Trade unions in Colombia
The working conditions of these Colombian laborers have some famous representation in literature, Jose Eustacio Rivera's La Voragine depicting both the plight of the rubber worker & the rich biodiversity of the Colombian countryside, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude & Álvaro Cepeda Samudio’s La Casa Grande containing fictional versions of the banana massacre.
Colombia had been dominated since the turn of the century by the Conservative party, but the government's loss of prestige following its violent suppression of strikers helped bring them out of office by the end of the decade, ushering in a new decade and a half-long era of Liberal rule, which was characterized by a government more sympathetic to labor.
[3] Liberal support of labor waned towards the end of their tenure as the party in power, as the foreign affairs of the 1940s overshadowed the domestic.
In the end, the split between the centrist and more radical reformist wing of the party, as headed by Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, allowed for a Conservative win in 1946, the uneasy transfer of power coupled with Gaitán's assassination shortly thereafter beginning the era of Colombian history known as La Violencia.The centrist-radical divide within the Liberal party was mirrored in the CTC, where, in the increasingly hostile environment of the burgeoning cold war and new Conservative government, centrists in the CTC carried out a purge of its communist members.
As the Liberal-led CTC was in this weakened state, the Unión de Trabajadores Colombianos (UTC) was founded by Jesuit elements of the Roman Catholic Church.
[4] A core sector of the newly founded UTC were the Catholic trade unions in the textile factories of Medellín, capital of the generally conservative department of Antioquia.
[5][6][7] Conservative rule would not last long, as general Gustavo Rojas Pinilla staged a coup d'état in 1953 after then president Laureano Gómez tried to have him dismissed.
The military government supported the creation of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) trade union confederation.
[11] With a strong anti-oligarchical discourse, Rojas Pinilla sought to utilize CNT and MAN to mobilize popular opinion against the traditional elites and their political parties.
[12] At the same time as the government mobilized support to CNT it curbed the activities of the two main party-affiliated trade union centers of the country, the CTC and UTC.
"[23] The Colombian parapolitics scandal revealed widespread links between the government and the paramilitaries, in which then President Alvaro Uribe and his congressional allies were heavily implicated.
