U.S. Aid to Colombia

In 2005, I visited the community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia. A group of poor farmers who had been repeatedly displaced from their homes by violence, they had decided to call themselves a “peace community” and reject violence from all sides—paramilitaries, guerrillas and the army.  Yet the community was subjected to ever more harassment and violence, including by the local 17th army brigade.  Some 170 members of the peace community have been assassinated since 1997. My visit came soon after seven members of the peace community, including three children, and a local farmer had been massacred and dismembered.  The community members had left their army-occupied town to construct a bare-bones, dirt-floor village down the road.

 
           
With over 4.9 million Colombians forcibly displaced from their homes by a debilitating war, Colombia is now the second worst internal displacement crisis in the world.  Between now and April 30, tens of thousands across the U.S. and Colombia will participate in this year’s National Days of Action for Colombia to call for a much-needed shift in U.S. policies toward the war-torn country.  Please join us!

Click here for photos, stories, instructions, factsheets, and more!

This year, the National Days of Action will focus on the displacement crisis, but in a different way than last year when we made thousands of paper dolls to symbolize the number of IDPs in Colombia. This year we’re asking you to go a step further than just understanding what is happening, and start talking about why in a campaign we’re calling “Face the Displaced – Colombia: Our Hemisphere’s Hidden Humanitarian Crisis.”


Community action: Once we’ve made these posters, we’re going to need your help organizing public events and church services all over the country where we can display these faces and teach about the displacement crisis in Colombia. Even if you can’t do a poster making party, if you can join the hundreds of grassroots groups and churches both in the United States and in Colombia that will be educating their communities throughout April and praying for peace in Colombia on the weekend of April 16-19th, it will make a huge difference. Click here for more information on organizing a demonstration.

This year we created a central site where everyone will be registering their events across the country so we can really see how much is going on. Please click here to sign up! Or if you're interested in organizing through your church, click here for a faith-based organizing resources.

Legislative change: We’ll work with you during April and beyond to ensure that Washington feels the force of the movement calling for change in U.S. policies towards Colombia. First, they’ll hear from you on the National Call-In Day on April 19th. Then, once you’ve displayed these faces in your cities, send the materials to Washington in May where we’ll be doing some last big displays before taking the faces with to Congress and the Administration to deliver your message. We’ll post more info on these actions soon!


And if you have any questions or need any help organizing, email Vanessa at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

In March, two major annual human rights reports on Colombia were released by the State Department and the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights’ office in Colombia. They highlight some advances, most notably a decline in killings of civilians by the army (extrajudicial executions), but point to numerous ongoing problems, including the major scandal of illegal wiretapping by the government’s DAS intelligence agency, a pronounced slowness in achieving justice in extrajudicial execution cases, threats and attacks against human rights defenders and failures by the government in protecting them, a resurgence of illegal armed groups following the paramilitary demobilization, and sexual violence in the context of the conflict.

On Friday, November 6th, the U.S. government finally released its estimate of how much coca was cultivated in Colombia in 2008. The result is the first reduction in coca-growing since 2002-2003, a significant drop from 167,000 hectares measured in 2007 to 119,000 hectares in 2008. (A hectare is equal to 2.47 acres.) This brings the U.S. government’s coca cultivation estimate to its lowest level since 2004. (The U.S. government has not yet released 2008 coca data for Peru and Bolivia.) This matches a downward 2007-2008 trend – though not the number of hectares – that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime announced (PDF) back in June.

A reduction in coca cultivation is good news. But what caused it?