by Max Schoening and Sibylla Brodzinsky, Voice of Witness
on September 13, 2011
“And the worst of all is when the things happen to you and you can’t do anything,” said María, a displaced woman in Colombia who has endured abuses by guerrillas, paramilitaries and the army. “And you have to just watch and simply be silent. If you say something, it will happen all the same. That’s when I saw that the only real right we have as people is to be silent. Maybe that’s the real right I’ve exercised here, in Colombia. It’s watch and be silent, if you want to survive.”
LAWGEF is pleased to publish this selection from a book coming out in 2012 from McSweeney’s Voice of Witness, by editors Max Schoening and Sibylla Brodzinsky. This will be a powerful collection of oral histories, compiling the life stories of a selection of Colombia’s over 5 million internally displaced people. In their own words, narrators recount their lives before displacement, the reasons for their flight, their personal tragedies and struggles to rebuild their lives. By amplifying these unheard voices through the intimacy of first person narrative, this Voice of Witness book aims to increase awareness of Colombia’s human rights catastrophe and illuminate the human impact of the country’s ongoing war.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on June 29, 2011
The steps up to the conference room were plastered with faces. Faces of the missing fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, mothers and wives. They looked out at us, some faded, torn photographs, others as real as if they could be ready to pick up their child, eat dinner with their family, head off to work, today. Gathered in this hotel conference room in Bogotá were the women and men who had lost a part of themselves when their loved one was taken away in “the perfect crime”: forced disappearance.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on September 06, 2011
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by Latin America Working Group
on June 24, 2011
Coalition of Groups ask U.S. Congress to Oppose Colombia Free Trade Agreement
Yesterday, June 23, 2011, the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), and more than 400 other organizations, academics, and individuals from both the United States and Colombia, sent a letter to the U.S. Congress asking representatives to vote no on the pending U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Human rights violations in Colombia–abuses against labor activists, Afro-Colombians, human rights activists and others–continue to take place at alarmingly high levels. In this climate, it would be a mistake to approve the FTA.
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by Andrew Carpenter
on July 13, 2011
On Monday, July 11, activists from the United States and Colombia organized an emergency demonstration against the pending Colombia Free Trade Agreement across from the White House.
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by Mariel Perez
on April 25, 2011
Last year, 280,041 Colombian civilians were forced to leave their homes, fleeing from the extreme violence of Colombia’s decades-long conflict. This statistic is the centerpiece of a February Spanish-language report published by the Colombian human rights NGO CODHES, a group that has worked tirelessly for nearly two decades to shed light on the human rights crisis in Colombia. As CODHES’ report highlights, almost 33 percent of displaced civilians are forced to flee from zones that are a focus of “territorial consolidation,” the signature program of the Uribe administration that aimed to set up military control of areas of the countryside while also, at least in theory, expanding civilian government institutions.
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