Colombia

The killing of Antioquia state Governor Guillermo Gaviria Correa on May 5, 2003, among ten hostages massacred by FARC guerrillas in reaction to a military rescue attempt, deprived Colombia and the world of a nonviolent political leader whose legacy is no less significant than those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born in Medellín in 1962, eldest son of a family prominent in politics, publishing and business. A mining management specialist by training at the Colorado School of Mines, after a decade of innovative public service including as Antioquian Secretary of Mines and General Director of the Colombian Roads Institute he campaigned for “A New Antioquia” in 2000 and was overwhelmingly elected Governor by 600,000 of six million people in Colombia’s most populous state. Gaviria’s brief but dynamic governorship was profoundly rooted in the principles and practices of nonviolence derived from his Christian faith and serious study...

MADRID – Before the latest carnage reported from Colombia is shunted down into the archives and certainly before the Bush administration decides it is going to re direct its military aid to Colombia, now concentrated on defeating drug trafficking, in the direction of fighting leftist guerrillas, we should all take time out to reconsider the last 100 years or more of Colombian history. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, has reminded us, Cicero wrote two thousand years ago, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child”. In Colombia’s case the continuing political violence has cut across all levels of society on and off all through the last century and much of the century before. (The common Colombian term La Violencia is usually used for the particular intense period of civil war between 1946 and 1966, to distinguish it from the...

UNICEF launched a campaign in Colombia this week that aims to bring together more than 2 million Colombians to promote peace, reports Bogota’s El Pais. The “Manos a la Paz” (Hands For Peace) campaign, which began Monday and runs through Sunday, has recruited 100,000 youth between the ages of 14 and 18 to act as “peace builders.” After receiving training, the youth deliver messages on peace building to families, schools, businesses and unions in more than 1,000 towns. According to its promoters, the campaign supports the Colombian peace process and is intended as a “push” to resolve the Colombian conflict with negotiations. It also teaches “tolerance and respect for others, reconciliation, solidarity and participation” (Ignacio Tena, Bogota El Tiempo, 4 Nov, UN Wire translation). At least 35,000 Colombians have been killed in just the last decade of Colombia’s 40-year civil war. “Kidnappings and extortion are common, and 1.5 million Colombians...

MADRID- After Kosovo why not next Colombia, land of the drug barons and 40 years of near continuous civil war? The rest of the world may drop its jaw at the idea of Nato troops being sent to pacify leftist guerrilla groups, army-backed, fascist-inclined paramilitaries and the world’s most ruthless drug cartels. But in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, it is being touted by some as a necessary solution. And if not Nato, at least the U.S. army. Don’t drop your jaw too far. For none less than the U.S. commander in chief, Bill Clinton, said last month that vital American interests were at stake in Colombia. It is “very much in our national security interests to do what we can”. When a U.S. president uses these code words it essentially means that the backbone of the U.S. military, intelligence and national security bodies has decided that, if necessary, the U.S. is prepared...