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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:34 pm
Time: 9:34 pm
Results for anti-union violence
1 results foundAuthor: Guzman, Daniel Title: Unobserved Union Violence: Statistical Estimates of the Total Number of Trade Unionists Killed in Colombia, 1999-2008 Summary: Anti-union assassinations may be one of the best documented violations in Colombia. Unions keep track of who has been killed in their community; companies and public institutions know when their employees are no longer alive. Special interest groups have formed to pay even closer attention to violence across unions, labor sectors, years and municipalities. The National Union School (Escuela Nacional Sindical in Spanish) is one such group: they have recorded violence against trade unions since 1986. Human rights groups, such as the non-governmental (NGO) Colombian Commission of Jurists, monitor the killing of unionists in addition to other victims and other violations. The government’s human rights office, led by the Vice President, began pooling together data on Colombia’s anti-union violence in 1999. Yet, even with so many monitors keeping track of the violence experienced by this group, we estimate in this study that in some places and times, as much as 30% of all the killings are not recorded by any of these datasets. Many have attempted to answer the apparently simple question: “how many trade unionists have been killed in Colombia?” Unions, human rights groups and the Colombian government debate the “right” answer. More recently, the political stakes of the answer increased when governments in North America and Europe linked their consideration of free trade agreements with Colombia to the question of whether violence against unionists has been improving or not. As part of the answer, some groups suggest lists of killings. For example, the ENS published a report in 2007 entitled “2.515 o esa siniestra facilidad para olvidar,” emphasizing their recorded death toll through that date [Montoya, 2007]. Their most recent published count is 2,857 union workers killed in the 25 years between 1986-2010 [Escuela Nacional Sindical, 2011]; a recent news article presents a different number, 2,819 unionized workers killed, for the same period [El Espectador, 2011]. Beyond counts, others try to suggest a pattern across time. For example, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights cites 26 union assassinations in 2010 as an increase from the 25 reported in 2009. The ENS disputes those yearly numbers with a higher count on their website - 28 assassinations in 2009 and 51 in 2010. The controversy around this apparently simple question suggests that there may be more killings that are unknown to some of the monitoring organizations. The debate becomes more complicated when researchers attempt to provide explanations about why the killings occur (or why they do not occur), occasionally with politically-charged interpretations. In 2009, for example, a study argued that union violence in Colombia is neither systematic nor targeted, an argument that many have disputed [Mej´ıa and Uribe, 2009]. The Achilles’ heel of all these claims is that the data are incomplete. All of the existing datasets document some killings, but none of the databases include all trade union homicides. Faced with tremendous political pressure to provide statistics – and to defend them – analysts tend to explain differences between their figures and other analysts’ counts as follows. Some analysts claim that competing numbers are inflated because they include deaths of trade unionists killed for non-union-related motives. Other analysts claim that the rival numbers are deflated because they categorically exclude some of the victims. The datasets used in this study included cases of killings against unionists related to their union activity - organizations that contributed data to this study carefully selected cases of killings of unionists which were viewed to be directly related to their union activity, other kinds of killings such as common crime or crimes of passion are not included. However, even with this common definition of what constitutes a ‘case’ we find some disagreement between groups about whether or not a homicide is related to union activity. As a result, we conducted analyses examining the sensitivity of the results and conclusions presented here to differing decisions regarding the inclusion or exclusion of homicides in the datasets used in this report. For more details see Appendices B and C. Although there is general agreement that even with a particular definition, none of the databases includes all of the victims, researchers have yet to sufficiently address this limitation. We have two purposes with this study. The first is to offer statistical estimates of unknown, unreported trade unionists killed. We use a statistical method called Multiple Systems Estimation, explained in detail in Appendix A. By combining an estimate of the number of deaths not recorded in any source with the number of known, recorded deaths, this analysis offers estimated totals for all unionists killed in Colombia between 1999 and 2008. Second, we are concerned that underregistration (deaths not recorded by any source) has not been sufficiently understood in previous studies which aim to measure anti-union violence3, human rights violations4 or war deaths5. In this report, we demonstrate the interpretative problems that result from ignoring underregistration. We show that underregistration of union killings is not constant across the dimensions we are trying to understand including time, space, and type of union. The variation in levels of undercounting is important because it can alter the interpretations we make when comparing across these dimensions. Details: Palo Alto, CA: Benetech, Human Rights Data Analysis Group, 2012. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 13, 2012 at: https://www.hrdag.org/resources/publications/uv-estimates-paper.pdf Year: 2012 Country: Colombia URL: https://www.hrdag.org/resources/publications/uv-estimates-paper.pdf Shelf Number: 126003 Keywords: Anti-Union ViolenceHomicidesHuman Rights (Colombia) |