by Winifred Tate, Guest
on April 18, 2013
“Colombia is a model for the region,” then-Senator John Kerry told the public during his January 2013 confirmation hearing for Secretary of State. Thanks to an aggressive counterinsurgency program, aided by billions of dollars in U.S. funding, Kerry and others in Washington argue that Colombia has been transformed. Rather than a model, however, the Women’s Alliance of Putumayo and others prove that the region is a cautionary tale, documenting those changes the thousands of human rights abuses that occurred here.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on April 08, 2013
At the Latin America Working Group, we were so saddened to hear about the untimely death of Stephen Coats, the director of the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP), a participating organization in the Latin America Working Group
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by Emma Buckhout, LAWG Intern
on March 25, 2013
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by Winifred Tate, Guest
on March 06, 2013
We heard from our longtime LAWG partner Nancy Sánchez, who has worked many years in Putumayo, Colombia, about this sorry case of fumigation of pineapple crops of the Association of Women Pineapple growers, Oroyaco Hamlet, Municipality of Villagarzon, Putumayo.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on February 25, 2013
"What is going wrong in Colombia?" asks the coalition of human rights defenders in Colombia. The government of Juan Manuel Santos last year invested time and funding in mechanisms to protect communities and people at risk, among them human rights defenders.
And yet, in 2012, every five days a defender was assassinated in Colombia, and every 20 hours one defender was attacked. In 2012, 357 men and women in Colombia were attacked for their work as human rights defenders, according to Somos Defensores ("We Are Defenders"), which maintains a unified database of attacks against human rights defenders. Sixty-nine defenders were assassinated, a jump from 49 assassinations in 2011. Indeed, this is the highest number of aggressions against defenders registered by the database in the last ten years, and a 49 percent increase since 2011. The attacks include: 202 threats, 69 assassinations, 50 assaults, 26 arbitrary detentions, 5 forced disappearances, 1 arbitrary use of the penal system, 3 robberies of information, and 1 case of sexual violence...
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by Omar Martinez
on February 07, 2013
Now is the time. With spring just around the corner, it’s time we all start thinking about Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia. Every year, communities across the United States come together and join in solidarity with our Colombian brothers and sisters in an effort to show policymakers that now is the time for real change in U.S.-Colombia policy.
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