U.S. Firm On Trial in Colombia Slayings

Civil Suit Alleges Coal Producer Had Union Leaders Shot

LA LOMA, Colombia -- In 2001, paramilitary hit men pulled three union leaders off buses in this roasting-hot swath of northeastern Colombia and shot them dead. In a shadowy conflict where gunmen often kill union activists, the slaying generated little attention, even as the dead men's families accused their American employer of having ordered the hits.

Now, six years later, the spotlight is on Drummond Co., the Alabama-based coal producer that employed the men. This week, in a federal court in Birmingham, the company has begun defending itself in a civil suit in which the families of the slain union members are seeking unspecified damages for their deaths. Drummond has denied allegations that it ever worked with paramilitary groups or played a role in the deaths.

The case marks the first time an American company has gone before a jury in a U.S. court for alleged abuses committed abroad. The trial is expected to generate scrutiny from other federal benches and the Supreme Court, which in 2004 upheld a ruling that foreigners could sue in American courts for abuses abroad -- but under narrowly defined legal boundaries. A key question is whether federal courts will be inclined to hold corporations responsible under the arcane 18th-century law -- called the Alien Tort Claims Act -- that was used to take Drummond to court.

"I think it has enormous significance," Martin Flaherty, a professor of international human rights law at Fordham Law School in New York, said of the trial. "That's really what this suit and other suits like it will answer -- the role of corporate responsibility."

Filed by lawyers for the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund, the suit comes in the midst of a long scandal in Colombia that has exposed ties between illegal paramilitary groups and the political, military and business establishment. Investigators in Colombia have shown how paramilitary members expanded their operations across much of the northern coast, including this region, with the help of corrupt politicians and army officers.

The slayings of union members has increasingly attracted attention in the U.S. Congress, which in a hearing last month scrutinized evidence that Drummond, along with Chiquita Brands International, an Ohio banana firm, allegedly helped support paramilitary groups. (In March, Chiquita admitted in D.C. federal court that it had paid paramilitary groups $1.7 million but asserted it did so to protect its workers.) More hearings on the issue are planned, said Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who chairs the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights that called for the June hearing.

"We have to monitor that behavior and sanction those that engage in that kind of activity," Delahunt said.

Drummond said it would not comment about the case, and its officials did not return phone calls. But in court Wednesday, Drummond's lead attorney, William H. Jeffress Jr., said, "The allegations of the plaintiffs are not true, and they're not fair." Jeffress said Drummond wouldn't have risked its investment by resorting to murder.

Nevertheless, the avalanche of revelations in the so-called para-political scandal has touched Drummond, a company that is close to the administration of President Álvaro Uribe and central to the production of one of Colombia's most important exports, coal. Drummond has sunk more than $1 billion into developing its mine here and produces more than 25 million tons of coal a year.

Several new witnesses have surfaced in recent months to allege that in an effort to fight back against Marxist guerrillas who attacked the company's coal trains in Cesar state, Drummond came to depend on fighters from Colombia's coalition of paramilitary groups, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC. Funded by ranchers and businessmen, the AUC morphed into a terrorist group engaging in drug trafficking and mass murder.

Its backers "feared attacks on the rail lines, on the port, on the mines," explained Rafael García, a former high official in Colombia's secret police who has become a government witness here revealing ties between paramilitary commanders and politicians.

Among the witnesses who have come forward here is Edwin Guzman, a former Colombian army sergeant whose unit, the Popa battalion, deployed hundreds of men inside Drummond's installations.