The bus had just left Drummond Inc's coal mine carrying about 50 workers when gunmen halted it and forced two union leaders off. They shot one on the spot, pumping four bullets into his head and dragged the other one off to be tortured and killed.
In a civil trial set to begin tomorrow before a federal jury in Birmingham, Alabama, union lawyers have presented affidavits from two people who allege that Drummond ordered those killings, a charge the company denies.
The Chiquita banana company has admitted to paying right-wing militias known as paramilitaries to protect its Colombia operations.
Human rights activists claim such practices were widespread among multinationals in Colombia, and that Drummond went even further, using the fighters to violently keep its labor costs down.
The Drummond case, they say, is their best chance yet of seeing those allegations heard in court.
The union has presented affidavits to the Alabama court from two people who say they were present when Drummond's chief executive in Colombia, Augusto Jimenez, handed over a large sum of cash to representatives of the local paramilitary warlord.
The affadavits claim the money was for the March 10, 2001, killings of Sintramienergetica union local president Valmore Locarno and his deputy, Victor Orcasita.
Union leaders, former army soldiers and ex-paramilitary fighters also allege that family-owned Drummond, which shifted most of its operations to northern Colombia in the 1990s as its Alabama veins gave out, paid and provisioned the paramilitaries as a matter of policy.
Drummond said neither charge is true.
"Drummond did not pay any paramilitary or illegal or unlawful group," it said in a written response to questions from The Associated Press.
Rafael Garcia, the former technology director of the Colombian state security agency, said in an affidavit that he saw Jimenez give "a suitcase full of cash" to paramilitary commanders "to assassinate specific union leaders," naming Locarno and Orcasita.
Garcia is in prison, convicted of erasing drug traffickers' names from security records.
Former paramilitary fighter Alberto Visbal said in an affidavit that he saw Jimenez pay his boss, who went by the alias "Julian," US$200,000 in cash.
Visbal, who has fled Colombia, said he understood from another fighter present that the money was in exchange for the killings.
He was later sent to confirm Locarno's death, Visbal said.
Paid off
In a filing in an Atlanta, Georgia, circuit court on Thursday seeking more time to gather depositions, plaintiffs for the union also alleged former union treasurer Jimmy Rubio saw a Drummond official -- they didn't specify who -- pay a paramilitary leader for the killings.
Rubio went into hiding when his father-in-law was murdered just before he was to give a deposition in the case, they said.
Affidavits from Rubio, Visbal and Garcia have all been entered into the public record at the court in Birmingham.
Drummond challenged the accounts in the affadavits.
"We have evidence that some [of the witnesses] are being paid and/or offered assistance by the United Steelworkers Union," it said in its written response.
The union said that the only assistance provided to witnesses was helping some of them leave the country after their lives were threatened.
The lawsuit, filed under a US statute that lets foreigners sue US corporations for their conduct abroad, seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
`Direct victims'
The lawsuits alleged that Locarno, Orcasita and Gustavo Soler -- who was killed after he took over for Locarno -- "were direct victims of Drummond's plan to violently destroy the union."
"I think they thought they could get away with anything, literally get away with murder," United Steelworkers lawyer Daniel Kovalik said.
Drummond's relationship with the Sintramienergetica union, which represents a third of the company's 6,200 local workers, has long been tense.
The union accuses the company of unsafe conditions it says contributed to 13 accidental deaths since 1995, of forcing injured employees to work and of indiscriminately dismissing workers.
Drummond said: "We have a good relationship with our rank-and-file workforce."
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