Blog Posts

In January, I traveled to Colombia on a delegation with Witness for Peace to meet with communities resisting displacement in Northern Cauca and with communities of internally displaced people near Bogotá and Cali. Since I got back, I’ve viewed my work differently, and here’s why:

I realized that in our advocacy we talk so much about “victims,” when the word we really should be using is “heroes.”

In a decisive ruling for democracy, Colombia’s Constitutional Court determined February 26th that a law authorizing a referendum to change the constitution to permit a second consecutive reelection of President Álvaro Uribe would be unconstitutional. President Uribe immediately accepted the decision.

We thought you should hear this story from Lisa Bonds, with our partner Lutheran World Relief in Colombia.  See LWR’s blog on Colombia and other topics by clicking here.

“I joined my Lutheran World Relief colleagues and Rosario Montoya, the Director of Fundacion Infancia Feliz, in a visit to the ‘Finca la Alemania,’ the German farm… As we drove to the farm, Rosario briefed us on the farm's history and the people who had recently returned to the farm after having been displaced by one of the most feared paramilitary leaders, called ‘the Chain,’ in the state of Cordoba...

In every province of Colombia, women long to know what happened to their husbands, to their daughters, to their sons. Children want to know what happened to their fathers, to their mothers.

Even Colombia’s associations of families of the disappeared have long estimated that at most the disappeared totaled 15,000. And many did not believe the toll was so high.

But as forensic teams are conducting exhumations following the partial paramilitary demobilization, prosecutors are interviewing paramilitary leaders, Colombia’s National Search Commission is soliciting information from the victims, and victims are organizing to know the truth, the scale of the human catastrophe is slowly being unveiled.

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?

Writing a few days ago in El Espectador, columnist Felipe Zuleta reported that mothers of young men killed by the Colombian military have begun receiving anonymous threats.

The mothers live in the poor Bogotá suburb of Soacha, where in 2008 elements of the Colombian Army abducted young men, killing them and later presenting their bodies as those of illegal armed group members killed in combat. When news of the Soacha killings broke in September 2008, the scandal forced the firing of 27 Army personnel. Murder trials have been proceeding very slowly, with an increasing likelihood that some of those responsible may not be punished.

Today, LAWGEF joined labor, environmental, human rights, development and faith-based organizations in submitting written comments to the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in response to a formal request to the public for opinions on the pending trade agreement. In their comments, these groups outlined the specific human rights and labor problems in Colombia, and urged the Obama Administration to insist upon seeing fundamental improvements on these issues before going forward with a free trade agreement.  Violence against trade unionists and other obstacles to worker rights were outlined by the AFL-CIO and US Labor Education in the Americas Project.  Some groups also outlined the potential impact of the trade agreement on the rural poor, including Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities.

Last week, a group of intrepid activists came together to raise awareness about the serious human rights issues that the Colombian government is seeking to hide with their recent campaign “Discover Colombia through its Heart.” Here are some great pictures shot of actions during the week by Brandon Wu from Public Citizen.

Just as the Bush Administration did countless times before, the Obama Administration certified on September 8th that Colombia meets the human rights conditions in law. The conditions, which refer to gross violations of human rights by Colombia’s security forces and collaboration between those forces and paramilitary or other illegal armed groups, are attached to thirty percent of Colombia’s military aid.

Why is the United States expanding its military bases in Colombia?
What does this mean for U.S.-Colombia relations?
What does this mean for the region?

These are the questions on the lips of many Latin American leaders and activists as they react to the deal under works between Colombia and United States that would grant the U.S. military access to at least five additional Colombian military bases. This deal with Colombia comes quickly after Ecuador decided to end its agreement with the U.S. that allowed the U.S. military access to the Manta airbase on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.