Widow of slain mine union leader speaks out against Alabama's Drummond Co. in Colombia
Source: The Montgomery Independent
Widow of slain mine union leader speaks out against Alabama's Drummond Co. in Colombia
Melissa Brown | mbrown@al.com By Melissa Brown | mbrown@al.com
on July 16, 2013 at 1:09 PM, updated July 16, 2013 at 1:16 PM
The widow of a Colombian mine workers union leader is speaking out against Garry Neil Drummond, Alabama billionaire and CEO of Drummond Co., in a Bloomberg article that outlines the challenges the company is facing in Colombia and its expanding operations in Alabama.
Bloomberg Markets magazine interviewed Nubia Soler, whose husband, Gustavo, was abducted and "found under a pile of banana leaves with two bullet holes in his head" in 2001. Gustavo Soler was union president at a coal mine in Colombia owned by Drummond Co.
Soler tells Bloomberg reporters that her husband had received threats for months before his death and told her to pack up and be ready to leave the area as soon as he arrived home from the union office in Valledupar, Colombia. Gustavo never made it home.
Bloomberg reports that Drummond met with Soler personally and promised to put her adolescent children through school but hasn't followed through.
"He never paid for a pencil,” she tells reporters Anthony Effinger and Matthew Bristow.
Read more: http://blog.al.com/tuscaloosa/2013/07/drummond.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Nov 19, 2012
Uribe admits receiving ‘help’ from Drummond
Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe admitted Sunday to receiving “help” from U.S. coal company Drummond while in office.
http://colombiareports.com/uribe-receiving-help-from-drummond/
The United States Has Been Enabling Torture for Decades
Thursday, 15 March 2012 04:27 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
~snip~
The United States Exports Torture
Mark Karlin: The infamous School of the Americas (SOA) (now euphemistically renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"has long been accused of teaching human rights violations, including torture. The Defense Department vigorously denies this accusation.
In Chapter 2, Bill Quigley - who writes for Truthout, as well as yourself - outs the truth. Hasn't the School of the Americas, and its predecessor, which was located in the Panama Canal Zone, been outsourcing torture and human rights violations for decades?
Marjorie Cohn: During the 1970s and 1980s, dictators and military leaders in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay used skills they learned at the US Army's School of the Americas to torture and execute dissidents. SOA graduates assassinated bishops, priests, labor leaders, women, children and community workers, and massacred entire communities. Although the school was cosmetically renamed in 2001 to the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" (WHINSEC) at Ft. Benning, Georgia, the US government continues to resist accountability for those complicit in the egregious human rights violations perpetrated by the school's students. There is a growing protest movement against the SOA/WHINSEC. Since the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980, protesters have increasingly engaged in lobbying and civil disobedience, including regular teach-ins, demonstrations and prayer vigils. Up to 20,000 demonstrators descend on Ft. Benning each year. They want the US government to admit what it has done at the school, allow an independent investigation and accept responsibility for the consequences. They are demanding that the torture school be closed.
MK: The torture and murders that occurred during the "dirty wars" in South America and the military dictatorship/right-wing militias' suppression of opposition in Central America was something out of the Spanish Inquisition. The US was on the side of the military governments, and yet, they were committing torture and massacres even against US citizens, including nuns. Terry Lynn Karl describes this in Chapter 2, with El Salvador as a case study. How come it took the war on terror to ignite a national discussion on torture and US foreign policy?
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/7273:the-united-states-has-been-enabling-torture-for-decades
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
June 25, 2007
42 House Democrats Back U.S. Terror Academy
Democrats and the School of the Americas
by DAN BACHER
Two San Joaquin Valley Representatives, Dennis Cardoza of Merced and Jim Costa of Fresno, were among 42 Democrats that voted to keep the world’s foremost torture school, the School of the Americas, open during a House vote on June 21. The vote was 203 yes, 214 no, 1 voting "present" and 19 not voting.
Cardova, Costa and 40 other Democrats voted no on the McGovern/Lewis Amendment that would have finally cut off funding to the School of Americas (SOA), now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Only 6 more votes were needed to pass it–but these Democrats shamefully chose to join Republican Representatives in voting for the school, whose graduates have been responsible for genocide, assassinations, torture and other human rights violations throughout Latin America for decades.
California representatives Loretta Sanchez and Grace Napolitano, along with Charles Rangel of New York, are listed among the Democrats who chose not to vote. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not found on any list, not even present.)
