Luciano Romero

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Luciano Enrique Romero Molina (born December 21, 1959 - September 10, 2005 in Valledupar , Colombia ) was a Colombian trade unionist who was murdered by paramilitaries for his activities. The coming to terms with his murder serves as a legal precedent .

The person

Luciano Romero was married to Ledys Mendoza and was 46 years old at the time of the crime. He was the father of three minor children when he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered with 50 stab wounds. For many years he worked in the Nestlé Cicolac factory in Valledupar. In 1986 he joined the Sinaltrainal union , where he became chairman of the Valledupar section. In 2000 he was elected to the regional board there. He was "not a good speaker and a rather quiet person". Luciano Romero concentrated his work on documenting human rights violations against trade unionists in Colombia. Therefore he was delegated to the human rights organization Foundation Committee for Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Valledupar as secretary for human rights . He was also interested in the links between the economy and the paramilitary forces in Colombia, whereby he also made sure that the rights of captured guerrillas were respected. Precisely because of this work, however, he often had to live with threats and attempts at intimidation. The threats related explicitly to his work as a trade unionist. On August 24, 1988, he was even illegally arrested, kidnapped and tortured by the Colombian judicial police. In 1999, the management of Cicolac publicly accused him of placing a bomb on the factory premises. Due to the resulting urgent situation, protective measures were even taken by the Colombian government for Luciano Romero (and other people) in 1999. After a collective bargaining dispute in which he was the negotiator, he was unjustifiably dismissed by Cicolac in 2002, which the Sinaltrainal union viewed as a preliminary step to his assassination, since this is the pattern that most of the murders of its officials took place on.

The case

After the dismissal at Cicolac, the Sinaltrainal union sought specific protection agreements for Luciano Romero with both the government and Nestlé. There were specific death threats, which is why, in the end, various protective measures were taken, especially on the part of civil rights organizations. For example, he was "accepted into a protection program of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States". On the part of Nestlé, apart from offers of talks (not in Switzerland) and the assurance to get a visa to leave the country, nothing substantial happened. To leave the country would have meant giving up family and work in Colombia, which Luciano Romero refused. While doing his part-time job as a taxi driver, Luciano Romero was lured to a paramilitary property on the evening of September 10, 2005 , murdered, and the corpse was finally deposited on a meadow known for it - as a deterrent. At the time of the act, Luciano Romero was 46 years old. The Luciano Romero case is not an isolated case. But it is a well documented one, because the murderers of Luciano Romero were convicted as paramilitaries in Colombia in 2007, their commander in 2010. Decisive for the further processing of the case was the advice of the presiding judge José Nirio Sánchez to continue investigating the police, secret service and also the management of Nestlé, "in order to determine their likely involvement and / or planning and financing of the murder" to clarify.

The work-up

The Nestlé milk powder plant is one of the few factories and therefore an important employer in Valledupar. There are traditionally close ties and business relationships with the large landowners and ranchers. And thus also to the paramilitaries, because these are mainly financed by this clientele. In contrast, there is no state monopoly on the use of force ( weak governance ) in these areas of Colombia, which are considered regions of civil war . The group management constantly assured that the freedom of trade unions would also be respected in Colombia. Which automatically implies the question of how transnational corporations should actually behave in such countries in order to guarantee this. On March 5, 2012, the lawyers of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which specializes in pilot processes, and the union of workers in the food industry in Colombia (Sinaltrainal) jointly filed a criminal complaint against the group management in order to clarify this question. You accuse the Nestlé group of having (indirectly) caused the murder of the Colombian trade unionist Luciano Romero. The ad reads "negligent homicide by omission". So far, however, no criminal proceedings have been opened by the responsible public prosecutor's offices in the cantons of Zug and Vaud . The claimants appealed against this to the Swiss Federal Criminal Court.

Sources and literature

swell

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Probably born in Valledupar. The exact place of birth could not yet be determined on the basis of the available documents.
  2. Keppeler 2012
  3. Seibt 2012
  4. See above all the criminal complaint submitted by ECCHR against Nestlé , in particular point II (previous history).
  5. Ketteler 2012
  6. Nestlé only promised to “help organize foreign visas for threatened ex-employees” (Seibt 2012).
  7. Ketteler 2012
  8. Until 2002 Cicolac after the sale DPA as a joint venture between Nestlé and Fonterra.
  9. See Spiegel-Online 2012.
  10. See Tages-Anzeiger 2012.
  11. See Zumach 2012.

Notes and quotes:

  1. "On the evening of September 10, 2005, he was kidnapped by paramilitaries, tortured and killed with 50 stab wounds" (special newsletter of ECCHR, p. 10).
  2. "He also visited captured guerrillas to ensure that their rights were respected" (Ketteler 2012).
  3. The Nestlé Factory and the Murders. In: taz. June 2, 2012
  4. "The reason: in the weeks before his death, Romero was just preparing to testify against Nestlé at a congress in Bern" (Seibt 2012).
  5. "The links between the local economy and paramilitarism in Valledupar and other parts of the country were confirmed years later by the judicial authorities" (ECCHR 2012, p. 12).
  6. ^ "All of Cicolac's large milk suppliers financed the paramilitaries" (Ketteler 2012).
  7. "Romero's case represents a structural problem" (Prosinger 2012). In the course of globalization, transnational corporations are more powerful than governments in many countries. “They are actors” (Prosinger 2012). The question therefore arises as to which rules and laws they have to follow in crisis regions.