ORGANIZING AND REPRESSION IN GUATEMALA

(by Stephen Coats - Multinational Monitor June 1995)

Human rights violations in Guatemala have been on the rise over the past year, and trade unionists are often the target of this new wave of violence. In the maquiladora sector, which in Guatemala produces apparel for the U.S. market, labor activists have become victims of harassment, kidnapping and murder. In the past, maquiladora labor leaders have generally not faced the same level of violence as activists in other sectors, but a number of recent incidents suggests that this situation is changing.
For example, on September 30, 1994, the entire executive committee of the Marissa maquiladora union was abducted and threatened with death. In March 1995, the violence reached a new level with the first assassination of a labor leader in the maquiladora sector, Alexander Yovany Gomez. And in May l995, Flor de Maria Seguero, a union organizer, was abducted, beaten and raped three times. Seguero has been active in focusing international attention on worker rights violations in the maquiladora sector. Last year, Seguero attended U.S. congressional hearings on working conditions in Central America.

Guatemala on probation

After a six-year struggle, worker rights advocates persuaded the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in August 1992 to accept two petitions filed under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) trade program challenging the systemic denial of worker rights in Guatemala. The petitions, filed by the Washington, D .C . based International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project, the AFL-CIO and eight other U.S. trade union and human rights organizations, documented extensive worker rights violations in Guatemala's maquiladora sector and other industries.
GSP extends duty-free trade benefits to certain commodities from Third World countries, but these benefits are supposed to be conditioned on beneficiary countries "taking steps" to afford their workers "internationally-recognized worker rights." These rights are legally defined to include acceptable working conditions, the right to organize, and prohibitions on child labor and slave labor.
Acceptance of the 1992 petitions placed Guatemala "under review," a probation-like status. Guatemala has been under continuous review since August 1992. By keeping Guatemala under review, the USTR is acknowledging that Guatemala has not taken sufficient steps to end probation. But review status also means that, in the USTR's estimation, Guatemalan labor conditions are not bad enough to warrant termination of GSP benefits.
Since the petitions were accepted, Guatemala has approved its most significant labor code reform in 40 years, opened two new labor courts, hired new labor inspectors, granted legal recognition to the first maquiladora unions in six years, recognized unions that have had applications pending for years (such as the Army Bank union), recognized a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant unionin the record time of just two months and, in October 1994, increased the legal minimum wage by 40 percent to about $2.50 a day.
Yet, these steps have not brought significant progress to workers for two main reasons: labor laws go unenforced and anti union violence goes unpunished.
Guatemalan labor courts are not functioning, having resolved just one out ofthe 600 cases that have come before them in the past two years. The minimum wage is not paid by most employers . The government rarely imposes fines for violations and, when it does, the fines are rarely paid. The government stands idly by while members of most of the maquiladora unions that it has recognized have been the targets of death threats, bribery and illegal firings and plant closings. Not a single maquiladora works under an independent union contract, and half the maquiladora unions have been destroyed in the past year.
In a country that remains one of the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere, impunity persists for those who kill, torture, disappear or threaten trade unionists. Not a single perpetrator of violence against workers has been prosecuted during the review period despite scores of cases.
Moreover, violence by right-wing forces against trade unionists, including in the maquiladora sector, has been on the rise.
Examples involving workers producing directly or indirectly for U.S. companies include: