A visit to Colombia
by Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers
I visited Colombia as part of a delegation organised by Justice for Colombia, to which my union, the ATL, is affiliated. This is an account of my visit to that tragic country.
Walking round central Bogota, with its shops, offices, government buildings and Spanish colonial houses, you could easily forget that Colombia is in the midst of a brutal civil war, that huge areas of the countryside are controlled by guerrillas or paramilitaries. Leave the centre and the reasons for the civil war become clear. Miles and miles of shanty towns; people living in shacks with plastic roofs, with no running water and illegal, and dangerous, electricity supplies. Colombia is a country of great contrasts, and the biggest of these is the huge gap between the elite, who own vast tracks of land and wealth, and the poor, who struggle to survive. The inequality is vast.
Our personal sense of security as we travelled through Bogotá was shattered as we saw a uniformed policeman, impassively watched by three others, viciously kicking a homeless man. His crime? Sitting on a street corner.
Colombia is a beautiful country. It has a wealth of natural resources – producing coffee, copper, emeralds, flowers, fruits and gold. It has huge natural reserves of gas, petroleum and oil. But these natural resources are not used to improve the lives of the majority of Colombians. Consider these facts: two and a half million families in Colombia have no home; 1.7 million children cannot go to school either because their parents cannot afford school fees, or because they live in conflict areas where schools, at the centre of rural communities, are targets in the war between the military and the guerrillas. Twenty million Colombians have no health insurance and, in a country where, following the government's privatisation programme, there are only eight public hospitals, five children in the past month have died on hospital door steps – their parents unable to pay the fees for their treatment. Consider, also, the priorities of a government which, faced with these problems, continues to allocate 35% of its income on military spending and just 3 or 4% on education.
Colombia is also, notoriously, a producer of cocaine – a trade controlled by right wing paramilitaries with close links to the ruling elite and to the government.
The delegation represented nine trade unions with over four million members. We spent a week hearing testimonies from trade unionists, human rights lawyers and social leaders. What we heard was terrible – accounts of torture, murder, massacres, forced displacements and false imprisonment – all elements of a brutal suppression, by the Colombian government, of the democratic rights of its people.
More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/?link=6&deleg=5
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