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Two SUNTRACS members slain, government blames the union

by Eric Jackson

As this story was written the SUNTRACS construction workers' union was burying two of its members who were slain in separate shooting incidents and preparing for a one-day protest strike. Meanwhile Government and Justice Minister Olga Gólcher, the superior of one of the killers, was complaining to the PRD-aligned La Prensa that SUNTRACS has a "hidden agenda" and the fact that one of her police officers killed an unarmed man and she and her subordinates were caught lying about what happened is no reason for the union she attacked to go on strike.

The confrontation between the government and organized labor has been brewing for weeks, with the Torrijos administration backing a company union strategy to break the power of SUNTRACS, the militant leftist union that represents about 60,000 Panamanian construction workers and has a master contract with the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC). The dispute first became acute on Isla Viveros, where Grupo Viveros is building a pricey resort community that is being marketed entirely to foreigners.

Grupo Viveros has as its principal public spokesman one Gustavo De La Cruz, a Colombian who has created a construction company called Maqtec that uses a company union. SUNTRACS members had been working on the Isla Viveros project until Maqtec was put on the job in mid-July. SUNTRACS immediately put up picket lines, whereupon de la Cruz declared in La Prensa that if SUNTRACS was not removed five or ten people would be killed.

De La Cruz's partners in Grupo Viveros include one Andre Beladina, a French former lawyer who was convicted for embezzlement from a Belgian bank for which he worked but despite this criminal record was allowed by the Immigration Office that is under Government and Justice Minister Olga Gólcher's supervision to live and work in Panama.

Why would Gólcher put up with a Colombian who makes death threats against Panamanians and a convicted French bank scam artist? It's not simply a matter that she hates SUNTRACS enough to embrace foreign criminals. Another of Grupo Viveros's principals happens to be her predecessor in her current post, PRD legislator Héctor Alemán. The latter is no ordinary PRD politician, but was in fact President Martín Torrijos's 2004 campaign manager.

It's illegal for a company to promote a union, and also illegal for a company to fire people for being members of a union. However, membership in the SITICOPP company union is mandatory and membership in SUNTRACS prohibited for those who work for Maqtec and, based on the importation of a Maqtec work crew Labor Minister Reynaldo Rivera decreed that the company union represents workers at Isla Viveros and Gólcher sent in the police to back up armed security guards and SITICOPP representatives at that project. The police and armed company representatives also established themselves on nearby Isla San Miguel, where nearly all of the SUNTRACS workers live, and have been attempting to drive the workers and their families from their homes there. A number of SUNTRACS members and other San Miguel residents have armed themselves for protection against the armed men sent into their community by De La Cruz, Beladina, Alemán and the other Grupo Viveros partners.

The company union strategy then spread to a much larger contract, the concession to build a Panama to Colon toll road that the government allowed the Brazilian construction giant Norberto Odebrecht SA to assume under legally suspect circumstances from the insolvent PYCSA consortium, which is and was under court-ordered receivership. To get a job on that project, workers are required to sign a contract in Portuguese and agree to join SITICOPP. SUNTRACS members are prohibited.

There, too, SUNTRACS set up picket lines.

On August 13 armed men whom SUNTRACS alleged to be hit men from Colon attacked picketers near the Odebrecht office in Chilibre, stabbing two union members and robbing a photographer from El Panama America of the camera memory chip on which he had recorded the incident. Gólcher and Rivera blamed SUNTRACS for the violence.

The following morning when SUNTRACS showed up to renew its picket line at Odebrecht, company employees opened fire on union members, killing Colon SUNTRACS leader Osvaldo Lorenzo and wounding two other workers. The police belatedly moved in and detained a number of Odebrecht employees and security guards. Gólcher and Rivera blamed SUNTRACS for the violence.

Two days later on Isla Viveros, the mayor of the municipality of Balboa that encompasses the Perlas Archipelago, noting that there was no building permit for the Grupo Viveros project, issued a stop work order. A group of 10 SUNTRACS members, a copy of that order in hand, headed from Isla San Miguel to Isla Viveros. Police searched them as they left Isla San Miguel and then again as they arrived at Isla Viveros. As the union members approached the work site the police opened fire first with tear gas cannisters and then with a shotgun blast. SUNTRACS member Luigi Argüelles, who was about 15 feet away from the police officer who pulled the trigger, was instantly killed.

