I thank the committee and give it sincere and fraternal greetings from Colombia and our trade unions, social organisations, political opposition and delegation. I thank the committee for its gesture of solidarity with the victims of the terrible weather in Colombia. We have had rains and vast areas have been flooded which have affected small peasant farmers and urban dwellers and caused the deaths of several people. The terrible winter from which we have been suffering is the result of global warming, which in turn is the result of humanity ignoring the damage it is doing to mother nature and the Earth. In this sense, our countries need to make an effort to care for the resources and life on this planet.
The committee knows also that our country suffers from other deep historical and systematic problems. Many of these are social problems. Others are political but the ones that concern the trade unions, popular movement and political opposition are the humanitarian problems. Colombia lives with a political and social armed conflict which has been ongoing for more than 50 years. As a result of this there is a permanent level of human rights abuses. In Colombia the opposition is persecuted, jailed, massacred and murdered. The Colombian Government in the past exterminated an entire political movement known as the Patriotic Union which left more than 13,000 victims dead.
The Colombian opposition is persecuted for thinking differently and questioning government policy, the economic model which is being put forward and the payment of foreign debt. The persecution takes the form of threats, imprisonment and murder. There are more than 7,000 political prisoners - prisoners of conscience - in Colombia, merely for opposing government polices. There are also more than 5 million internally displaced people and the situation got considerably worse in recent years under the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez. We have a new government under President Santos which has sought to create an environment in which there will be a belief things can change. However, this is a lie because while there has been a change of form, the same policies continue to be applied. In the five months the Santos Government has been in office, already eight trade unionists have been killed. In 2010 to date, 41 have been murdered. Our own Alternative Democratic Pole party, the political opposition, has had 12 of its members murdered, 47 threatened and many more imprisoned. Moreover, there is constant abuse of other human rights by the armed forces and the security services, especially in rural areas where the war continues. For example, the mobility of indigenous Afro-Colombian and peasant farmers is restricted. This restricts their ability to grab hold of vital supplies that they need for their survival.
This policy of human rights abuses is applied to generate terror among the people as a whole and the leaders of social organisations and within the political opposition in order to create the conditions which will enable the government to continue its policies on the economy and fulfil its commitments to international institutions and organisations such as in the the proposed free trade agreements with Canada, the United States and the European Union. We consider that if one of the conditions of the European Union for signing a free trade agreement is that the other partner respect social, environmental and human rights, the Colombian Government ought not to be rewarded with such an agreement since, as I said - we have the proof - there is ongoing systematic violation of human rights of members of the political opposition, human rights defenders and social organisations.
