Who Killed Locarno and Orcasitas?

• Author: Dudley, Steven
• Position: Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasitas, union activists, Colombia

An Inquest into the Deaths of Two Colombian Unionist

On Monday, March 12, four unmarked buses chartered by the Alabama-based coal company Drummond left the company's facilities in northern Colombia. The buses were carrying Drummond's miners to Valledupar, a sleepy, blue-collar town where most of the 1,000 men who work in the mine live. Valmore Locarno, the boisterous president of Drummond's union, and Victor Orcasitas, the union's vice president, sat near the back of one of the buses. The two normally did not travel together, but because Orcasitas was meeting with company officials that day, he had gotten permission to leave his shift early.

The union leaders' bus started north along the well-paved, two-lane highway around 6 p.m., just as darkness began to settle. Shortly after passing a toll booth some seven miles from the mine, bus riders say a green Ford pickup truck with tinted windows began following them. After tailing the bus for a couple of miles, the men in the pickup pulled up alongside it, showed their guns to the driver, and forced him to turn onto a flirt road. About 350 yards down the road, the pickup and the bus stopped. Approximately six men exited the pickup, the bus riders say. Some wore civilian clothes, the others military uniforms. They did not cover their faces. Three heavily armed men entered the bus.

"We've come to settle a problem with two people," one of them told the scared miners. "Those who don't owe us anything have nothing to worry about."

The armed men took the workers' cellular phones and confiscated any weapons on board. One witness says that the first group of workers got off the bus, and the armed men forced them to put their hands against the bus to frisk them. They then tied one worker's hands behind his back and left him sitting in the dirt. As Locarno stepped off the bus, several miners remember that one armed man tried to grab the union leader by the back of his collar. Locarno snapped away from the man, but he grabbed him again. When Locarno snapped away for a second time and turned to face his aggressor, the armed man shot him in the face. He then proceeded to shoot him at least three more times in the head until one of his colleagues said to him, "That's enough. I think he's dead."

Next, someone in the pickup honked the horn. The tied-up worker was not Orcasitas, he signaled. The armed men looked carefully at the workers leaning against the bus and grabbed Orcasitas from the lineup. The person in the car honked twice: They had their man. They untied the other worker and forced everyone except Orcasitas back into the bus.

"In five minutes, you can leave," one of them said to the bus driver. "Don't say a word. We've got people everywhere."

They pushed Orcasitas toward the pickup.

"Kill me now," he told them.

"No, we're not going to kill you. We're just going to settle a little problem you have with Drummond."

The armed men then shoved Orcasitas in the back seat of the pickup and drove off in the direction of Valledupar.

At 12:30 a.m., the police found Orcasitas's body along the side of the road about twenty miles from where Locarno was killed. He had been shot twice in the back of the head. He bore no signs of torture, aside from the rope burns around his wrists. Police said they drove through the area looking for the killers.

"It's difficult," Valledupar police commander Abel de Jesus Leon explained to me a few days after the killings, "because they steal cars, do their business, then hide with their cars back on their farm." The army, in its one-paragraph report to the local ombudsman's office...