Is the Human Rights Situation Improving in Colombia?

The Colombian government organized a delegation of 80 people to the United States a few weeks ago. Their claim: the human rights situation is better in Colombia and so the Free Trade Agreement must be passed. By clearing the Colombian army to receive U.S. military aid that had been held back due to its links to paramilitary groups, the U.S. State Department substantiated the delegation’s claims, perhaps unintentionally. But one does not have to look hard to realize that the human rights situation in Colombia is worse for some of the most vulnerable sectors of the population.

The Displaced
The Consultancy for Human Rights and displacement reported this week that at least 270,000 people have been forced to flee from their homes in the last six months. That’s an increase of 41% from 2007! The situation is aggravated by poisonous U.S. funded fumigation. Colombia continues to be the country with the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world. The report highlights paramilitary rearmament and the FARC’s counteroffensive as some of the causes for the alarming increase in displacement. A disproportionate number of the displaced are Indigenous and Afro-Colombians.

Workers
For the past two weeks 10,000 sugar cane cutters in southwestern Colombia have been on strike to protest wages so meager that their working conditions have been compared to the slavery period. The sugar cane industry is gaining huge profits because of its production of ethanol and current global demand for this fuel. But the workers who spend long hours –beyond an eight hour day—without health benefits and under meager wages are met with extreme repression as they attempt to gain a dignify pay for their work. The anti-riot police were called in, workers have been injured, and government officials have singled them out as supporters of the left wing guerrilla group, the FARC. The sugar cane industry stands to gain much from the passing of the FTA but even the promise of future increased profits isn’t enough to serve as a deterrent when it comes to respecting human rights.

Human Rights Workers and Indigenous Peoples
Human rights activists too, were especially hard hit in the past few weeks. In Cauca alone 3 indigenous leaders working to regain land owed to them by the government were recently assassinated and 5 other community members killed. On Sept. 24, Olga Marin Vergara, a member of the Ruta Pacifica (a women’s rights organization), was killed along with her son, five year old grandson and daughter-in-law. In all of these cases the communities suspect “demobilized” paramilitaries are the culprits. As for union leaders, the US Labor Education in the Americas Project reports that 41 of them were killed in 2008, a figure higher than in all of 2007. Indigenous peoples are not fairing any better: in 2004 the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples declared that 8 groups were at the point of physical and cultural extinction due to the effects of the conflict. Today the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia reports 18 groups are facing this dire situation.

Are human rights improving in Colombia? News from recent weeks shows the answer is “no.”