ABSTRACT
On Christmas Day, 25 December 2001, several hundred members of a public service union located in the south-western city of Cali, Colombia occupied their company’s 17-floor central administration building – the CAM Tower. The occupation was a response to the Colombian government’s decision to move ahead with plans to privatize EMCALI,1 the state-owned utilities company that provided electricity, water and telecommunications to the city’s two million inhabitants. For SINTRAEMCALI,2 the public service union involved, this was yet one more challenge in their long-running battle to keep their company in public hands. During the course of the 36-day occupation, the CAM tower became the
geographical headquarters of a citywide series of mass mobilizations. Tens of thousands of people in Cali went to meetings, joined marches, blocked off roads, and engaged in political protest in the defence of EMCALI as a stateowned public utilities provider, with the vast majority drawn from the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. This local activity was complemented by solidarity actions both in Bogotá, the capital, and in London, UK. In Bogotá, SINTRAEMCALI workers and supporters occupied the headquarters of the Superintendent of Public Services3 for 14 hours while local public service trade unionists formed a protective cordon around the building. In the United Kingdom, pickets outside the Colombian embassy were organized on several occasions in solidarity with SINTRAEMCALI workers, and two live video link ups were made between leaders of the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) and workers inside the Cali occupation. During key moments of the dispute, interventions were made either via letters to the Colombian government and/or in face-to-face meetings with Colombian diplomats by the British TUC, Amnesty International, Public Services International (PSI), the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), UNISON, the FBU, ASLEF, War on Want, the UK-based Colombia Solidarity Campaign and a range of other UK trade union and social organizations; and messages of support and solidarity for the occupation were received by email from as far afield as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines. On day 36 of the occupation, the workers emerged from the CAM tower
with a signed agreement from the Colombian government to freeze the
privatization plans. Victory, even if only of one battle, had been achieved in an ongoing struggle that has cost the lives of 17 SINTRAEMCALI members, murdered by right wing paramilitary forces linked to the Colombian state. Many more activists have also been displaced from their homes and families after being targeted by state and para-state forces for their involvement in the anti-privatization movement. The question of how this victory was achieved, and disseminating that
knowledge, remains important, for it was done in the face of opposition from local elites, the national government, the World Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and several key multinational corporations (MNCs), with all the structural, political and military power that this entails. It is important beyond Colombia, because, over recent decades, similar networks of actors have managed to implement other processes of privatization across lowincome countries, often in the face of widespread opposition, and generally to the detriment of the poorest sections of these populations. It is also important because it shows that labour can learn to operate imaginatively in new spaces (Munck 2002), and thus challenges the commonly held thesis that in the era of neoliberal economic globalization capital’s newfound mobility allows it an inevitable strategic advantage over labour movements due to their alleged inability to operate on the global scale (Castells 1997). I will begin this chapter by providing some context to the case study and
the research approach; developing on from that I want to connect with the earlier arguments in the book and to link them more explicitly to the case of SINTRAEMCALI. In doing so I will also draw on Kevin Cox’s (1998) understanding of ‘spaces of dependence’ and ‘spaces of engagement’ as an analytical tool to highlight the linked network of associations that were produced by SINTRAEMCALI and within which this process of strategic learning and knowledge production took place. This will then be followed by an exploration of the development of SINTRAEMCALI from the mid-1990s onwards, and the strategies and learning ‘spaces of engagement’ that emerged. Finally, I will return to the CAM tower occupation to reflect on how the different ‘spaces of engagement’ came together to produce more than the sum of their parts and ultimately proved too much for a Colombian government reeling under the relentless multi-actor and multi-scalar resistance.
