Colombia's coal mines offer a microcosm of events and ideas sweeping Latin America in the twenty‐first century. Foreign multinationals ravage the environment to extract resources consumed in the global north. Indigenous and Afro‐descended peasants inhabiting valuable regions claim special status as caretakers of fragile natural environments. Radical unions elaborate an anti‐imperialist, environmental critique of the companies that they see as looting their countries. These forces contribute to a twenty‐first century socialism that links indigenous and environmental rights, attacks the privileges of multinationals and the global north, and commits to redistribution and a vision of development that transcends economic growth.
Latin American political movements linking traditional peasant values of subsistence with a leftist critique of imperialism are contributing to new forms of environmentalism there. While in the United States labor and environmental movements tend to operate within mainstream political and economic models based on privileging high levels of consumption and economic growth, Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development. From indigenous and peasant movements to leftist labor unions to political leaders, Latin Americans are calling for economic development that privileges the rights of rural peoples and their environments, and redistribution of resources domestically and globally. Yet they remain imbedded in an international economy based on extractivism and economic growth, which poses significant challenges to any alternative paths.
This article examines how globalization and violence have shaped workers' organizations in the Urabá banana zone in northern Colombia from the 1960s to the present. Early unions found allies in leftist political and guerilla organizations. The banana growers relied on the neoliberal state and rightist paramilitaries to unleash an extraordinary wave of violence to crush the leftist unions. They also wooed the right within the unions by pleading a set of common interests in reforming the global banana trade to the benefit of Colombian producers. By the 1990s, a newly right-dominated union in Urabá proved adept at labor-management collaboration in the interest of their joint regional stake in the industry, but it also promoted international labor unity aimed at pressuring banana transnationals to accept minimum labor standards.
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