The North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee Blog

By Hugh Bronstein BOGOTA, March 22 (Reuters) - Alabama-based Drummond coal mining company on Thursday denied charges pending in U.S. federal court that it paid right-wing paramilitaries to kill three union leaders near its Colombian mine in 2001.

Earlier this month a judge said there was sufficient evidence for the families of the dead miners to sue Drummond for the killings of the three men, who were involved in a contract dispute over wages and workplace safety when they were pulled off buses near the northern Colombian mine and shot.

A Drummond lawyer in Bogota said the company was innocent.

"Drummond has not and will not make payments, agreements or transactions with illegal groups and emphatically denies that the company or any of its executives had any involvement with the murders," the lawyer told reporters.

The statement came three days after U.S. banana giant Chiquita Brands International Inc. pleaded guilty in the United States to paying $1.7 million in protection money to paramilitaries between 1997 and 2004.

The suit alleges that Drummond's top Colombian executive was seen handing a suitcase full of money to paramilitary thugs in exchange for murdering the men.

Drummond says it has filed slander charges against the witness, a former intelligence official in jail for links to the paramilitaries.

More than 4,000 Colombian union leaders have been assassinated since 1986, according to the U.S. State Department, accounting for most union murders in the world.

The Chiquita and Drummond cases are front page news in this Andean country as it begins to confront its paramilitary past.

The militias were formed in the 1980s to help business owners and cattle ranchers protect their property from leftist rebels. But they soon turned into death squads funded by the drug trade and extortion of the very businesses that first organized them.

President Alvaro Uribe is facing a scandal in which his former intelligence chief and eight allied lawmakers are in jail awaiting trial for colluding with paramilitary militias guilty of some of the worst atrocities of Colombia's four-decade-old guerrilla war.

"Considering the Chiquita decision and the attention that Colombian prosecutors are putting on these paramilitary-related cases, Drummond has got to be hearing footsteps," said Dan Kovalik, a lawyer for the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union, which brought the civil suit against Drummond on behalf of the families of the dead miners.

Both the paramilitaries and the rebels are branded terrorists by Washington. Thousands are killed and displaced every year as they battle over lucrative drug-smuggling routes.