Involvement Until around 1990 Colombian trade unions were among the strongest in Latin America. However the 1980s expansion of paramilitarism in Colombia saw trade union leaders and members increasingly targeted for assassination, and as a result Colombia has been the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists for several decades. Between 2000 and 2010 Colombia accounted for 63.12% of trade unionists murdered globally. According to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) there were 2832 murders of trade unionists between 1 January 1986 and 30 April 2010, meaning that "on average, men and women trade unionists in Colombia have been killed at the rate of one every three days over the last 23 years." Other sources give figures of around 4000 trade union members killed from the mid-1980s to 2008. According to a 2007 Amnesty International report, in 2005 "around 49 percent of human rights abuses against trade unionists were committed by paramilitaries and some 43 percent directly by the security forces." The Colombian parapolitics scandal revealed widespread links between the government and the paramilitaries, in which then President Alvaro Uribe and his congressional allies were heavily implicated. The government during Uribe's tenure opposed labor both directly & indirectly, the Ministry of Social Protection in 2004 actively labeling many strikes as illegal & suppressing the formation of new unions, while the government turned a blind eye to many instances of paramilitary anti-union violence, around 3,500 unionists having been murdered within a 15-year period (1990-2005), the government only having investigated 600 of theses killings, leading to only 6 convictions. At times the government even engaged in such violence itself, the Colombian Army having killed 3 union leaders in Arauca in 2004. The ITUC in 2010 concluded that "the historical and structural violence against the Colombian trade union movement remains firmly in place, manifesting itself in the form of systematic human and trade union rights violations." From 1986 to 2009, Antioquia Department saw the highest number of murders (46% of the total), while the agricultural workers' union Sintrainagro was the most targeted union (at 844, 31% of the total). There are reports that US corporations in Colombia have actively colluded with paramilitaries in order to reduce union activity. Besides acknowledged payments from multinationals to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) (Doe v. Chiquita Brands International), "Trade unionists have been particularly targeted by the paramilitaries, and most of the violence has