"4 Gildan Union Leaders Die in Honduras Shooting", 29 June 2023

Four garment union leaders were among 13 people killed in the Honduran manufacturing city of Choloma on Saturday after heavily armed men fired into a pool hall during a birthday celebration.

All four of them—​​Xiomara Cocas, Delmer Garcia, Lesther Almendarez and José Rufino Ortiz—belonged to Sindicato de Trabajadores de Gildan San Miguel, which represents workers at Gildan Activewear’s San Miguel plant. Cocas was the union’s president. Her son, Eduardo Melendez, also died in the shooting...

[President Xiomara Castro] blamed the deaths on hired killers “trained and directed by drug lords” in the northern Sula Valley, adding that “multiple operations, raids, captures and checkpoints are initiated.”...

Police investigating the shooting said there was a possibility that the incident was connected to the gang-related slaughter of 46 inmates at a women’s prison in Tamara, far north of Choloma. Some of the victims were killed by gunfire, and others were hacked to death by machetes. Still more with doused with a flammable liquid, locked in their cells and set alight...

... the Fair Labor Association, the multistakeholder organization whose roster includes Gildan, told its members on Wednesday that the country’s recent escalation of violence warranted additional measures to ensure the safety of workers and union representatives.

T he shooting took place just as Gildan announced the closure of its San Miguel factory. Sindicato de Trabajadores de Gildan San Miguel, according to Solidarity Center, an international workers’ rights organization, was in initial talks with management about the move, which will leave 2,700 workers unemployed...

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the world’s largest trade union federation, suggested that the deaths could be linked to “false rumors” that the union was responsible for the plant’s shuttering. But it also noted that Choloma is a “flashpoint” for hostilities against efforts by the government to rein in organized crime, including suspending parts of its constitution in December to do so...

The Solidarity Center urged Gildan, which did not respond to a request for comment, to recognize the impact of the murders on the union and its general workforce and to “take stronger measures to ensure the safety and security of Gildan San Miguel workers as they return to work following this tragic event.”

“We urge the government of Honduras to immediately carry out a thorough investigation that manages to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this heinous act, and to take all necessary measures to ensure that unions and their representatives can act without intimidation or violence in their role as elected representatives of the workers,” wrote Atle Høie, secretary general of IndustriALL Global Union, a Geneva-based global union federation, in a letter to President Castro...