by Winifred Tate, LAWGEF Board Member
on March 08, 2012
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by Winifred Tate, LAWGEF Board Member
on January 25, 2012
“On horseback, on motorcycles, in canoes, in jeeps, on unpaved roads, over mountains and through jungles, we arrived to listen to the voices of women.”
This account of a powerful Colombian women’s movement is brought to us by Winifred Tate, a LAWGEF Board Member and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. Ms. Tate translated and edited the following interview with Nancy Sanchez of the Colombian human rights group Asociación MINGA about the Putumayo Women’s Alliance, a network of women’s organizations and activists working together for peace and justice in the middle of a conflict zone. This is the first of two posts about the Putumayo Women’s Alliance.
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by Latin America Working Group
on March 07, 2012
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by Lisa Haugaard and Vanessa Kritzer
on October 12, 2011
The U.S.-Colombia trade agreement was held up for an unprecedented five years over human rights and labor rights concerns. It was passed today, October 12th, but over strong and passionate opposition from many members of Congress, and from a broad range of civil society organizations in the United States and Colombia, including labor unions, human rights groups, faith-based organizations, environmental groups, and Afro-Colombian, indigenous and small-scale farmer associations.
"Why do we care so much about this?" said Lisa Haugaard, Executive Director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG). "Because we believe that passage of this agreement will make it harder to encourage the Colombian government to protect its trade unionists, who are still murdered with impunity today—23 so far this year. Because we believe the flood of agricultural imports from the United States will undermine Colombia’s small-scale farmers, including Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, who have suffered so much in Colombia’s civil war. And because it will boost the kinds of large-scale investment, such as mining and biofuel, that has helped to fuel the violence in a conflict that still grinds brutally on."
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by Lisa Haugaard
on February 06, 2012
“It’s hard for us to do human rights work where we are. We have to hide what we are doing so they don’t watch us. Our comings and goings are monitored. Our emails are monitored. Our leaders are in a permanent state of stress, not just for themselves but for their children. It was hard for us to even get out to talk to you.”
This is what I heard from one activist when I visited Colombia on an international mission to investigate the status of human rights defenders this past December. Unfortunately, he was not alone in describing this systematic persecution and attacks against those working for justice in Colombia.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on September 26, 2011
The State Department on September 15, 2011, certified that Colombia had met the human rights conditions attached to U.S. assistance. No surprise there—the State Department always certifies Colombia meets the conditions, no matter what is happening on the ground. To be fair, this time, with the year-old Santos Administration, there’s somewhat more reason to certify than during countless rounds of certification during the Uribe Administration. The certification document cites the Santos Administration's successful passage of a victims' reparations and land restitution bill; a “disarming of words” initiative in which it abandoned the inflammatory anti-NGO language used by Uribe and his top officials, which had endangered human rights defenders and journalists; progress on some historic human rights cases; and a variety of directives and policy initiatives, at least on paper, to support human rights and labor rights.
But the 118- page document contains a wealth of information that shows why we should still be deeply concerned.
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