Colombia: News & Updates

Two key US Senators have proposed a major reform of US aid to Colombia that would make the US a stronger partner for peace and justice work in Colombia. Their 62-page “United States-Colombia Strategic Alliance Act of 2022″ proposal focuses on such things as rural development, women’s empowerment; protection for labor and peace activists; and the environment rather than on the US’ customary support for military programs. “This legislation underscores the importance of Colombia as our strongest partner in the region, and will support Colombia’s efforts to implement its landmark peace accords, protect human rights, and promote rural and economic development,” said one of the Democratic Senators, Tim Kaine in a written statement.

Dear friends,

The times don’t seem very good for making progress on the climate crisis. The Biden administration provided some great rhetoric during the recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow, but then came home and backtracked where it really matters, on policy decisions.

More recently, the terrible news of the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine has had the effect, among many bad effects, of distracting attention from the very important new IPCC report, which should have been a serious warning to governments and people alike.

A Colombian conservationist who saved a rare species of parrot from extinction, a young feminist activist in Afghanistan, and two poets in Myanmar who used words to protest against the military coup were among 358 human rights defenders murdered in 35 countries last year. As in previous years, most killings took place in the Americas and in the Asia-Pacific region. Colombia, where activists are routinely targeted by armed groups despite the 2016 peace accord, remained the most dangerous country to be a human rights defender, with 138 deaths recorded. The majority of those killed, 59%, worked on land, environmental and indigenous rights, where their activities disrupted the economic interests of corporations and individuals in mining, logging and other extractive industries.

Please see a summary of the letters we sent to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice. IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.

A bombardment carried out by Colombia's armed forces killed 23 FARC dissidents on Thursday as part of a military offensive to seize control of an area in the northeast of the country which sits on the border with Venezuela, the government said. Dissident members of the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reject a 2016 peace deal with the government. The dissidents have become a security threat, according to the government, which accuses them of murdering community leaders and civilians.

Colombia’s constitutional court voted Monday to decriminalize abortion in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, a transformative shift for the majority-Catholic country and the latest sign of a turning tide in Latin America. The ruling makes Colombia the third large country in the region to decriminalize the procedure in slightly more than a year, after Mexico and Argentina, a development that appeared unlikely just a few years ago. Abortion rights activists said it could fuel further gains for abortion rights in the region. Since 2006, the procedure has been permitted in Colombia in cases of rape, nonviable pregnancy and when the life or health of the mother was in danger. At the time, those rules positioned the country as a regional leader in abortion rights. But between 2006 and 2020, the court heard, nearly 3,000 people were prosecuted for having an abortion. More than 90 groups filed a lawsuit in September 2020, arguing that the criminalization of abortion exacerbates the stigma around the procedure and creates barriers to access, even for patients who qualify under the exemptions.

Confrontations between Indigenous Guard land defenders and FARC rebel dissidents are escalating. According to a 2021 report by INDEPAZ, at least 611 environmental defenders have been killed since the signing of the peace agreement in Colombia in 2016. Of these, 332 were Indigenous, the report said, and 204 of the killings took place in Cauca, Colombia. This year so far, 12 Indigenous people  have been killed in Cauca, according to Juan Camayo Diaz, coordinator of Tejido de Defensa de la Vida, an Indigenous human rights organisation in the province. The situation in the region is “one of the most concerning in Colombia”, said Juan Pappier, a senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Today many of the municipalities in the region face even higher levels of homicides than immediately before the peace process. That’s a tragedy that requires an urgent re-think of the government’s security and protection strategies,” Pappier told Al Jazeera.