After three weeks on strike, Colombia’s public-sector unions announced an agreement with the government for their 800,000 members to go back to work on Oct. 28. Workers won a 1.5 percent pay raise, slightly more than the government had offered. But union leaders said the biggest victory was the re-emergence of the Colombian labor-union movement as a powerful force after years of repression.

From the beginning, the government of President Andres Pastrana had set out to destroy the strike. In its Oct. 19 edition, the magazine Semana, which reflects the views of Colombia’s business elite, described plans to smash the unions "like Margaret Thatcher did to the British unions and Ronald Reagan did to the air-traffic controllers."

Pastrana declared the strike illegal just days after it began on Oct. 7. He sent the armed forces to dislodge workers occupying their work places.

Union leaders were threatened by paramilitary death squads with close connections to the military. Eight union leaders—including Jorge Ortega, a vice president of the United Workers’ Federation (CUT)—were assassinated.

Despite the repression, the unions held firm. Several mobilizations brought hundreds of thousands of workers into the streets, including the Oct. 22 funeral for CUT leader Ortega. CUT President Luis Garzón called it "the strike of the century."

"The period of ebb in the mass struggle provoked by the dirty war in Colombia has definitely ended," noted New Colombia News Agency analyst Hector Mondragón. "Large demonstrations will begin to create the conditions for future basic changes in Colombian life."

In addition to the wage gains, which were slightly above the government’s original offer, the unions won pledges for investment in the public sector. The government was forced to suspend its plans to privatize the Colombian Telecommunications Co. and several other state concerns. And the government promised that unionists would not face reprisals after returning to work.

The unions did not succeed in forcing a wholesale reversal of Pastrana’s pro-International Monetary Fund neoliberal economic policies. But union leaders vowed to keep up their campaign—in conjunction with other sectors of Colombian society.

"If Pastrana does not want to negotiate peacefully with us, then he will have to sit down and talk to the ones with guns," a union official told Reuters on Oct. 27, "because they are going to be demanding many of the same things."

Pastrana’s government has promised to begin talks with the country’s main armed revolutionary groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army and the National Liberation Army. Both groups demand an end to neoliberal policies as a necessary step toward any peaceful solution of the armed conflict.

this article is from Workers World newspaper