Top Colombia Labor Leader Shot, Two Others Killed

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

Friday December 15 11:16 AM ET
Top Colombia Labor Leader Shot, Two Others Killed

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Suspected right-wing gunmen shot and wounded one of
Colombia's top labor leaders on 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.

Borja's bodyguard, 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.

They said the car the gunmen fired from was found abandoned about six
blocks from the scene of the attack, with a corpse lying either inside it
or nearby. 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, has reported receiving repeated death
threats in the past.

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.


Copyright © 2000 Yahoo! Inc., and Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.