Advocate Articles

By Eric Oliver and Vanessa Kritzer

This April, LAWG worked with a large coalition of faith-based and human rights organizations to make the 7th  Annual Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia a huge success.  Every week in Colombia last year, more than 2,250 people were violently pushed off their lands and left homeless.  With this in mind, we focused our efforts on spreading one simple message: everybody deserves a place to call home. 

In order to raise awareness about the scale of Colombia’s displacement crisis, more than 100 communities took part in our grassroots project, “A Place to Call Home: Hand in Hand for Peace in Colombia.” From San Francisco to New York, Chicago to Miami, people gathered in community centers, churches, and college campuses to learn about Colombia and join in the effort to create 5,200 paper houses to symbolize the yearning for home of 5.2 million displaced Colombians. The results were inspiring and imaginative.  These homes were displayed publicly throughout April to raise awareness, and photos of the events were shared on our facebook page to show solidarity between groups in the U.S. and Colombia. In May, these houses will be delivered to the White House along with 15,000 postcards asking President Obama to make meaningful changes in U.S. policies towards Colombia.

But that’s not all! In addition to crafting, activists made their voices heard through organizing lobby days, holding prayer services, and signing an online petition asking Congress to stop funding the war and to increase aid for displaced people and refugees.  We planned our main weekend of action to coincide with the Summit of the Americas, in which leaders from across the Western Hemisphere gathered in Cartagena, Colombia. Through letters to the editor, radio interviews, and coordinating with Colombian partners planning a vigil in Cartagena, we focused press attention onto the displacement crisis and amplified our call to support victims of violence and those working for peace in Colombia.

We owe a big thanks to everyone who helped us with this wonderful project. By working together, we have gained amazing momentum in the movement for better U.S. policies towards Colombia. Now we can’t wait to start planning for next year!

“Very few people have been found, so the question’s always there: how do we talk about them?  Is or was?  Presence or absence?” 

It’s hard to understand what exactly it means to be disappeared.  One day a daughter, father, or aunt is there, and the next they aren’t.  Families are left to search endlessly for their loved ones, meeting immense resistance from the government, and all the while never knowing if their loved one is across town or across the country, dead or alive.  

This patchwork quilt, with photos and bits of poems stitched on it, was created by Blanca Nieves from the blue jeans, blouses and dresses of her four murdered daughters, who were disappeared and killed by paramilitary forces in Putumayo, Colombia where the family lived.   This quilt is one of the tremendously moving pieces of art in Remember Me: Voices of the Silenced in Colombia exhibit, created by Lutheran World Relief and the Colombian human rights groups MINGA, Agenda Caribe and Fundación Manuel Cepeda. 

Vanessa Kritzer takes the exhibit to Portland with Witness for Peace Northwest organizer Colette Cosner!For the past two years, this powerful exhibit has travelled around the United States, educating communities about our country’s role in Colombia’s conflict. LAWG got involved this past summer, working with Witness for Peace and Lutheran World Relief to display the exhibit and organize panel discussions about U.S.-Colombia policy in Seattle and Portland. Then, on October 4th, 2011, we brought it to Washington, DC, for a reception in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Art piece about fumigations.The Remember Me exhibit features works of art created and inspired by victims of violence, their friends and families from San Onofre, Sucre and the province of Putumayo. One piece was comprised of a simple plastic box filled with a mosaic of small squares, each with a face of a desaparecido (disappeared) in Colombia who lies somewhere unidentified in a mass grave. Another powerful work used toy planes to illustrate the devastating effects of aerial fumigations, as they indiscriminately dropped herbicides on fertile land and families. A third poignant piece used three hearts connected by a stake, highlighting the faces of a leaders killed or imprisoned because of their commitment to human rights and peace.Representative Jim McGovern speaks about violence in Colombia.

At the opening in the Rayburn House Office Building, Colombian human rights defender Juan David Diaz spoke about his father, who was murdered in February 2003.  Tito Diaz, mayor of the small town El Roble in Sucre, had denounced the alliance between deadly paramilitaries and local politicians to then-President Uribe.  Within weeks, his bodyguards were removed, and in April of that same year he was found murdered, tortured, shot and left in a crucifix position.  Today, his son Juan David continues to endure threats for his own human rights work. 

Congressional Human Rights Caucus Co-Chair Representative Jim McGovern also spoke at the reception about his experiences visiting displaced communities in Colombia and many families who are victims of human rights abuse.  “This exhibit helps bring those voices to life,” said Rep. McGovern. “It is so important that we not just know, but feel, the violence and loss that they experience.”

