By Admin Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The association of coffee farmers in Colombia, Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros (Federacafe), is promoting a project to produce fine wood from coffee trees.
Sexual violence has become a weapon of war in Colombia, Oxfam saysBy Admin Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Madrid - Sexual violence against women is widely used as a weapon in Colombia’s armed conflict, the development charity Oxfam International said in a report presented Wednesday in Madrid.
The Politics of Chavez and Uribe: Distinct Ideologies, Similar Strategies?By Admin Thursday, August 27, 2009
President Alvaro Uribe recently moved one step closer to running for a third term in office. The Colombian Senate voted 56-2 last week to approve a plan for legal changes that would enable him to be reelected a second time. The process must now be approved by the House of Representatives and pass a nationwide referendum, in addition to being vetted by the nation’s Supreme Court. The next presidential election, for a four-year term, is scheduled for May 2010. The Americas Quarterly provides further details here.
Help Needed For Colombian DisplacedBy Admin Monday, August 3, 2009
Years of insurgency and narcoterrorism have placed Colombia among the countries with the highest numbers of Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs. Threatened by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia terrorist group, other illegal armed groups, criminal gangs and drug traffickers, people continue to be driven from their homes and forced to abandon their lands and livelihoods.
In 1940s Colombia, Blacklists and ‘Enemy Aliens’By Admin Monday, August 3, 2009
One hallmark of a gifted novelist is the ability to see the potential for compelling fiction in an incident, anecdote or scrap of history, no matter how dry or seemingly obscure, that others have overlooked. By that standard and several others, the career of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a Colombian writer born in 1973, is off to a notable start with “The Informers,” his ambitious first novel.
Afghanistan/Iraq = Mexico/ColombiaBy Admin Friday, June 26, 2009
Given the much-anticipated death of newspapers, and despite the efforts of the electronic media to direct your attention to the important foreign news — those nasty Iranians (it is Iranians, isn’t it?) and Susan Boyle — you may have missed the important speech by the new President of China in Havana, Cuba, three weeks ago. On June 4, the Chinese President delivered a speech entitled “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning” (remarkably enough, the same day that the new President of the United States was delivering a speech on a similar topic in Cairo, Egypt).
I’m Sicario because “I love you”By Admin Monday, June 8, 2009
Sicario, that ancient Roman world for ‘hired-killer’, was updated in the Latin American Spanish by the Colombian mafias since the 1980s. The figure of a “professional” assassin got a kind of fascination not only by popular stories, but literature and movies. It even attracted prestigious writers like Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa who traveled to Medellín to see if it was real that guns were everywhere shooting everyone like a kind of wild west movie. Several authors and film directors like Fernando Vallejo and Victor Gaviria, are even responsible for the foundation of a new kind of literary genre: the Sicario Novel.
Bird species on extinction ‘red list’ increases to almost 200By Admin Thursday, May 14, 2009
The number of bird species around the world threatened with extinction has risen this year to almost 200 species despite conservation efforts, according to the latest international report.
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species found more than 10 per cent of all bird species - a total of 1,227 - are in danger of being wiped out including birds in Britain like the red kite and curlew.
By Admin Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Foreign Office Minister, Gillian Merron, discussed human rights in Colombia during a panel discussion at Canning House in London. She welcomed improvements within the country but acknowledged that poverty and inequality remain key challenges.
By Admin Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Stephanie Peacock
WATCHING people walking around the busy streets of Bogotá, going in and out of office blocks, shops and cafes, it is easy to forget that, despite Colombia’s beauty and wealth of natural resources, it is a country gripped by violence. In fact, Colombia has been in the throes of an armed conflict for more than 40 years.
