Hearing the other voices in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Hearing the other voices in Colombia
By Dee Aker and Elena McCollim 2:00 a.m. January 25, 2009

As the new Obama administration comes into focus internationally, anticipation and apprehension grip two distinct Colombian worlds. That of President Alvaro Uribe and his right-wing appointees seems to be hesitating – just a little. Theirs has been the only voice heard in Washington for some time. Should they change their tone?

Has someone noticed that 31 trade unionists were assassinated in the first half of last year, that attacks against the independent judiciary increase or that the government of Colombia continues to commit serious, systematic human rights violations? If so, will these negatives reverberate and expose some other unseemly trends such as the increase in narco-trafficking after billions of U.S. dollars have been spent to slow it? Plan Colombia, begun in the Clinton administration to deal with the stream of drugs to the United States, has been welcomed in its increasingly narrow martial approach from 2001. What now?

The other world, one of rural peasants, Afro-Colombians, the indigenous, the displaced, squatters and families of victims of death squads, is hesitantly expectant. For years it has been amassing – and disseminating – testimonies documenting the violations. Is there a sliver of hope for this world of the outsiders?

While Barack Obama has not experienced or focused on Latin America, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, represents some distinct ties to the origins of Plan Colombia, victims of past policies are organized and vocal. Because of the face Obama has presented to the world and the connection he is perceived to have with his own civil society, many long-suffering advocates for the traumatized and excluded in Colombia feel there is a chance they will now be heard.

A Colombian activist with a major women's nongovernmental organization put it this way: Although Obama's election is clearly good news, we must look at the U.S. government as the U.S. government. It remains to be seen how he will deal with us as president. If he will hear us, we want to say to him stop sending foreign military troops, and, if the free-trade agreement with Colombia is to pass, let it at least include human rights and environmental conditionality.

Recently it was Colombia's turn to undergo a review of its human rights by the United Nations; Dec. 10 marked the culmination of this process, at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. In their submission to that review, nine leading human rights and humanitarian agencies noted that between July 2002 and December 2007, more than 75 percent of the forcibly disappeared, assassinated and internally displaced were the victims of government security forces, which included the paramilitaries created with U.S. financial and military support.

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