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Colombia orders arrests in slaying of unionists(EFE News Service Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Colombia's Attorney General's Office ordered the arrest of two suspects in the March 2001 murders of a pair of unionists who represented employees of U.S. multinational coal company Drummond, judicial officials said. The arrest orders were issued Friday for presumed members of the AUC paramilitary federation Oscar Jose Ospino and Jairo de Jesus Charris. According to the officials, "documentary evidence, testimonies and statements" exist to back up the decision to have the men arrested on charges of first-degree murder. On March 12, 2001, union president Valmore Locarno and Victor Hugo Orcasita were riding in a Drummond bus carrying some 50 workers when it was intercepted by a group of armed men near the northern Colombian town of Bosconia. The paramilitaries removed Locarno and Orcasita from the vehicle by force, shot the former to death and took his companion with them to torture and kill later. Antother union leader, Gustavo Soler, who was also riding on the bus and subsequently replaced Locarno as president of the union, was murdered seven months later. According to the investigation, Ospino was the head of a group of the AUC paramilitary federation that was active in that region. Also implicated in the crime is Jorge 40, former head of the AUC's Northern Bloc who turned himself in in March 2006 to avail himself of the benefits of the Peace and Justice Law, the controversial legislation detailing the process of re-integrating Colombia's militiamen. The two suspected militiamen for whom the arrest warrants were issued Friday remain fugitives, while in July a U.S. jury acquitted Alabama-based Drummond of responsibility for the murders of the three union leaders. Some 31,000 members of the AUC - which was formed to fight leftist guerrillas but turned into a drug-running crime mob that routinely killed mayors, city council members, university professors, labor leaders and journalists that it deemed leftist - demobilized in recent years as part of a peace process with President Alvaro Uribe's government. Colombia, where more than 800 union activists have been slain since 2001, is the world's most dangerous country for members of organized labor. Copyright 2007 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc., Source: The Financial Times Limited |