U.S. Firm On Trial in Colombia Slayings

Guzman said in an interview that Drummond provided transportation to paramilitary units and that the company's chief of security coordinated military-paramilitary operations. The Popa's former commander, Col. Hernán Mejía, was cashiered and is being investigated for having allegedly collaborated with paramilitary groups.

Guzman said Drummond officials knew full well how the paramilitary groups operated. "Seven hundred soldiers can't do what two paras can do, since the paras don't capture, they just assassinate," he said.

Drummond has its defenders, including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has said he does not believe Guzman's allegations against the company. In a recent interview, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said, "I have no doubt that this was not company policy."

Much of the case against Drummond is based on circumstantial evidence. Additionally, some of the witnesses for the plaintiffs were themselves involved in paramilitary activities or other crimes, raising questions about their credibility.

"Certainly that's going to be a problem," acknowledged Terry Collingsworth, general counsel at the International Labor Rights Fund. "Drummond is going to argue, 'The guy's the devil, and how are you going to believe him?' "

Still, Collingsworth said, there are witnesses such as Isnardo Ropero, who was a private security guard for a Drummond official, and George M. Pierce, an American who worked in La Loma for two years. In a sworn statement, Ropero said paramilitary groups provided security services for Drummond, and Pierce described in trial testimony how Drummond's chief executive in Colombia, Augusto Jiménez, made a veiled threat against labor leaders. Pierce has also said Drummond officials presumed that union members were nothing short of rebel collaborators.

"They chose a side in the war," Herman N. "Rusty" Johnson Jr., an attorney for the plaintiffs, said of Drummond. "They chose the paramilitaries."

What has not been in dispute is that the AUC killed the union leaders whose families have now brought suit. Valmore Locarno, the local union president, and his vice president, Victor Orcasita, were slain on March 10, 2001. Not quite seven months later, Gustavo Soler, Locarno's successor, was shot dead. A feared commander, Rodrigo Tovar, has been charged with the slayings, and Attorney General Mario Iguaran has said prosecutors are investigating paramilitary groups' ties with Drummond.

Nor is there much disagreement over the AUC's influence in the late 1990s and early in this decade, a time when Drummond was also expanding. With financial and political backing, the AUC took control of the dusty, poverty-stricken towns all across Cesar.

While its fighters eroded the rebels' support base, they also forced the smallest businesses to make extortion payments and had local officials kick back a percentage of all public contracts.

"They dominated military, massacring people, dismembering people, leaving people dead on the highways," said Alfonso Palacio, candidate for mayor in the town of La Jagua and a government witness against paramilitary commanders. "They generated a collective psychological terrorism in the region."

Among those left devastated by the violence is a woman in her 40s who had a child with Orcasita, the former vice president of the Drummond union.

"The damage was great, just too much, too much," said the woman, a plaintiff who was granted anonymity in the case for fear of reprisals. "All these years I've been alone with my daughter. Going through hard times, cruel times."