Colombia

FOR has worked with and accompanied the courageous anti-militarism youth group, Red Juvenil de Medellín (Medellin Youth Network) since 2003. Red leaders and supporters were recently subject to a death threat from the newly emerged "Black Eagles" paramilitary group. We urge readers to respond to the Red’s appeal in the face of this threat.

Click here learn more and sign our petition.

Below is a letter from our friends at Red Juvenil:

We wish to inform human rights organizations and other official entities that our organization has been the subject of a death threat from the paramilitaries known as the Black Eagles.

Facts:

1. Thursday and Friday May 29 and 30, the Red Juvenil (Youth Network) received an email from the address redesnegras@hotmail.com with the following message:

"Death to anarchists disguised as pacifists, no more drug concerts or communists, this is the last warning." Those threatened were eight people: members and close friends of the Red Juvenil. It was signed by the group Black Eagles.

After hours of waiting in the hot Santa Cruz, California city council room, listening to the impassioned arguments in favor and against off leash dog use at a nearby beach; and seeing a lengthy power point presentation on the plans for a new building in downtown Santa Cruz, we were losing our steam.

It seemed likely that our resolution, requesting that all US military aid to Colombia be re-directed to domestic drug prevention and rehabilitation programs, wouldn’t be considered until after 7pm when the council members returned from their evening recess.Fortunately Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty noticed that we had been patiently waiting all afternoon (thankfully we had all brought work with us: the UCSC Colombia research cluster grad students were grading papers and others worked on their laptops) and pushed our agenda item to the top of the list before the break. At 6pm, life-long activist Bert Muhly from 3 Americas took the floor.

When I was in Bogota earlier this month continuing research on US military aid, I caught up with Mike Power, a stringer for BBC and Reuters. He had just come back from the Meta region, where he’d interviewed the mother of a 15-year-old boy killed by the army and passed off as a guerrilla. He talked about how he’d stayed up late transcribing the interview, hearing the woman say over and over on his machine “I came home and I was destroyed.” We spoke of the experience of translating and interpreting, how powerful it is when the personal voice of another, someone in grief, comes through you.

The BBC didn’t run his piece, apparently because the mother’s testimony was not sufficiently ‘credible.’ Fortunately, online magaine The First Post has featured this story, and quotes FOR and Amnesty International (see article below). FOR and Amnesty collaborated on a joint report about US support for Colombian army units that have committed extrajudicial killings. You can see it at www.forcolombia.org/Calltoinvestigate

“Body guards are not going to protect our lives. What it’s going to protect us is understanding that our work is legal and legitimate… a strong rejection by those holding political power to (threatening) pressures” said yesterday Claudia López, a prestigious Colombian researcher with New Rainbow Corporation, now victim of threats for their work on links between paramilitary and politicians.

This coming weekend, communities across North America will participate in the annual "Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia." It is an opportunity to show solidarity with the Colombian people, who continue to endure war, violence, displacement, and political unrest. Indeed, another massive scandal struck the Colombian government this week, as President Alvaro Uribe's cousin and confidant, Mario Uribe, was accused by prosecutors in that country of ties to right-wing paramilitary death squads.

Tens of thousands of Colombians marched on March 6 in Bogota (see photos by Sarah Koopman) and many other cities to stand with the victims of right-wing paramilitary violence and to protest violence by all armed groups. Solidarity events occurred in New York, Washington, and San Francisco.

Now, in the wake of accusations by a presidential advisor that the activists in Colombia who helped organize these peaceful marches are guerrillas, they are being targeted with paramilitary threats, kidnappings, and even killings.

Lethal attacks on Colombian labor activists also continue. On March 4 in Washington, President Bush called on Congress to approve the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, although Colombia is the most dangerous nation in the world to be a trade unionist. As if in response, in the four days following his statement, four labor leaders in Colombia were murdered.

[Editor's note: Maryrose is the Co-Director of FOR's Youth and Militarism Program, and is currently participating in our Youth Arts and Action Delegation to Colombia.]

I asked Sharon Lungo from the Ruckus Society, one of the awesome delegation members, to talk to me for a minute about her experience so far with the delegation:

MR: Sharon, will you talk for a minute about the delegation so far, and what happened today?

By Andrew Gorby

Yuri Neira has spent the last one-thousand and fifty-eight days bringing his son’s dreams to life--dreams that the riot police of Bogotá ended with the savage swinging of their batons on May 1, 2005 during city-wide protests. With their faces cowardly hidden by ski masks, and their bodies and minds protected by thick black armor, they brutally beat 15 year-old Nicolas Neira as he gasped for air. The tear gas which was thick in the air had induced Nicolas’ asthma. He died days later, his head not full of dreams, but full of blood and fluid from severe cerebral hemorrhaging.