SOA Watch, a human rights advocacy group founded in 1990 by Maryknoll Priest Father Roy Bourgeois to close the "School of Death," was disappointed by the vote. However, SOA Watch vowed to continue its efforts in Congress until the school, located in Fort Benning, Georgia, is shut down.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/06/25/democrats-and-the-school-of-the-americas/
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Training Torturers: The School of the Americas
Marjorie Cohn
In the most developed countries (France, the United States), some terrible schools have trained soldiers for years to the subtleties of the cruellest torture techniques. Marjorie Cohn is studying the School of the Americas history from where have come out some terrible war criminals. To limit the spread of Communism in the 60s and the 70s, the United States has supported the biggest Latin American dictatorships by training their leaders to counteract the enemies of the regime. Almost 60 000 soldiers, officers and civilians had become torturers experts when they went out of the School of Americas. Today, the school activities remain unclear. No investigation has been opened to highlight the managers responsibilities.Importing torture techniques it had used in the Phoenix program in Vietnam - including waterboarding, electric shock, assassination, kidnapping, and summary execution – the United States trained Latin American strongmen how to maintain control. Manuals that explained how to use torture to neutralize enemies were brought to the School from the U.S. Army intelligence training center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
“The U.S. Army School of the Americas ... is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.” - Representative Joseph Kennedy [1]
A few years ago, during a visit to Buenos Aires, I visited the Plaza de Mayo. Old women carrying large photographs of their dead children marched around the square as they have done every Thursday since April 1977. One woman told me how her 18-year-old daughter, clad in a nightgown, was abducted in the middle of the night. She had criticized government policies at the university. Her body was found near a creek. Other women related stories of how their children were “disappeared” and tortured. These mothers continue to demand that the military tell them what happened to their loved ones. During the time they were kidnapped, the United States supported the Argentine dictatorship in its “dirty war.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Leopoldo Galtieri led the military junta in Argentina, when some 30,000 people were disappeared and killed. Galtieri was a graduate of the School of the Americas.
A School for Counterinsurgency
The School was established in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone; it was called the Latin American Training Center-Ground Division. In 1963, it became the U.S. Army School of the Americas. It suspended operations in September 1984 pursuant to the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty. The School of the Americas (SOA) reopened three months later at Fort Benning, Georgia, where a U.S. military base is located. Due to negative publicity about the School, SOA was cosmetically renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001.
Since it opened, more than 59,000 military, police, and civilians from 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries have been trained at the School. Many went on to disappear, torture, and murder their people. “In fact,” according to a 1995 Los Angeles Times editorial, “it is hard to think of a coup or human rights outrage that has occurred in (Latin America) in the past 40 years in which alumni of the School of the Americas were not involved” [2].
More:
http://unmondetortionnaire.com/Training-Torturers-The-School-of#lire
TORTURE 101
in the US School of the Americas (SOA)
by Lisa Haugaard
The Pentagon revealed what activists opposed to the school have been alleging for years-that foreign military officers were taught to torture and murder to achieve their political objectives," says Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy Il (D-MA), who has waged a three-year campaign to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). Hoping to elude media attention, the Pentagon waited until late on a Friday to release training manuals used at the school and distributed throughout Latin America that instructed officers on the use of torture, murder and blackmail in the fight against left-wing opponents.
The most egregious passages in the declassified manuals advocated such tactics as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse and paying bounties for enemy dead. One of the manuals offers the following techniques to recruit a guerrilla as an intelligence source: blackmail, false arrest, Imprlsonment of the potential recruit's parents and execution of all other members of his guerrilla cell. Another manual contains detailed instructions for making Molotov cocktails.
The Pentagon released the manuals after a sustained public pressure campaign focused on the role of the CIA in Guatemala, which was the subject of a June report by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board. Since the board's report mentioned the manuals, the Pentagon received requests to declassify them in their entirety.
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/SOA/torture101_SOA.html
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
The Crucifixion of EL SALVADOR
Noam Chomsky
~snip~
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly. The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence-some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.
In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones. The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)
According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents-tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Also, from the same source, an incident which has stuck in my memories for years and years:~snip~
The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."
The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.
According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.
Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.
By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
.
.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan
"It was 1920 in the southwest West Virginia coal fields, and, as the narrator recalls, "things were tough." In response to efforts by miners to organize into a labor union, the Stone Mountain Coal Company announces it will cut the pay miners receive, and will be importing replacement workers into town to replace those who join the union."
much more at link above.
Although I liked the movie, it was disturbing . . .
It appears that big money still abuses the workers -
will it ever change?
I sure hope so.
CC
Alabama Coal Billionaire Battles Murder Suits as Prices Ebb
By Anthony Effinger & Matthew Bristow - Jul 15, 2013 11:01 PM CT
Gustavo Soler knew he was in trouble. It was 2001, and Soler was union president at a coal mine in Colombia owned by Drummond Co., which is controlled by the wealthiest family in Alabama.
Soler’s predecessor, Valmore Locarno, and Locarno’s deputy, Victor Orcasita, had been killed seven months earlier, and now Soler was getting threats, says his widow, Nubia, in an interview in Bogota. He told his family to pack up. They would leave the area as soon as he got home from the union office in Valledupar, a city in the country’s coal belt. He never made it.
Armed men stopped his bus, asked for him by name and abducted him. He was found under a pile of banana leaves with two bullet holes in his head, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its August issue.
After the killing, Nubia says, Garry Neil Drummond, chief executive officer of Drummond Co., sent a taxi to bring her to the Drummond offices near the coastal town of Santa Marta, where, in a meeting, he promised to put her children, Sergio and Karina, then 14 and 9, through school.
Nubia describes a tender moment for a tough man. Drummond, now 75, started working in his family’s coal mines around Jasper, Alabama, at 15. As an executive in 1969, he negotiated an export deal with a Japanese trading company and fulfilled the commitment by strip mining Alabama’s hills with colossal shovels and trucks. When those reserves dwindled, Drummond Co. opened its first mine in Colombia in 1995. It came under attack from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a group that had been at war with the government since the 1960s.
More:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/alabama-billionaire-battles-murder-suits-as-prices-ebb.html