Lisa and Vanessa attend the Remember Me opening in Congress with Annalise Romoser from LWR,  Zoraida Castillo, Amaury Padilla, and Juan David Diaz.Zoraida Castillo from Lutheran World Relief’s Colombia office described the process they went through to create the exhibit. Then, Amaury Padilla from MINGA explained that this exhibit comes from a tradition in Colombia used not only to honor the victims, but also to illuminate truths that are too often denied about the country’s decades-long conflict.

This exhibit humanizes Colombia’s humanitarian crisis by providing a forum for understanding outside of the context of policy papers and statistics. Remember Me drives home a powerful lesson by giving a face to the victims and those who struggle for justice.

A new government in Colombia that’s more open to dialogue, but continued threats and attacks against human rights defenders and displaced leaders. Budget battles in the U.S. Congress. Colombian peace communities in danger. Pressure increasing to approve the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

With all that’s been happening, we’ve had a busy last couple months in our advocacy and education efforts to promote human rights and peace in U.S. policies towards Colombia—and it doesn’t look like it will be slowing down any time soon. In case you’ve been busy too, here’s a review of some of what we’ve been working on:

Emergency Actions for Policy Change

When we saw momentum building in Washington to move the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, we leapt into action. We created a petition to President Obama asking him to not move forward with the Free Trade Agreement while labor and human rights violations continue, millions of people are still displaced from their lands, and small-scale farmers have no resources to help them compete with incoming subsidized agro-business. We collaborated with Change.org to reach out to thousands of new activists and we got everyone in our coalition spreading the word. The result? Over 11,000 messages going straight to the White House! (And it’s still live. If you haven’t signed yet, check it out here.)

Meanwhile, alarming reports of threats and attacks against human rights defenders, peace communities, and land rights activists in Colombia keep coming in. In April we heard from our partners that the communities living in humanitarian zones in Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins in Colombia were in great danger. The Colombian military forces that usually form a protective perimeter around the outside of the communities had pulled out and paramilitary forces had been seen coming in. So we put out an emergency call to action and 1336 people responded, sending 5336 messages  to top Colombian officials asking them to send protection back to these brave communities. But so far the threats and violence continue. If you haven’t sent a message yet, please do so here. And check out this action alert with updates on various threats to Afro-Colombians and human rights defenders here.

Grassroots Education and Organizing

We still have to tally up the final numbers, but we can already tell that the 6th annual Days of Prayer and Action: Hand in Hand for Peace in Colombia has been a great success! Throughout April, thousands of activists have created hundreds of events across the country to stand with Colombia’s victims of violence. We are particularly energized by the response to the creative project this year, in which communities across the United States have traced and painted images of their hands onto banners and posters filled with messages of hope and solidarity that will be sent to peace communities and human rights organizations in Colombia. To learn more about it, click here.

New Media and Publications Outreach

We’ve continued getting our perspective out to a broader audience online on the Huffington Post and fostering good discussions on our “Stand for Land Rights in Colombia” facebook page, where activists new and old to the movement can share information and be alerted to key moments for action on U.S. Colombia policy. (Check out one of our recent articles on Colombia here and our facebook page here.

Meanwhile, we’ve been promoting Breaking the Silence: In Search of Colombia’s Disappeared  to lawmakers, academics, and activists alike. And our efforts have already paid off: our findings made their way into the United Nations’ recent Human Rights Report on Colombia, which spent a whole section on disappearances. (To read it yourself click here)

But as much as we’ve been doing, there’s still a lot of work ahead. What should you look out for?

Action to Stop the Free Trade Agreement: Despite huge problems left unresolved, the Obama Administration recently made it clear that they will push forward with the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement this summer. So now we’re taking it to Congress and we need your help. Starting this month, we will be organizing activists across the country to meet with their representatives, write to their local media, and do creative street demonstrations to raise awareness of why passing this trade agreement right now would be harmful and unethical. Want to participate? Send us an email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and check out our resources for lobbying here.

More Budget Battles: After barely avoiding a government shutdown by making some serious cuts in the 2011 budget, the new leadership in Congress is already taking out their knives to chop up the Obama Administration’s request for 2012. If we want to preserve aid we support like humanitarian assistance for refugees and internally displaced persons, we will need to keep up the pressure on our members of Congress so they know that these items are not negotiable.

To stay involved on all our Colombia work, make sure to join our email action list on LAWG’s webpage or “like” the “Stand for Land Rights in Colombia” page.