09:56 a.m. Jul 07, 1998 Eastern
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, July 7 (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters blocked the road to San Juan's airport Tuesday as labour unions and civic organisations launched a general strike to protest against the sale of the government-owned telephone company.
Strikers gathered on the highway in front of the airport, creating a massive traffic jam. Police said they might have to use tear gas to disperse the crowd.
Students and professors placed construction barricades at the entrances to the University of Puerto Rico to shut down the campus in a show of solidarity with the strikers, and shopping centres, banks and retailers were closing to pre-empt demonstrations.
Protesters gathered in the pre-dawn hours outside several government offices and sang: ``Workers, united, today's there's no work. It's a strike.''
The 48-hour strike, planned by a coalition known as the Umbrella Committee of Labour, Civic, Cultural, Political and Religious Groups, known by its Spanish acronym of CAOS, will involve more than 300,000 workers, its leaders say.
The strikers were protesting plans by Puerto Rico Gov.
Pedro Rossello to sell a majority stake in the Puerto Rico Telephone Co. to GTE Corp. of Stamford, Connecticut, for $1.75 billion.
Union leaders vowed to shut down the island to force Rossello either to abandon the sale or to schedule a referendum so the island's voters can decide whether to sell.
Sale advocates say the PRTC, which lost its monopoly on local telephone service with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, cannot compete with private sector. Its market share has fallen to 35 percent. As a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rico is bound by U.S. telecommunications laws.
The PRTC's three unions, representing more than 6,000 people, have been on an indefinite strike since June 18 to protest against the sale, which was announced by Rossello in May.
``We more than anyone love social peace and tranquillity,'' union president Annie Cruz said in a radio message played on stations in the capital, San Juan, early Tuesday. ``But never at the cost of our dignity.''
The telephone union strike has been plagued by bombings, sabotage and bloody picket-line confrontations between strikers and police. Two bombs have exploded outside branches of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico. One of the explosions took the finger of a police officer.
Bombs have also been discovered and deactivated before they exploded next to automatic teller machines at the bank's branches. Banco Popular, a unit of Popular Inc., will acquire approximately 5 percent of the PRTC in partnership with GTE.
Saboteurs have done an estimated $2 million in damage to PRTC facilities and left hundreds of thousands of customers without service.
Late Monday, Rossello activated the Civil Defence to help maintain order and safeguard basic services such as water and electricity during the strike.
``We will be on call to guarantee public safety,'' Puerto Rico Civil Defence Director Epifano Jimenez said. ``We have a response plan, and we will coordinating communications efforts for the government.''
Leaders close to the labour movement indicated that Teamsters and other union members would use trucks to block major avenues around the island to cause massive traffic jams.
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