Many of the Colombian “success stories” touted on the foundation’s website were critical about the foundation’s effect on their lives. Many labor leaders and progressive activists say foundation programs caused environmental harm, displaced indigenous people, and helped concentrate a larger share of Colombia’s energy and mining resources in the hands of Giustra, who was involved in a now-bankrupt oil company that worked closely with the Clinton Foundation and which used the Colombian military and a surveillance program to smash a strike by its workers.
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“The idea was that they would help small stores and small fishermen,” she said. “And that’s what it did, but only at the start.”
Sandra said she received no money from the Clinton Foundation and, in fact, took out a large bank loan at its urging. Paying this loan proved to be a tremendous burden, she said. In its statement to Fusion, the Clinton Foundation said that Valdivieso had benefited from “commercial advice to enter new markets and increase her sales, among other business tools.”
Even worse, within months, the head of the Acceso project told Valdivieso that she should no longer deal directly with buyers. Instead, she would sell her fish directly to Acceso — at sharply reduced prices, Valdivieso said — and Acceso would resell them. In other words, the Clinton Foundation would act as a middleman and profit from margins supplied by the people it was supposed to be helping.
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In September 2005, Giustra and Clinton flew to Kazakhstan together to meet the Central Asian nation’s president. Shortly thereafter, Giustra secured a lucrative concession to mine Kazakh uranium, despite his company’s
lack of experience with the radioactive ore. Within months of securing the Kazakh mining deal, Giustra
had donated more than $31 million in all. The Clinton Foundation disputes any suggestion that the former president helped Giustra secure the Kazakh mining deal, citing
an online Forbes column that suggested “Giustra, the eminently successful deal maker,” had worked out the deal “long before Clinton’s arrival.”
In 2007, while Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, Giustra pledged to give a $100 million to the Clinton Foundation in a New York press conference. More Giustra-connected pledges followed, including $4.4 million from Pacific Rubiales (called Petro Rubiales Energy Corp. in foundation filings) and the firm’s other financial backers, according to documents
surfaced by investigative reporters at the International Business Times. The
Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative to combat global poverty was born.
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The Clinton Foundation
told the Washington Free Beacon last year that its Acceso job training center has “helped hundreds of employees and potential employees” of the port project, many of them Afro-Colombians.
Nearby residents live in sprawling shantytowns of concrete and wood shacks; the promise of port-construction jobs initially gave them hope. But the few who received jobs were shocked by the dangerous working conditions, low pay and callous managers, local union officials told us.
One incident encapsulated their concerns. Shortly before closing time two years ago, two workers were in the bucket of large mechanical arm called a “cherry-picker,” painting a massive oil tank. The machine suddenly bucked them off, throwing them into a cement wall. The wall fell on top of them, instantly killing 40-year-old Jose Munoz. The other employee, 28-year-old Sergio Luis Elles, was bleeding and buried, but somehow still alive.
Their fellow workers frantically pulled away the concrete blocks to save the trapped Elles.
Within minutes, an ambulance arrived. But, union officials told us, it didn’t take Elles to the hospital. Instead, it took both workers to a nearby lunch tent. Other workers watched as port officials walled off the tent and paramedics carried the two victims in.
“Pacific did not want the stain on their reputations from worker’s accidents,” said Julio Carrascal, an official with the Unión Sindical Obrera, the Colombian oil workers’ union. “They didn’t want the news to get out.” Representatives of Pacific Exploration and Production, the company formerly known as Pacific Rubiales, did not respond to our requests for comment.
Truck driver Gabriel Martinez saw the men hauled into the tent on what was a very hot day – the recorded temperature in Cartagena that day hit 93 F. “They kept them in the tent for an hour,” said Martinez. “Then they left in the same ambulance.”
Elles, the injured worker, died shortly after the ambulance departed.
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One day, an order came down to the management that there were sanitation concerns, and the sleeping areas needed to be cleaned. When the workers returned to their tents that night, they found that any possessions they had left on top of their hammocks had been thrown away – shoes, clothing, personal items.
“We had no idea what a union was, we had no idea what a protest was,” said Acevedo. “But everybody came back to the tent and saw their things had been thrown away. So we said, let’s do this.”
The next morning, Acevedo and six other angry workers refused to board the bus. By 11 a.m., more than 2,000 workers had joined the strike, blocking the roads near the campsite and paralyzing Pacific Rubiales’s operations.
Strike leaders drew up a list of demands to present to Pacific: decent food, decent salaries, better contracts, improved living, and better transportation. Workers sat in their tents, playing cards and waiting for the company’s response.
It came two days later, on July 22, 2011, when General Rodolfo Palomino, head of Colombia’s National Police arrived at the campgrounds with the full force of the Colombian military behind him.
Tear gas rained down from helicopters; tents were set ablaze with workers sleeping inside them. Uniformed men with automatic weapons swept the compound, driving the workers into the trees.
Fallout from that strike, and subsequent work stoppages, continued for months. The company initially made moves to negotiate, but the list of labor demands was never met. The workers chose four representatives to speak on their behalf in Bogota in meetings with the ministry of labor. One was fired by his subcontracting employer during the negotiations. Two were jailed for three months.
In December, just as Pacific Rubiales’s stock price was peaking, an USO leader, Milton Rivas, was shot dead two blocks from a police station in Villa Vicencio, the largest town near the oil field. No one was ever charged but union officials suspected he was killed by paramilitary members allied with Pacific Rubiales.