Top human rights attorney talks Colombia

The human rights attorney spoke about Colombia.Interested students and faculty gathered last Thursday to hear Adil Melendez, a prominent Colombian human rights attorney.  Melendez works with the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE) in an effort to draw attention to the human rights situation in Colombia. With the help of an interpreter, the soft-spoken Melendez painted a bleak and deflating picture of progress in the US’s 3^rd largest receiver of foreign aid and its closest ally in the region. 

Melendez works in Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Cartagena is a breakout tourist boomtown.  It boasts a picturesque old town, a distinctive bay, a flourishing trade economy, and postcard-perfect beaches nearby. 

Overlooking all of this is the Castille de San Felipe, the largest Spanish fortress in the Americas.  The cannon-studded citadel looms impressively over idyllic, colonial-style streets, which are now clogged with cruise-shippers, backpackers and chatty street vendors.  “It’s cocaine days over,” gushed the New York Times recently, “Cartagena has emerged as the belle of the ball.”

But as in the bygone days of Spanish rule, Cartagena’s indelible charm obscures a dark reality of political exclusion and devastating poverty.  Though few visitors make it outside a handful of select barrios and seaside resorts, Melendez described how a short drive takes one past multi-million dollar condos and into miserable favelas. 

Here Cartagena’s famous cobblestones give way to garbage-strewn dirt.  These streets are crowded with poor costeños who struggle with terrible working conditions and receive little funding for social programs from the current government headed by Juan Manuel Santos.  Cartegena’s locals are of mostly African descent, and Melendez asserts that racial discrimination of Afro-Colombians is part of the problem.

Melendez says marginalized Colombians have little recourse because, as he puts it, civic mobilization has been criminalized. The situation for labor unionists is particularly bad in a country where car bombs and motorcycle drive-bys remain as common methods of political expression. 

According to the Georgetown Human Rights Action group, which sponsored the event, more labor union activists are murdered in Colombia than the rest of the world combined (51 in 2010, according to the unions).  Melendez has received regular death threats and been the target of two assassination attempts.  He is now under special protection from the DC-based Inter-American Human Rights Commission, part of the Organization of American States.  The program affords him a detail of bodyguards, but he pointed out that many of his colleagues are not so lucky. 

Melendez also spoke out against patrimonial US policy and multi-nationals like the American fruit importers that have accrued a checkered reputation in the Caribbean for their historical hard line on workers’ rights and in a few incidents, ties to violent paramilitary gangs.   Too often foreign investment or infrastructure projects come to involve unscrupulous local jefes, resulting in repressive violence or forced displacement.  Estimates of internally displaced people in Colombia range in the millions. 

 Melendez’s visit comes as the US prepares to ratify a large free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia.  He believes the FTA fails to sufficiently protect local communities and their human rights.  Several congressmen and the Obama Administration have shown concern for the issue and the potential effects of the agreement.  Likewise, Santos has made an effort to curb corrupt and repressive behavior with some high level prosecutions in the region, including that of the former mayor of Cartagena. 

But with the passage of the FTA fast approaching, Melendez contends that these efforts are coming up short.  Even The Economist has acknowledged that the US has “more to gain” from the agreement, and that the human rights situation for labor activists is bad and showing little improvement. 

After the event a handful of Colombian GULC students lingered to discuss Melendez’s viewpoints, which many felt were extreme.  Progress is slow in Colombia, but there have been undeniable gains.  They argued that doctrinaire leftists often try to detract from the accomplishments of Santos and his predecessor-mentor Alvaro Uribe. 

Violent crimes have indeed dropped off dramatically in Colombia, which has long been ravaged by an internal conflict in which the battles lines have become increasingly blurred.  Colombians struggle to navigate a corrupt army, gang-like paramilitary groups, a splintered but die-hard leftist movement (best known by the FARC) and powerful drug cartels.  The US’s decade old “Plan Colombia,” focuses most of its funding to the police and military and has been criticized as being directed towards the government’s political opponents like the FARC, rather than cocaine production which appears to have permeated power structures on all sides.

By John Thompson

Guest Writer