LAWG Blog - Latin America Working Group

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

:2013, Blog, Blog Posts, Colombia, Lisa Haugaard

Until We Find Them, Part 2: The Disappeared in Colombia

by Emma Buckhout, LAWG Intern on March 25, 2013

On Monday, March 18, 2013 the Latin America Working Group Education Fund together with theWashington Office on Latin America, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the US Office on Colombia, and the Guatemala Human Rights Commission hosted a panel event entitled “Until We Find Them: The Disappeared in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru” to discuss the situation of forced disappearances in each country.

:2013, Blog, Blog Posts, Colombia, Stand by Colombia's Victims of Violence

Purely Pineapples: Aerial Spraying Continues to Miss Its Target in Colombia

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.

:2013, Blog, Blog Posts, Colombia, Guest, Stand by Colombia's Victims of Violence

Killings of Human Rights Defenders Increase in Colombia: What Is Going Wrong?

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...