Gólcher blamed SUNTRACS for the violence. The Ministry of Government and Justice and the National Police that are one of its components issued a series of conflicting statements. At first it was claimed to be an accident. Then it was claimed that the SUNTRACS members were armed, even though in the course of the two prior searches, another search after the killing and the police control of the death scene no weapon was found for police to produce. Then the police said that only rubber bullets had been fired. (At a range of 15 feet, these can be fatal.) However, the rubber bullet story was then contradicted by the medical examiner, who found that the cause of Argüelles's death was his heart being punctured by a shotgun pellet.

That afternoon the labor/left FRENADESO umbrella group, of which SUNTRACS is a key component, had already planned a march from Parque Porras to the Presidencia to protest against the US-Panama free trade treaty whose approval or rejection is pending before the US Congress, increases in the cost of living and stagnant wages. With Lorenzo's murder two days before and the general company union strategy employed against SUNTRACS union busting and anti-labor violence came to the fore as the main issues and the shooting of Argüelles reinforced that.

The previous night Gólcher and Education Minister Miguel Angel Cañizales, the latter having gotten his start in politics as a psychologist for Manuel Antonio Noriega's torture / intelligence / propaganda G-2 Panama Defense Forces union, went on national television to allege that violence was planned for the August 16 march. No particulars were given, but in any case it was announced that schools in Panama City and San Miguelito would be closed.

(The latter move has an element of the company union strategy embedded within it. The nation's teachers' unions are loosely united in the Teachers Action Front (FAM), while the government has created a paper organization called the Teachers Unity Coordinator (CUM) with which to negotiate in lieu of FAM. The unions in FAM had endorsed the August 16 march, which would have meant teachers missing afternoon classes to attend. CUM only has spokespeople rather than members, but they promised that teachers would be in their classrooms that afternoon. As much as to avoid the possibility of rioting at some of the high schools, Cañizales shut the metro area schools in order to avoid a demonstration of teachers' loyalty to their unions rather than the government's CUM.)

As people gathered for the FRENADESO march, a few people had badly concealed weapons on their persons and union leaders repeatedly called for discipline and the avoidance of any provocations.

As the march got underway, the usual police procedures were different. This time there was not the ordinary Transito coordination to route traffic around the marchers. In fact police several times directed traffic right into the line of the march. The first such incident resulted in a pickup truck and two cars being blocked at a side street and Avenida Peru by the Revolutionary Student Front (FER-29) contingent. After pleading and arguments, the word came down for the young militants to stop hassling the drivers and let them through.

So were police looking to cause another violent incident?

As the march was happening prosecutors were busy questioning one Frederick Maire, who had presented himself to them with a claim that the previous night he had been approached by SUNTRACS secretary Saúl Méndez, who provided him with a pistol, $500 and instructions to start a shooting incident at the march. According to law enforcement reports Maire purportedly said that he had never met Méndez and at first though that the union leader was a homosexual attempting to pick him up, but the contract was made and would have been carried out but for the pleading of Maire's family to turn himself in to authorities instead. Based on that story an investigation was opened against Méndez and SUNTRACS secretary general Genaro López, both of whom deny Maire's allegations and claim that it's another part of a government move to destroy the union.

Rafael Rodríguez, the lawyer who generally represents SUNTRACS, went to court to file an anticipatory habeas corpus motion that would if granted prevent prosecutors from ordering Méndez or López jailed. Maire, based on his claim that he had accepted a contract to create a violent incident at the FRENADESO march, was arrested and jailed.

For scenes from the August 16 FRENADESO march, click here.

SUNTRACS members killed in government move to smash union
With habeas corpus motion pending, Noriega's house being renovated

Toned down rhetoric, but Cornejo case moves ahead

US denies RP basketball team visas, reverses itself

Mayoral candidates and labor
Panama News Briefs