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How does this work? Quite simply, the right-wing terrorists earn their money by terrorizing the workers, murdering those who seek to organize struggles for higher wages or improved conditions and threatening the rest that the same will happen to them if they don’t submit.

Indeed, over the past six years, more than 800 union officials and organizers have been assassinated in Colombia—and more than 4,000 since 1986—with virtually no one punished for any of these killings. It is routine for employers to utilize the right-wing paramilitaries as hit-men against their own rebellious employees.

A concrete example of this process involving another US multinational is working its way through the legal systems in both the US and Colombia. Colombian prosecutors have opened a formal investigation against the Alabama-based coal producer Drummond Co. Inc. on charges that company paid a paramilitary leader to carry out the death squad murders of three union officials at its coal mine in the northeast of the country. The company is being sued in a civil case involving the same charges in Alabama, where Drummond is headquartered.

Such methods of terror, violence and murder against the working class are, as the statement from the US attorney suggests, a common business practice, dedicated to improving the bottom line. To “conform their conduct to the requirements of the law and still remain competitive,” as the prosecutor suggests, can be accomplished as simply as finding or organizing new death squads that are not on the State Department’s official terrorist list.

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