Free What!

Although the reason for the the democrats putting off the vote on the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia probably has more to do with election year politics than what was in the agreement most of the folks here were cheering. Read more from the NYTimes here.

Accompanying

This has been a busy week for me here in Colombia. I got to do my first accompaniments both in the city and on a trip outside of the city. During the week I was accompanying a lawyer from one of the lawyers groups that we accompany. He was at a trial involving the murder of two or three campesinos. Some members of the army are accused of the crime. The situation was a little tense because one of the guys had just been captured by the police so there were a ton of heavily armed prison guards and police in the room. This weekend I traveled to a displaced community with two of the organizations that we work with. They are gathering information about what happened to them in order to try and get them back to their land. The trip was pretty fun we stayed two nights. While they were meeting with the community me and the other PBI volunteer stayed outside and mostly played with the kids and chatted. I also experienced my first military road block. They pulled over the bus that we were in and patted down all of the men and looked through our bags. I was pretty nervous about it but it was actually really easy. We did a role play before I left on the trip to train for this kind of thing but the role play ended up being a lot tenser than the actual thing which I guess is a good thing.

NEWS UPDATE: Clinton advisor resigns after meeting with Colombian officials concerning the free trade agreement and is fired by the Colombian government. For more info check out the NY Times article

This week in Colombia

This week I was assigned to collect the coyuntura which translates to something like the current situation. So I read a lot of different news sources cut pasted and summarized. So here is what happened in, or pertained to Colombia this week.

Five families are suing Chiquita brands for the deaths of their husbands because Chiquita Brands was paying the FARC for protection and they were kidnapped and killed by the FARC.

Ingrid Betancourt who was a leftist presidential candidate and dual french citizen is in bad health. She was kidnapped by the FARC in 2002. The Colombian gov has offered to eliminate many of the restrictions for prisoner exchanges in order to work out a deal with the FARC.

The problems between Colombia and its neighbors continue. At the beginning of this week Ecuador was accusing Colombia of murdering one of its citizens who was completely innocent during the cross border raid four weeks ago. However by the end of the week it came out the the Ecuadorian had actually been helping the FARC.

President Bush is trying to push through the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia. It will probably be reintroduced in the Congress on Tuesday.

In the Washington Post there was an article about extra judicial killings in Colombia. The newest PBI bulletin is also about this theme the English version should be out soon I will post a link when it is .

In more personal news. Alessandra(an Italian who got here at the same time as me) and I did do a couple of things on our own. We have weekly meeting with some of the organizations that we accompany and we went to one of those by ourselves. We also tried to accompany a lawyer from one of the lawyers groups that we accompany to a hearing but when we got there it was postponed.