Colombian oil worker tells his incredible story

Gilberto Torres will reveal his experiences as a trade unionist in the most dangerous country on earth at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival 2002 in Dorset this July. The oil worker was abducted in February as he left his job at the OCENSA pipeline, which transports BP’s oil from wells in the eastern Andes to the Caribbean port of Covenas.

Campaigning anti-poverty charity War on Want is bringing Gilberto Torres to the UK to highlight worker’s rights abuses in Colombia and strengthen the international trade union movement. Colombia is recognized as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a trade union member. Ninety per cent of assassinations of trade unionists take place in Colombia.

Gilberto is a regional leader of the Colombian oil workers union Union Sindical Obrera (USO), which has lost 89 of its members to paramilitary death squads since the mid-1980s.

After his abduction, Gilberto was kept shackled in a hole in the ground covered with barbed wire for six weeks by the paramilitary group AUC (United Self-Defence of Colombia). In response to his disappearance, USO staged a national strike, with the Colombia Solidarity Campaign mounting two pickets at the Colombian Embassy in London.

Gilberto was finally freed on Sunday, April 7 after negotiations with the International Red Cross, the Presidential Peace Commissioner and the People’s Defender. Union leaders had spent two weeks in talks with top executives of state oil corporation ECOPETROL demanding that they do more to secure the rights of Colombia’s oil workers.

The year of living dangerously