Carloswas not on the list of workers that were dismissed, maybe he was lucky. Nor

was he on the list of another twelve workers that were fired later, some of whomwere fired for having participated in a protest organized by cutters from differentmills that was held on January 16 at the offices of Asocaa (Colombian SugarGrowers Association).

A dilemma of conscience

Mauricio Muoz faced aserious dilemma after thedeath of his colleague JuanCarlos. When I think about

him, I am attacked byfeelings of guilt, he says. If


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we hadnt started the unionization process, he would still be alive. But as muchpain and loss as I feel for our colleague, the process must continue because aninjustice has been committed. 98 of us have been fired and we are survivingfrom what our friends and neighbors can give to us.

98 cutters that, because of the over supply of labor in the sugar cane industry,cannot easily find work elsewhere nor do they have the training or contacts tolook for work in another field.

It pains me that a legally-executed union process has to experience death inorder to gather the attention of the public and the government, which until nowhas done nothing to pressure the company to negotiate the bargaining petitionthat we presented, adds Muoz; his face expresses better than his words thecross fire of emotions that he experiences as a result of his colleaguesassassination.

Asocaa should address this problem, he continues, because if it doesnt fixthings, if our demands are not heard and they dont rehire the workers whohave been fired, there may be a strike at La Cabaa.

This strike could potentially extend to the other mills where Sintrainagro has apresence. There are more than four thousand affiliated cutters and theorganization has announced its total support for the La Cabaa cutters.

The tribulations of Luz Aide

Overwhelmed by rage and pain that dont allow her to think, Luz Aide Secuadoesnt know what to think about the death of her husband and doesnt dare tomention a possible motive or author. She tends to believe that he wasassassinated because of his union activity because she can find no otherexplanation; she knew of no other problems that he might have had. Hisdrinking, which was for a long time the greatest source of his problems, was athing of the past. It had been a year since Juan Carlos had completely stoppeddrinking in order to fully dedicate himself to raising his and Luz son, VictorAlejo; Luz Aide has two other daughters from a former husband.

I know that I have to accept this and keep going with my children, but it is going

to be very difficult without Juan Carlos. The little bit of money that he wouldhave earned during this pay period was already designated for the childrensschool supplies because it is time for school to start. But that money is gonebecause we had to spend it on the burial, she adds.

The only thing that her deceased husband left behind for Luz Aide and her sonis a small plot of land that they have worked together to grow yucca andplantains on the days that he didnt have to go to cut sugar cane. He wasntable to finish building the apartment that he was adding onto the second floor ofhis in-laws house. Its there, half finished, and there is no one to finish it, shesays.

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Crónica 1 Sobre el asesinato de Juan Carlos Pérez_2013_English