• April 20 National Day of Action for Colombia [0]
• U.S. and Colombian Organizations Call on President Obama: End Plan Colombia and Change U.S. Drug Policy [0]
• Colombia Inviting U.S. Military Operations Kicked out of Ecuador [0]
• More Illegal Wiretapping Uncovered [0]
• School of Americas Graduate Threatens Peace Community Leader [0]
• Commemoration [0]
• August 2009 Delegation to Colombia [0]

Host a doll-making party: [1] Ask your student club, church group, or community organization to consider doing a doll-making party in February or March. The parties are an opportunity to raise awareness in your community about Colombia's crisis while making dolls to be used in April 20th's public actions. Click here to download a displacement fact sheet, a doll-making guide and a compelling video on Colombia's crisis.

Help plan the day of action: Contact your local organizer (listed below) and help shape the public doll-delivery actions of April 20--plans include speakers, marches, protest, street theater, creative performances and more!

Send postcards to Obama [2]: Contact Liza Smith (liza@igc.org) to receive postcards that urge Obama and his administration to shape a new policy towards Colombia. Distribute the postcards to your friends, colleagues, family and wider community to sign and send in.

Send emails to Obama: Click here (link coming soon!) to let the Obama administration know that the time is now to chart a new policy towards Colombia. Please forward the link widely.

To contact coordinators about the action [3] in Portland, OR, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York or Washington, DC, click here. [4]

Want to get others in your community involved? Download a half-page flyer [5] that outlines the Days of Prayer and Action, to be used in tabling, flyering, etc.

Get your faith community involved in the Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia --Talk to a leader in your faith community about this opportunity to pray and act for peace in Colombia. Ask them to set aside Sunday, April 19 to focus on Colombia during the worship service. Click here [6] for sample sermons, prayers, etc.

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Colombian groups' appeal (PDF) [7], signed by former Foreign Affairs Minister Augusto Ramírez Ocampo and more than a hundred other national leaders, organizations and individuals, urges President Obama to consider five changes in U.S. Colombia policy:

• Reformulate counter-drug policy, including modifying Plan Colombia to prioritize voluntary eradication of coca leaves, productive alternatives for farmers, and a rural reform that respects land rights and reparations for those victimized by violence and drug trafficking.It also calls for further strengthening of social and humanitarian components of the plan in relation to military components.
• Promote a negotiated end to the armed conflict.
• Support the judicial branch in its efforts to investigate "the capture of the State and economy by mafias that put at risk our democracy, as in the case of the 'parapolitica' scandal, and prevent impunity for the armed groups and their allies."
• Prioritize strict respect for human rights as the foundation of U.S. aid policy.
• Agree on fair trade treaties, based on mutual respect, human rights and sustainable development.

In a letter coordinated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (PDF) [8], 46 national and regional U.S. organizations urged the President to end a failed drug policy in Colombia and to invest in drug treatment here in the U.S. and aid for the millions of Colombians displaced by war. The letter followed closely on the heels of the President's first address to a joint session of Congress, in which he stated the need to "go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs" and to "act boldly and wisely."

The U.S. groups' letter encourages the White House to make three major changes to current U.S. policy. First, it presses the Obama administration to end military aid to Colombia, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Western Hemisphere. Second, it calls for renewed diplomatic efforts to support a negotiated settlement to the armed conflict in Colombia. And third, it challenges the U.S. to increase development aid to the nation, as well as to dramatically redirect funds to domestic drug treatment programs.

"Both sides in Colombia's armed conflict have committed terrible atrocities," and civilian killings by the Colombian army have increased in the last two years, the groups wrote. Research by FOR last year showed that nearly half of these killings were reportedly committed by U.S.-supported units. "For us, and we think for you, it does matter whether people are threatened by corrupt and brutal armed forces that our tax dollars have trained and equipped. We want that to stop," the groups said to the President.

The failure in U.S. drug policy led former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia in February to describe Colombia as "a clear example of the limitations of the repressive policy promoted globally by the United States" and to call for a new paradigm that prioritizes reducing demand for illegal drugs.
And in a report released March 10, the Inter-American Dialogue [9] said that “It is painfully clear that U .S . anti-drug efforts are not doing much either to cut supply or reduce demand” and called for “an honest, well-informed, and wide-ranging exploration and debate on alternative drug policies across the Americas” and urged Washington to “relinquish its dominant, often suffocating, role in shaping counternarcotics efforts in the hemisphere.”

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Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said [10] during a visit to Washington on February 26. Santos said the city of Cali is being considered [11], because of its proximity to the Pacific and its altitude. U.S. aircraft based in Manta patrol the Pacific for narcotics and undocumented immigrants, and contribute to Plan Colombia.

"We're expanding cooperation in every sense, including access to our bases and that is what we're negotiating," Santos told reporters alongside Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez during a visit to Washington, where they met with U.S. officials and lawmakers.

The deal being negotiated provides expanded access to Colombia's bases for U.S. military planes, Santos said, adding that "instead of one type of airplanes, let's have this other type."

