Across the Americas

To the Plenary Session on the Situation in Honduras
UN Headquarters , New York, 29 June 2009

Excellencies,

It is with a heavy heart and deep personal outrage that I open this plenary session to consider the coup d’etat that interrupted the democratic and constitutional rule of President Manuel Zelaya in the Republic of Honduras yesterday, the 28th of June.

Is Plan Colombia subsidizing narco-traffickers to cultivate biofuels on stolen lands?

By Teo Ballvé
The Nation, May 27, 2009

On May 14 Colombia's attorney general quietly posted notice on his office's website of a public hearing that will decide the fate of Coproagrosur, a palm oil cooperative based in the town of Simití in the northern province of Bolívar. A confessed drug-trafficking paramilitary chief known as Macaco had turned over to the government the cooperative's assets, which he claims to own, as part of a victim reparations program.

April 17, 2009

Dear friends:

The Canadian Parliament is about to consider ratification of a “free trade” agreement with Colombia. The text of the agreement is nearly identical to the US-Colombia trade agreement and would have the same kinds of disastrous consequences for millions of Colombians.

Jorge Enrique Robledo, Bogotá, January 16, 2009

On November 13, at the time when the Mining Company of Caldas owed
salaries and benefits to its workers, a number of trucks arrived at the facilities owned by the Canadian transnational Colombia Goldfields to haul off to Medellín the "calculating equipment, furniture, implements, materials and the rest". The reason? To sell them to the highest bidder to pay off --according to the company-- their labor and commercial debts. In the following days they abandoned their operations in Marmato and fired the last of 200 workers, without honoring their commitment to pay on December 10 many of these workers for services rendered.

by Luis Ángel Saavedra
1/22/2009
Indigenous groups on both sides of the border need each other to protect their land and autonomy.

Members of the Awa indigenous people of northern Ecuador and southern Colombia say that despite the political border dividing them they need each other to fight a common threat: the appropriation of their lands.