Consuelo was kidnapped on September 10, 2001, and released on January 10 of this year. Gustavo’s son Pablo Emilio has been held since late 1997, more than 10 years. Gustavo has walked thousands of kilometers in Colombia in his quest to secure freedom for his son and all the hostages. They will share their own stories and the struggles of the victims’ families, and explain how we can all be part of helping secure the release of the hostages, and building a possible path towards peace in Colombia.

Colombia’s humanitarian tragedy

According to the nongovernmental organization País Libre, as of 2007 illegal armed groups in Colombia (left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries) were holding 14,233 hostages. In addition, thousands have been forcibly disappeared, mostly by pro-government forces, many killed and buried in mass graves. According to the Washington Post, "the number of disappeared has eclipsed the tallies in El Salvador, Chile and other countries where the practice was widespread. And if estimates by some investigators turn out to be correct, Colombia will soon count more disappeared victims than Argentina or Peru." The Post also notes that the continued disappearance of tens of thousands of farmers "has been largely overlooked," as has the existence of the alarming number of hostages in the hands of illegal armed groups (August 28, 2008).

Other gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law include politically-motivated individual assassinations, and massacres of civilian populations. Such assassinations have continued this year, with killings of trade unionists, for example, up from last year. Another example: Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities have been especially targeted, driving them off of lands to which they have won legal title, which are taken over for "development" by business interests based on Bogotá and Medellín.

Human Rights Violations and the US Role in Colombia

In the early 1990s, Colombia became the third-leading recipient of U.S. military aid worldwide, after Israel and Egypt (and, after 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan). Such aid was sharply increased at the end of the Clinton administration with the introduction of Plan Colombia, originally touted as an anti-drug program, but since then re-sold as a counter-terrorism initiative. Yet despite the more than $5 billion spent on aid to Colombia in the last 9 years, the flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States has risen, the total acreage planted in coca leaf has increased, and gross human rights violations by official forces persist.

Approximately 80% of that aid has been for the military and police forces, who have been implicated in a continuing string of human rights violations, both committed directly by the military, such as the February 2005 San José de Apartadó massacre, and by the paramilitary alliance Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which for years has worked closely with many mid- and high-level military officers, according to international and Colombian human rights reports.

Until last year, U.S. policy towards Colombia largely reflected a bipartisan consensus in favor of more of the same, with few in Congress raising a critical voice. However, that situation has begun to change. Colombians need you to become involved to see to it that the human rights and humanitarian tragedy is accorded higher priority in U.S. policy as a new administration takes over in Washington. This includes the need for the United States to insist that the Colombian government pursue a peaceful end to the conflict, so that all may return safely to their homes.

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