Amidst a context of war, social and grassroots organizations throughout Colombia have generated diverse initiatives and experiences of peace, resisting permanent threats and attacks, building community, and creating through their actions and expressions the possibility for a dignified life.
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By Mauro Giormenti, in Columbia. The entire Department of Arauca is under a general strike against the government, the multi-national oil companies, and the repression of civil resistance to the visit by President Santos to the region.
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On 13 February 2013, three pellets were fired at the vehicle of Father Alberto Franco, a prominent human rights defender and Executive Secretary of the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz (Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace CIJP).
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Workplace hazards, fairness for subcontracted workers top union demands Workers at the Colombian mine that provides coal to NB Power’s plant in Belledune are on strike as of February 7th. The strike marks the first workers’ action to stop work at the mine in the union’s 22 year history. Sintracarbón, the union representing workers at the Cerrejón mine, the world’s largest open-pit coal mine, in La Guajira, Colombia, decided to strike in light of the company’s failure to meet their demands.
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Background "A strike for human dignity"
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U.S. Representatives Henry “Hank” Johnson, James McGovern, George Miller, Sam Farr, Rosa DeLauro, Janice Schakowsky, and Barbara Lee sent a letter to Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos expressing concern over threats faced by Colombian land rights leaders.
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The Political Mass Movement of Central-Eastern Colombia have publicly declared an indefinite general strike which began at 6am on February 12th, 2013.
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Colombia’s recent passage of a constitutional amendment that expands military jurisdiction in cases of human rights violations is a major setback for justice. The reform would allow grave human rights crimes to be investigated and tried by the military justice system, in direct conflict with years of jurisprudence of Colombia’s high courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
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A stand of plantain trees in northern Colombia, where returning refugees say they are being displaced by a paramilitary-backed banana ‘invasion.’ Residents involved in land restitution say that they live with constant threats, and that abduction, torture and murder remain common fates. Death lists are widely circulated.
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Since Monday January 21st, approximately 1 500 people belonging to different social organizations of Arauca, maintain an on-going permanent pipeline blockade against oil extractive transnational corporations in different sectors of the region. Their objective is to reactivate the pacific mobilization of their demands to transnational oil companies and to the Colombian state.
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