"Late US coal tycoon personally ordered union killings in Colombia"
Convicted conspirator in deadly union busting plot testifies before war crimes tribunal
by Adriaan Alsema September 26, 2024
The late CEO of US coal mining firm Drummond personally allegedly ordered the assassination of labor union representatives at one of his company’s mines in Colombia in 2001, according to war crimes tribunal JEP.
The court made this claim in a report on the interrogation of the security chief of one of Drummond’s contractors, Jairo Jesus Charris.
The security chief of food provider ISA was convicted for two of the homicides allegedly ordered by Drummond executives in 2009 together with ISA CEO Jaime Blanco.
According to Charris, Drummond security chief James Lee Atkins, a former CIA agent, told him and Blanco that Drummond CEO Garry Drummond had personally ordered the assassinations of union reps.
. . .
Drummond’s security chief ordered the security chief of La Loma, the company’s mine in the Cesar province, to warn the commander of the local unit of paramilitary group AUC when the Sintramienergetica representatives went home on March 12 of 2001.
The paramilitaries stopped the bus that was transporting the union reps and executed them on the side of the road.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/late-us-coal-tycoon-personally-ordered-union-killings-in-colombia/
(The union workers had been getting death threats regularly, and turned to the company to allow them to sleep at the company at night after work, rather than returning to their homes every weeknight, and Drummond flatly refused their pleas. They had been terrorized repeatedly before this atrocity occurred in full sight of their co-workers on the bus.)
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The open-pit Pribbenow coal mine in northeastern Colombia is operated by Alabama-based Drummond Co.
Ken Silverstein, Joshua Collins
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November 30, 2023
Comeuppance
The Colombian Murder Case That Refuses to Die
Twenty-two years ago, three union leaders for mine workers employed by an American company were killed.
The murders have gone unsolved. But now the Colombian government is prosecuting two company executives for financing the paramilitary group responsible for the killings.
Photographs by Stephen Ferry/Redux
Three enormous open-pit mines owned by Drummond Co. in northern Colombia dwarf the nearby town of La Loma, which sprang up after the U.S. company began extracting coal in 1995 and has grown to some 10,000 residents. Life in La Loma revolves around the mines. Packed company buses flood the town every 12 hours, at the 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. shift changes. After workers who have just completed their shifts empty out, the buses fill right back up with fresh replacements waiting to be taken to the mines to begin theirs.
Alabama-based Drummond has earned billions from its local operations, and most of the surrounding area in Cesar province has paved roads, a result of the development the mining industry has brought to the region. Near La Loma’s idyllic town square, which boasts a colonial-style church and half a dozen restaurants, a health clinic has erected a plaque thanking the company for the contributions that made even rudimentary medical care possible.
On a brutally hot, dry morning in September, dust filled the air with every breeze as a Drummond guard patrolled the area around El Descanso, the largest of the company’s mines, just north of town. He walked slowly along a railroad line that transports coal from Drummond’s mines to a coastal port it owns on the Caribbean Sea 120 miles away. The guard was friendly and casual, but when a New Republic reporter raised his camera to take a photo of a passing railcar, he waved and shouted warnings to stop.
His concern over a reporter snapping a photograph of the train line may seem overly dramatic, but it was understandable given the backstory. In 2001, three union leaders representing workers at the mines were assassinated by marauding thugs. Their murders have never been fully solved more than two decades later. The quiet scene on that September day belied the violent events that unfolded at the time, when the army and allied right-wing paramilitaries largely controlled Cesar province during the peak of Colombia’s 52-year civil war. Much of the violence and “social cleansings” they committed took place in towns that lay along the tracks.
. . .
From left: former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, longtime Drummond Co. president Garry Drummond (now deceased), and ex-Drummond Ltd. official Augusto Jimenez.
More:
https://newrepublic.com/article/176808/colombian-murder-case-refuses-die
