Visit to Colombia

President elect Juan Manuel Santos of Columbia described his country as champions of kidnapping, degrading human rights, killing and displacement of people. Columbia, he said, was the nearest thing to hell as a country. I met President elect Santos last week as part of a delegation from Justice for Columbia which included 3 Westminster MP’s, 6 MEP’s, 2 senior lawyers and the General Secretaries of 6 UK, 1 American and 2 International Trades Unions.

Colombia is the size of France, Germany and the UK combined and has a population of 45 million people. You may know the country from the Harrison Ford film Clear and Present Danger.

The capital district of Bogota is home to around 8.5 million residents. Colombia exports petroleum (BP is the second largest foreign investor), coal (the largest opencast mine in the world), emeralds (over half of the world’s emeralds), nickel, gold, copper, iron ore and natural gas. Agriculture employs 25% of the workforce, with exports of bananas, sugarcane, palm oil and cut flowers. It is also a major illegal exporter of cocaine to the UK.

For 45 years there has been a war in Colombia mainly between government forces and leftwing guerrillas groups. Recently rightwing paramilitary organisations, often working with the security forces, have joined the conflict. The war causes immense suffering for the people of Colombia

In 2002 a group of British trade union leaders were the first official delegation from the UK to visit Colombia. During their weeks visit six trade union activists were assassinated and the group returned home vowing to work to raise awareness of what was happening. In March 2003 Justice for Colombia was launched.

During our five days in Columbia we met with newspaper editors, lawyers, the President and Vice President elect, the Foreign Minister, senior trades unionists, families of victims of the ‘false positive scandal’ and flew to the town of La Macarena to hear testimonies of victims and relatives of victims of human rights abuses who have disappeared many of whom were possibly in the graves of possibly up to 2000 unidentified bodies alongside the local army post. We visited political prisoners in Buen Pastor Women’s prison, met with Senators and Congressmen, families of Columbians for Peace and the UK British Ambassador.

Nominally Columbia is a parliamentary democracy with elections every 4 years but there is wide spread corruption, low turnout and serious violence within the political process. Columbia’s paramilitary death squads are responsible for much of the violence, abuses and deaths in the country. The paramilitary have three sources; landowners and business people, drug cartels and army death squads developed to carry out a dirty war against the guerrillas and suspected sympathisers. High levels of violence are used, assassinations, massacres, torture and sexual violence. In the 1990’s they merged into the (AUC) United-Self Defence Forces of Columbia. The AUC and the Columbian military patrol together, have joint offensives and share bases and communications facilities. This close relationship has been recorded by the UN, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Para-Political scandal has also revealed close links between senior political figures and the paramilitaries. Evidence showed the DAS worked with paramilitaries to carry out assassinations, electoral fraud and protected drug operations.

Life is cheap in Columbia. Up to the end of June 2010 at least 31 trades unionists have been murdered, 196 union activists disappeared and many imprisoned and attacked.

Four point five million people have been moved off their land and out of their home regions. A land area the size of Austria has been seized often after the execution of local community leaders, massacres of communities and the disappearance of individuals.

In November 2005 the Ministry of Defence issued Directive 29 giving a financial bonus to soldiers and incentives including leave days and promotion fir killing a guerrilla. This lead to an upsurge in extrajudicial killings of men and boys who were then dressed in guerrilla uniforms to claim rewards.

Our group took evidence from mothers in Soacha where boys from a poor neighbourhood were seduced with false offers of employment, taken hundreds of miles away by the army and killed before being dressed in guerrilla uniforms. When the families tried to reveal what have taken place they received death threats and some were killed. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights investigated and said that the scale of killings in Columbia constituted a ‘crime against humanity’. In Columbia these are known as false positive killings.

At La Macarena we attended a hearing of evidence of disappearances killings and dispersals. The day after we left Colombia, President Uribe visited La Macarena and praised the soldiers allegedly responsible for the abuses and said those attending the hearing there were linked to terrorism. The Defence Minister Gabriel Silva reportedly claimed that images of the unidentified graves at La Macarena were in taken in the former Yugoslavia.

Impunity is at the centre of the human rights crisis in Colombia. No one is brought to justices for the killings. The UN reports that in 98.5% of cases where the army has executed civilians no one has been brought to justice.

Here in Bridgend the Gerado Cruz award is presented at the Bridgend College annual awards ceremony to a student in trade union studies. Gerado Cruz was assassinated on his return to Columbia following a visit to Bridgend and the college had followed events in Columbia ever since.

Columbia is a major exporter of cocaine. The use of paramilitary forces is seen by some as a way forward in Afghanistan. The UK will soon be asked to sign a free trade agreement with Columbia. A Foreign Office Minster will attend the inauguration of President Santos. I have urged the Minister to set benchmarks for the new government, in human rights and trades union relationships, in the disbanding of the DAS and support for the judiciary. Until these are in place there should be no British support of the Free Trade Agreement.