Geography Archives: Colombia

Human rights movements recorded an increase of attacks against police stations, military bases, and civilians and reported assassinations and intimidation against social leaders in several departments. In February, the panorama has been no different.

The State and the ruling classes of Colombia, which constitute the counterinsurgent power bloc, have made use of a series of fallacies to hide the terrorist nature of the State in this country, consolidated as such for decades.

People frequently refer to Colombia as “the coffee-growing country,” due to its high volume of coffee exports, but in recent years Colombia has found itself in headlines for a different commodity.

“Far too many women are fighting—not only for their rights, but for the rights of all,” says Yomali Torres, an Afro-Colombian activist. The 26-year-old joined throngs of women in the streets of Colombia over the past month to demand an end to patriarchal oppression at the hands of a U.S.-backed neoliberal state.

Known as the “Red Dance,” the systematic murder of the Patriotic Union remains one of the most extreme cases of political violence in Latin America and new evidence suggests that it was concocted by one of the most decorated spies in Israeli history.

Photos circulating on social media show Colombian government forces using Israeli weapons against protestors and Israeli-made Sand Cat armored vehicles patrolling the streets of Colombian cities. Alan Macleod investigates the growing ties between the unlikely allies.

There has been a social explosion of the Colombian people against poverty and repression. President Duque’s ‘tax reform’ package was the last straw that broke their patience.

Despite the quickening decline of the “West,” the U.S. and its junior partners in imperialism are determined to hold humanity hostage to terminal capitalist greed and violence.

Ugliness defines the mood of state violence from Cali (Colombia) to Durban (South Africa), each context different and the depth of the violence particular to the location. Images of security forces cracking down on people trying to express their political rights have become commonplace.

Behind The Headlines’ Dan Cohen examines the ongoing national strike in Colombia and how President Duque is relying on a neo-fascist ideology to subdue it.

“The Trump administration waged a full scale campaign to undermine Colombia’s peace accords. We must not waste our time hoping the Biden administration might reverse course, we must demand it.” — James Jordan, Alliance for Global Justice

On December 8, a Conviasa flight prepared to take off from Caracas, Venezuela, for Mexico City. It planned to carry 200 election observers and journalists who came to Venezuela from a range of countries to monitor the National Assembly elections that were held on December 6.

Class struggle in Colombia will escalate as the hopes of the peace deal are continuously shattered by the blood and gore of political killings. Without any material policies, the guarantees of the Peace Agreement have turned out to be hollow.

Patrón lived in Chocó in northwestern Colombia, where 96 percent of the people identify as Afro-Colombian or as part of the Emberá Indigenous community. Chocó is treated as a backwater of the country, with no real infrastructure in the province’s expanse and little social policy to enhance the lives of its population.

The unchecked growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America is tearing apart the socio-economic fabric of the countrieslocated in that continent.

Venezuela’s rate of infection remains low, despite the U.S. unilateral sanctions that have denied the country the right to import drugs and tests for the population.

Simón Trinidad matters; his time has come. This leader of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) faced bizarre and unfounded criminal charges in a U.S. court. He’s being held under the cruelest of conditions in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He will die there unless he is released. Simón Trinidad will be 70 years old on July 30.

With the U.S. government now absurdly saying that Venezuela is the source of narco-trafficking, even though all evidence pointing to narco-trafficking is rooted in Colombia, the pressure on Colombia to deal with its drug problem is now lifted.

Despite protests of historic proportions fueled by anger over corruption and a brutal right-wing crackdown, the unrest in Colombia has garnered remarkably little international media attention compared to Venezuela.

The protests that started with the national strike called by Colombia’s central union on November 21 to protest pension reforms and the broken promises of the peace accords have persisted for two months and grown into a protest against the whole establishment. And the protests have continued into the new year and show no signs of stopping.