In Venezuela, Shootings of Union Organizers Common

Two shots to the head, fired from a van, put a sudden end to the life of Argenis Vásquez, the organising secretary of the Toyota assembly plant workers' union in the city of Cumaná, 400 kilometres east of the Venezuelan capital, as he was leaving his home at 09:00 local time.

But his death was just one of the cases that marked the start of another bloody month for Venezuelan trade unionists.

The day before, on May 4, 29-year-old Keller Maneiro, a delegate of the Union of Construction and Lumber Workers in Ciudad Guayana, 500 kilometres southeast of Caracas, was murdered in the parking lot of a supermarket.

A few days later, Sergio Devis, leader of another construction union in Ciudad Guayana, was intercepted along a rural road by men who roughly forced him out of his car and dispatched him with shots to the head, according to witnesses.

Vásquez had organised a strike at the Toyota plant in April, and immediately after he was killed a group of enraged workers attacked the factory, destroying gates, windows and a security booth. They set two cars on fire and assaulted one of the supervisors as well as reporters covering the event.

The state governor, Enrique Maestre, of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), to which Vásquez also belonged, said he was "concerned that hired killers should have reached our state of Sucre," in the northeast of the country.

Some of Toyota's workers say the company is responsible for Vásquez's murder, while others blame a power struggle within the union.

The national chief of the judicial police, Wilmer Flores, is conducting an investigation, but veteran police agents say, based on experience at Ciudad Guayana, that if hired killers are involved it will be difficult to establish connections between the victim and the assassins.

The area around Ciudad Guayana is a centre of heavy industry, where iron ore, bauxite and precious minerals are mined and there are steel and aluminium works and hydroelectric plants. Bridges, dams and other infrastructure are also under construction.

So far this year, four activists belonging to different construction industry unions have been murdered. One was shot inside a hospital in Ciudad Guayana.

Pedro Moreno, human rights officer in the Venezuelan Workers' Confederation (CTV), which is aligned with the opposition and has long faced accusations of corruption, told IPS that in the last decade "more than 150 trade unionists have been killed.

"Together with Provea, a human rights organisation, we have prepared a report to take before the International Labour Organisation (ILO)."

Provea said that in the period from October 2007 to September 2008 there were 29 homicides related to union activity – lower than the 53 murders during the period from October 2006 to September 2007.

"As well as being heinous crimes, they are a sign of the weakening of the trade union movement and a threat to the effective rights of workers," Marino Alvarado, the head of Provea, told IPS.

In Moreno's view, "these crimes are committed by organised groups within the unions created by the ruling party, which hand out jobs to workers in exchange for their first month's salary and other payments. Then when labour activists oppose these practices, they settle the problem with their guns."

In November 2008, three union activists at the Colombian-owned Alpina food company in Villa de Cura, 100 kilometres west of Caracas, were murdered, presumably by hired killers.

They were active in the Classist Unitary Revolutionary and Autonomous Current (C-CURA), a group that supports the administration of Hugo Chávez, with reservations, within the National Union of Workers (UNT), a pro-government central trade union.