CPT is planning a delegation for 13-26 January 2009, to highlight the concerns of Colombia's traditional mining communities.  As well as traveling to Bogota and Barrancabermeja, where CPT-Colombia's full-time presence is based, delegation participants will visit a mining community in the San Lucas Mountains of southern Bolivar province.  There, they will hear firsthand about the miners' struggles to stay on their land and maintain their way of life, despite paramilitary violence, assassinations, unjust accusations and arrests, and the encroaching interests of agro-industry and multinational mining companies.

Now is a crucial time to act on behalf of Colombian's traditional mining communities.  While the communities experience and protest the violence, environmental degradation, neglect, and abuse of their human rights, the Colombian government is negotiating with Canada and the U.S. trade agreements that would further threaten these communities' survival.  Please consider expressing your solidarity with the miners by joining CPT's delegation to the mining zone of southern Bolivar. 

The lush and gold-rich San Lucas Mountains in Colombia's Southern Bolivar province seem calm at first glance.  Here, isolated mining communities hug the steep mountain slopes.  Unfortunately, these mountains also harbour a bloody war.  Most Colombian government officials, courting gold-mining multinationals, present a different picture of the region as they sell off the mineral rights to these corporations.  Yet, the facts remain clear; most small miners in this region have had a family member killed or "disappeared."  They are caught in a three-way battle over land, in the middle of the FARC and ELN guerilla groups, the Colombian regular army battalions and the paramilitary or "mercenary hired guns."  The miners fear that the Army and paramilitary are working to clear the land of what the Colombian ministry of mines has referred to in a brochure as "a plague," i.e.,  the small campesino miner.

 

Since Martin Luther initiated a reformation in the sixteenth century, Catholics and Protestants have argued and fought, sometimes to the death, about whose church shall lead us to salvation. In many contexts it is impossible to hold an ecumenical service because one tradition will not recognize the other. Colombia is no different. Resentment on both sides has caused a great divide between the two...

In the past several years efforts at reconciliation have borne some fruit. Anabaptist churches in Colombia and the Conference of Bishops have held meetings sharing statements of apology and recognizing pain and hurt.

Recently our team in Colombia hosted a delegation of leaders from the Colombian Mennonite Church and a mix of priests, scholastics and candidates from the Basilian community of Colombia....

 

On Monday 21 April 2008, paramilitaries renewed their death threats against the leaders of organizations and organizations with which the team has worked closely for years … This time, the newly reiterated threat includes a list of specific people–some of whom are well known to CPT Colombia team members and have become dear friends of the team. After naming various people, the threat continues, "…we will start with you, and afterwards the others until there is not one left, plague of FARC sons of bitches, we will finish you off."

CPT urges supporters to take Urgent Action. 

On 10 April 2008, several social and human rights organizations received a threatening email from a paramilitary group called "Águilas Negras, Bloque Norte de Colombia" (Black Eagles, North Division of Colombia). The group declared as targets for assassination members of the Southern Bolivar Agricultural-Mining Federation (the Federation), Sembrar Corporation (a human rights organization), the Program for Development and Peace in the Middle Magdalena (Programa) and the parish priests of two rural communities, Tiquisio and Regidor, in southern Bolivar province.

Given the seriousness of the threats we ask you to call, fax or email the Colombian authorities....