On the 8th of July 2000, a group of paramilitaries executed six young leaders of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in the center of La Unión. The massacre happened four months after an FOR delegation had visited the Peace Community. After the...
Displacement and Land Issues
Colombia: Approaching the Point of No Return
FOR Peace Presence focuses primarily on the negative effects of militarization and developmentalism on the human population of Colombia. Try as we might, Macaws have been really hard to accompany. This article, originally written for Capital Canal, then translated for...
Displacement in El Tamarindo
El Tamarindo is a community located on the outskirts of Barranquilla, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. The members of this community grow platano, keep animals, and try to get by in their village that they arrived at 12 years ago after being displaced by violence...
Colombian Coal: Fueling the Cycle of Conflict
Barges and cargo ships dot the distant horizon off the white shores of Santa Marta. Seated on the Caribbean Sea between sandy beaches, small fishing villages, and the Sierra Nevada mountain range, Santa Marta was destined to be a centerpiece of Colombia’s growing...
Empires of Gold and Colombian Extractivism Today
By Luke Finn Before there was Colombia, there was the extractive industry. The legend of El Dorado stems from a Spaniard, Juan Rodriguez Freyle, watching a High Priest of the Muisca getting covered in gold dust and jumping in Lake Guatavita, near Bogotá, in a...
Aerial Fumigation and its Discontents
By John Lindsay-Poland Once the signature program of the U.S. drug war in Latin America, aerial fumigation of coca leaf crops is finally in deep trouble. Fumigation’s crisis comes in a moment when coca growers, like other farmers throughout Colombia, face an economic...
Cargill Illegal Land Grabs Implicate Colombia Presidency
By Jake Van Jenzen A century of neglect, drug trafficking, and civil wars had made the “wild-east” Colombian department of Vichada a publicly designated “wasteland”. By the 1990’s, however, reduced hostilities allowed the government to open it up in specially...
Aerial Fumigation Comes to San José de Apartadó
By Gina Spigarelli The turnover of a calendar year is a time for rebirth and re-evaluation, a time of resolutions and looking forward to an even better year to come. January 2013 brought something new to the peace community — low flying aerial fumigation planes....