Santos expressed confidence that an agreement would be reached this month, building on existing military relations. El Espectador noted in January [12] that the Uribe government seeks to improve relations with the Obama administration through hosting the military operations now conducted from Ecuador. Negotiations for the U.S. presence began February 13 and 14 in Colombia.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has promised the U.S. base deal will not be renewed, and voters last year approved a constitution prohibiting foreign bases. Correa said the Manta air base would be converted into an international airport when the 10-year base deal expires in November 2009 and U.S. forces pull out. Last July, Ecuador's Foreign Ministry officially notified Washington it would not renew the base agreement, and the U.S. ambassador, Heather Hodges, has said that U.S. troops will leave Manta [13] this November.

But Santos said that hosting the U.S. operations "is only a possibility we are studying in the framework of a new military cooperation agreement being negotiated with the U.S.."

"The only real possibility I see that will favor Colombia in an eventual agreement with the U.S. is the same achieved with Plan Colombia, where equipment brought by the United States in the long term is transferred to Colombia… Look at the Ecuador case, the U.S. leaves and they didn't leave them anything," wrote Jhonny Fabian on an unofficial Colombian military forum [14] on March 1.

The coalition of Ecuadorean peace and human rights groups that successfully campaigned for the base closure is planning to conduct a social, economic and environmental audit of the impacts of the Manta base, said Gualdemar Jiménez of Service for Peace and Justice (SERPAJ). He was visiting Washington on Saturday for "Security Without Empire", the national conference on military bases organized by a U.S. network, including FOR.

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Semana uncovered a massive wiretap operation [15] carried out by the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), the Colombian secret police that answers directly to the President.

The targets this time included Supreme Court Justices who are investigating members of Congress close to President Uribe, including his cousin Mario Uribe. The Uribe government have fiercely attacked several of those justices, accusing them of "engaging in witness trafficking" and political persecution. Over the past 18 months, the justices and their families have also been targeted [16] for harassment, including one whose home was broken into with just a laptop stolen.

Ivan Velásquez, the justice handling the parapolitica investigation, reportedly had more than 1,900 phone calls intercepted in a three-month period and has been subject to a "man to man" surveillance. In October 20007, "Tasmania," a right wing paramilitary leader [17], was reportedly bribed to falsely accuse Velásquez of manipulating testimony. No one has been charged for any of the attacks on the justices.

Evoking the Fujimori-Montesinos regime in Peru that targeted political adversaries for intelligence operations, the latest set of illegal interception targets also included opposition politicians, journalists, and even some government officials. The intercepts are an effort, according to the whistleblowers, because "you have to have insurance" against the victim of wiretapping [18] denouncing the one who ordered it.

President Uribe has denied [19] any involvement in the illegal operation. The government portrays the scandal as an infiltration from the mafia into the intelligence agency.

The justices have announced taking the abuses to the United Nations and the Organization of American States, saying the abuses amount to "a plot against the Supreme Court [20]." The justices have also made clear that it is not enough to prosecute the officials who have implemented the wiretapping, but to reveal who ordered them and who has benefited from the information illegally obtained.

The abuses of the Colombian intelligence are linked to U.S. military aid. The U.S. has contributed equipment used in the abusive interception, according to Semana. Although U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield stated his rejection [21] of such use of American aid, there has been almost no debate in Washington about the "causalities" of U.S. aid in terms of basic human rights and civil liberties.

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U.S. speaking tour by Renato Areiza [22], then coordinator of the San José Peace Community. He visited communities in Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., North Carolina, Florida, and spoke at the annual vigil to close the School of the Americas.

But last month Renato faced a different kind of audience. On February 7, Renato was detained in San José de Apartadó by an army lieutenant, who put him on the phone with Colonel Germán Rojas Díaz. Rojas accused Renato of being the financial chief of a guerrilla front that operates in the area and told him to cooperate or go to prison, according to the Community [23]. Renato told Rojas that he has had nothing to the armed groups.

Colonel Rojas commands the Voltigeros Battalion of the Army's 17^th Brigade, and was trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in 1990.

Since Renato made these accusations public, the Community says, "members of the Army and paramilitaries desperately seek out Reinaldo throughout the area and have shown him their enormous anger for having denounced the blackmail." On February 24, soldiers told a community member that Renato had "earned his death." The Community stated that the Brigade has had a guerrilla commander who deserted the rebels illegally living in their compound for three months, though they are required to turn him over to prosecutors. The former guerrilla, known as "Samir," reportedly ordered a number of killings in the area and is negotiating benefits from the Army in exchange for collaboration in destroying the community.

At the same time, some 50 European and Colombian organizations called on Colombia's Prosecutor General [24] to fully prosecute the intellectual as well as material authors of the massacre in 2005 in San José, committed by paramilitary "guides" in cooperation with army soldiers, and to announce the status of the investigations. An army captain implicated General Héctor Jaime Fandiño in an attempted cover-up of the army's responsibility in the massacre.

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johnlp@igc.org [25]. To download an application, please click here (DOC) [26].

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