We think you’re fantastic.
To begin with, when we asked you to join in the Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia, you built portraits, staged rallies, and made phone calls that resulted in our most successful year yet! We doubled participation, with 43,850 people from 70 cities across the U.S. and Colombia getting involved. While over 36,000 people were crafting and displaying posters featuring the stories of Colombia’s displaced in their communities, 110 U.S. and Colombian congregations joined the call for peace through community education and prayer. If that’s not solidarity, we don’t know what is.
And after all that, when we then asked you to send Secretary Clinton a message to stand up for human rights in June, hundreds of you stepped up to flood her office with faxes.
So, thank you for being so incredible.
And now—you know there’s always an “and now” with us—we need a little more help from you. (The truth is, until we see truly just policies towards Latin America, we probably always will.)
Remember that great resolution that Representative Hank Johnson put out in March to call on the Colombian government to protect indigenous and Afro-Colombians? Well, it still hasn’t passed. In the meantime, more people have been displaced, more death threats have been issued to over 100 organizations and communities, and more leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated—including Afro-Colombian leader Jair Murillo, who was murdered this past Saturday, a day before the march that he had been organizing of IDP organizations going from Buenaventura to Bogotá to demand dignity and rights.
Here in DC, we’re knocking on the door of every congressional office we can in a final push to get this resolution through before Congress goes on recess on August 3rd.
As things heat up in Washington and Colombia, we’re glad to know we have a fantastic advocate like you at our backs.
And by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, click here to check out our new report, Far Worse than Watergate, uncovering the shocking truths about the illegal wiretapping scandal that rocked Colombia this year.
