Top Colombia Labor Leader Shot
Reuters Friday, December 15, 2000; 1:14 PM
BOGOTA, Dec 15—Suspected right-wing gunmen shot and wounded one of Colombia's top labor leaders Friday in a botched assassination attempt in which at least two people were killed, authorities said.
The high-profile attack against Wilson Borja, head of Colombia's 700,000-strong public sector workers' union Fenaltrase, was the latest targeting organized labor in Colombia where authorities say nearly 1,600 union activists have been killed since 1995.
Police said three assailants brandishing automatic assault rifles opened fire on Borja—a member of the central committee of Colombia's small Communist Party—as he left his home in a district of Bogota in an all-terrain vehicle.
One of Borja's bodyguards, who was shot in the face, managed to return the gunmen's fire and a woman street vendor was killed in the shootout, police spokesmen said.
Police said the car the gunmen fired from was found abandoned about six blocks from the scene of the attack, with a corpse lying alongside it. It was not immediately clear if the dead man was one of the trio of would-be assassins or a passerby killed so they could avoid being identified.
Borja, who was shot in the right leg, collarbone and nicked by a bullet that grazed his scalp, was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was listed in stable condition.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack but Borja, who has led six strikes against government economic policy since President Andres Pastrana took office in 1998, had complained to the authorities of receiving a series of death threats since September, according to Roberto Chamucero, Fenaltrase's vice president.
To protest the shooting, which Pastrana deplored as "vile and cowardly," Chamucero said unionized government workers would stage a 24-hour strike Monday.
The Communist Party is loosely allied to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest surviving rebel army, and Borja has served as a go-between in government efforts to open peace talks with the smaller National Liberation Army.
The two guerrilla groups have been waging war against the state since the mid-1960s, in an increasingly brutal conflict pitting them against ultra-right paramilitary groups and state security forces that has taken 35,000 lives since 1990.
"EXTREME RIGHT GROUP"
Labor Minister Angelino Garzon, a former union boss himself who visited Borja in the hospital, told reporters he had no doubt that "an extreme right group" was responsible for the attack.
"It's a group that's attacking not just labor activists but all of the country's peace efforts," he said.
He did not elaborate, but the FARC indefinitely suspended nearly two years of peace talks with the government last month, to protest what it described as the government's failure to halt "terrorism" by paramilitary groups and right-wing death squads that operate with the alleged complicity of Colombia's armed forces.
Union activists have long been a main target of the paramilitaries and the International Labor Organization reported at a meeting in Bogota earlier this month that 1,598 union members had been assassinated in Colombia since 1995.
The systematic killing is reminiscent of the mid-1980s when the FARC tried to enter mainstream politics by setting up a political party known as the Patriotic Union.
Several thousand party members were killed in just a few years in an extermination campaign blamed on paramilitary gunmen working for Colombia's large landowners and wealthy elite.