A trade unionist murdered when organising lorry drivers in Salvadorean ports
The North American trade unionist Gilberto Soto was murdered in El Salvador on 5 November. With him vanished most of the hopes for building constructing a trade union movement among the workers in Salvadoran ports, who are forced to work in terrible conditions.
Soto was in El Salvador to gather information on the working conditions of workers in Maersk, one of the main international companies in container movement. The trade unionist was murdered in cold blood by two men who shot him at point blank range at the door of his family home (Soto was of Salvadoran origin).
In El Salvador, lorry drivers who move containers are subject to constant harassment by their employers and have never been able to organise as a trade union. They are also only paid for their hours worked, with no right to sick or holiday pay. It was this situation that Soto was exposing and which probably cost him his life. In fact, the murdered trade unionist was gathering data from several Central American countries and had arranged interviews with dockworkers in Honduras and Nicaragua.
Soto was 50 years old, and leaves a 25-year-old son. His family has asked the Salvadoran government for an official investigation into the causes of this crime. The International Dockworkers Council (IDC), an organisation with over 60, 000 dockworkers as members around the world, and with delegates in America in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Chile and Peru, expresses its solidarity with the victim’s family and its categorical condemnation of this terrible crime.
