Police arrived at the Santa Isabel mine in Colón-Génova on February 21, 2012. The officers asked these local miners to attend a meeting to see if they could sort out their licensing request; However, when the roughly twenty-five miners arrived, they were read their rights and arrested. About a week later, a report ran on television stating that police had arrested a group of illegal miners in Colón-Génova who were making over 150 million pesos ($CAD 84,500) per month and using their earnings to fund the FARC and Los Rastrojos, a paramilitary group.
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Colombia’s Congress last night passed bills to implement a free-trade accord with the U.S., advancing the agreement ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit this weekend for the Summit of the Americas.
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Café Artère : 7000 du Parc (Métro Parc) Free admission Books available for $20 -- "An extraordinary exposé" - Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums "Timely, hard-hitting and well-researched." - Mike Edwards, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos "An important piece of scholarship." - Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, University of Oregon and author of Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh "Sure to be controversial."
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Chiquita, the global banana producer, was ordered this week to face a federal court over their role in paying off right wing death squads in Colombia. Villagers allege that the death squads used “random and targeted violence in exchange for financial assistance and access to Chiquita’s private port for arms and drug smuggling,” according to a lawsuit filed on their behalf by EarthRights International and Cohen Milstein.
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We support the week of economic disruption.
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Amnesty's statement last week to the United Nations Human Rights Council couldn't be clearer. While the government of President Santos has made a number of important commitments to improving respect for human rights, "there have been few tangible improvements in the overall human rights situation".
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We who participated at the international meeting in Switzerland, express our fraternal greetings in support of all political prisoners in different jails of Colombia. We are informed about the hunger strike that you carry through at this moment demanding that the Colombian State recognizes you as political prisoners caused by the social and armed conflict that Colombia goes through. It is necessary to remember that the political prisoners are in their big majority students, workers, farmers and intellectuals, defenders of human rights or journalists.
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URGENT ACTION NEEDED BY COLOMBIAN AND U.S. GOVERNMENTS HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS DEMAND GUARANTEES FOR LIFE AND THE DEFENSE OF INDIGENOUS AND AFRO-DESCENDANT TERRITORIES OF NORTHERN CAUCA Human rights organizations demand that the Colombian and U.S. governments take immediate action to guarantee the right to life and territory of indigenous and Afro-descendant territories of Northern Cauca.
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The Washington Office on Latin America visited Chocó in March 2012. Alarmed by the severity of grave human rights situation in Chocó, we support the following statement issued by Diocese of Quibdó. We also encourage the U.S. government to promptly act in order to guarantee human rights and territorial rights for Chocó’s Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples and to promote efforts that dismantle the military, political and economic operations of illegal armed groups in the Chocó.
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A thick fog flows over the eastern range of the Colombian Andes. Here and there, the constant wind lifts the clouds to reveal lagoons, cloud forests, and páramo, an Andean alpine ecosystem known as a “mountain-top sponge” for its massive water-holding capacity. Descending lower into the Upper Magdalena Valley, about 400 kilometers southwest from Bogotá, rural communities farm a wide variety of fruit and vegetable crops, and raise animals that not only sustain families, but help feed Colombia´s major cities.
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