Colombia

September 16, 2011
Kelly Nicholls and Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli

In April, President Obama and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos reinitiated discussions on establishing a free trade agreement. The agreement is now scheduled to be implemented by the end of the year, and the Colombian port city of Buenaventura will likely be one of the most directly affected places, at a high cost to the local community. This article was originally published in the July/August 2011 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.

September 12, 2011
Colombia recently changed the method it uses calculate poverty. Consequently the numbers of the poor were reduced significantly. But how accurate are these statistics? And how are the chosen variables measured?
September 6, 2011
The government of Juan Manuel Santos is adjusting its military strategy to concentrate on special operations rather than on sustained large scale operations such as Plan Patriota. The move is another step in the shifting dynamics of the Colombian conflict in recent years.
August 31, 2011
Matías Vernengo

Rather than a “free trade” agreement between the United States and Colombia, the plan that will be sent to Congress should be understood as a corporate and financial liberalization agreement. Workers, in Colombia and the United States, have little to gain, and everything to lose. This article was originally published in the May/June 2011 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.

August 29, 2011
In this post, I provide the reader with some additional context to the workers' mobilization in Puerto Gaitan and the problems that multinational investments bring to bear on the country’s political economy of war.
August 22, 2011
Colombian oil workers resumed their protests in Puerto Gaitan last week, once again confronting security forces. The new protests come after the Colombian government and the Canadian oil company Pacific Rubiales failed to fulfill promises made during last month’s oil workers’ strike.
August 15, 2011
Over the weekend thousands of campesinos, indigenous, and Afro-descendants gathered in the city of Barrancabermeja to call on the Colombian government and the insurgency to begin peace negotiations. The insurgency has expressed their willingness to talk, but the Santos government has yet to even explore the possibility. In order to understand why, we have to analyze the core obstacles that have confronted government peace negotiations with the FARC and the ELN since the mid-1980s.  
August 1, 2011
During the 1980s, Colombian narcotraffickers fought ferociously against being extradited to the United States. But lately in an unprecedented shift, narcotraffickers are changing their attitudes, and courting extradition—the sooner the better.
July 25, 2011
Last week, in perhaps the largest recent strike in Colombia, 10,000 workers walked out of several multinational oil companies in the Department of Meta. The strikes came in response to recent layoffs and the dismal working conditions in Meta, which over the last few years has become the epicenter of the country’s oil production.
September 25, 2007
Jaime Arocha Rodríguez

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