AXIS OF EVIL - BUSH AND URIBE VELEZ GO FOR ALL OUT WAR
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CONTENTS

p2 REACTIONARY COUP DEFEATED IN VENEZUELA
p4 STOP THE US-PASTRANA WAR DRIVE!
p5 THE UNREPORTED DIRTY WAR
p6 ALVARO URIBE VELEZ - PARAMILITARY CANDIDATE
p8 ALVARO URIBE VELEZ - CANDIDATO PARAMILITAR
p10 THE US "WAR ON TERROR" SPREADS TO COLOMBIA
p12 COLOMBIAN ELECTIONS: SOME OLD, SOME NEW, AND SOME UNCERTAINTIES
p13 THE ALEXANDER LOPEZ CAMPAIGN
p14 THEY BELIEVE IN PEACE WITH SOCIAL JUSTICE
p16 COMMUNITY MOTHERS FIGHT TO NURTURE A BETTER FUTURE
p18 50 COLOMBIAN TRADE UNIONISTS ASSASSINATED BY APRIL THIS YEAR
p20 THE HUMAN COST OF BP IN COLOMBIA
p22 LETTER TO BP
p23 BP'S TWO PIPELINES
p24 BP BIG PROFITS - BIG PORKIES
p25 OUR QUESTIONS TO BP
p26 DYNCORP: BEYOND THE RULE OF LAW
p27 SINALTRAINAL DEMANDS JUSTICE
p27 DRUMMOND SUED
p28 EDUARDO UMAÑA MENDOZA, PRESENTE
p29 LLAMADA DE LOS PRESOS POLITICOS
p31 CALL FROM POLITICAL PRISONERS FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY
p34 THE RGIONAL IMPACT OF PLAN COLOMBIA: ECUADOR
p36 SINTRAEMCALI VICTORY TOUR
p38 CONFERENCE SUCCESS
p39 SUSSEX STUDENTS IN PALESTINE
p39 LETTER
p40 MEETINGS AND EVENTS


SUBSCRIBE!
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make payable to 'Colombia Solidarity Campaign' and send to
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USE THE BULLETIN MAKE COLOMBIA EMERGENCY HAVE AN IMPACT ON MAY DAY
------------------------------------------------------------------

Please order extra copies of the bulletin by replying to this e-mail,
and we will send you X copies sale or return to really make a national
impact on May Day. You can also take to meetings and distrubute through
local shops and organisations.

The Colombia Solidarity Campaign will have a contingent on the United
for May Day March in London, assemble Clerkenwell Green (nearest tube
Farringdon) 12 noon and march to Trafalgar Square. Join Us!


UPDATE FROM MARIO NOVELLI
-------------------------
How many more friends do we have to bury before the World wakes up to
what is going on in Colombia?

At 4.30 p.m. on the 14th of April, 2002, Tito Libio Hernandez was
standing at the main entrance of the University of Nariño where he had
worked for the last 28 years. Two masked men sped past on a high
velocity motorbike and shot him repeatedly. He was rushed to the local
hospital and was proclaimed dead at 5.02pm. The killers escaped into
the obscurity of what in Colombia they call impunity. A better word may
be immunity, an immunity which has meant that nobody has been prosecuted
in 99% of the cases of the over 3500 thousand trade unionists that have
been murdered in Colombia since 1986.

Tito worked at the University of Nariño, in the South West of Colombia
for 28 years, and had been a trade union member and activist for the
National University Workers Union of Colombia in Nariño since he first
joined the University. He was also a community leader in his local
neighborhood, and more recently a member of the Social and Political
Front, a political party that was born out of the trade union and social
movement several years ago, and which stood candidates in recent
elections for the Senate and Congress. The Front now has a presidential
candidate Lucio Garcon, ex leader of the Central Unified Workers Union
of Colombia.

Tito had received death threats on a number of occasions from a
paramilitary organisation that operates in the city of Pasto, capital of
the department of Nariño. The question of why he had received death
threats and why he was eventually assassinated cuts straight to the
heart of the deteriorating political situation in Colombia and the lack
of respect for fundamental human rights for all those brave individuals
seeking to defend public services, protect natural resources from the
greedy gaze of multinational corporations, and oppose growing US
military intervention in the country.

The thread that unites these factors: public services, natural
resources, US intervention and the elimination of social leaders is a
neo-liberal economic model which while widely recognised as a failure,
continues to expand its tentacles across the globe. In each country
this model has its friends and foes, and the results of these alliances
and confrontations produces different results according to the history,
culture, and balance of forces present. Despite the differences in
outcomes, the objectives are generally recognised to be the same: reduce
public spending via the privatization of nationally owned sectors of the
economy, cutbacks in social spending via the rationalization of public
service provision and where profitable their privatization, and finally
the opening up of the economy to external competition in all sectors.
The measures are generally justified in terms of reducing external debt,
though these measures have rarely reduced that debt.

The effects where 'successful' have been the redistribution of wealth
away from the vast majority of poor to a small national elite and
international investors. They have led to an increase in unemployment
due to destruction of indigenous industry and agriculture via the
introduction of cheap imports, a deterioration in the provision of
public services to the poor - particularly health, education and welfare
services, and the transfer of previously state-owned natural resources
into the hands of the local elite and foreign multinationals. It also
serves, via the process of privatization, to remove productive sectors
of the economy out of democratic control, and reduce the power of trade
union organisations through layoffs and the selling off of different
parts of an industry whose workers previously had one unified union to
represent them.

The crucial determining factor in any country has been the ability of
ordinary working people to organise themselves in their defence: in the
defence of jobs, in the defence of public services, and in the defence
of the countries natural resources. In Colombia there lies a rich
history and tradition of resistance, and a brutal history of repression
against those involved. The United States government has been
implicated in that repression for many years, both overtly and covertly,
particularly when the national elite appears to be losing control.

In Colombia, popular resistance to the economic reforms meant that their
imposition was delayed until the late 1980s, and since then there have
been strong organised movements which have postponed, weakened and
modified the extent to which they have been approved and implemented.
Despite this, the effects have been devastating. While in the 1980's
the Colombian economy grew on average 4%, in the 1990's it grew by 2.8%
and in 1999 it contracted by 5%. Unemployment has risen to 20.4%, the
highest level this century. In 1998 more than 16,000 businesses closed
with the loss of over 300,000 jobs. Agriculture has almost completely
collapsed as cheap food imports flooded the market in the last decade,
leading to over one million hectares of land to be abandoned. Levels of
poverty have risen, and official government reports now suggest that 60%
of the population now live below the poverty line. This in a country
blessed with an abundance of natural resources: coal, oil, emeralds,
water and a bio-diversity unmatched in Latin America. True to form the
model has produced winners as well as losers. While in 1990 the ratio
between the richest 10% of the population and the poorest was 1:40, at
the end of the decade that difference was 1:80. Apart from the national
elite, the other big winner has been foreign multinationals who now
control large amounts of the countries natural resources.

Alongside the decline in social and economic human rights over the last
decade has come the decline in political and civil rights. Laws have
been approved to criminalise legitimate social protest. Trade unionists
and community leaders have been arrested and charged with rebellion, and
marches have been violently attacked by riot police. More covert, and
more frightening still has been the rise in extra-judicial killings of
trade union and community leaders carried out by paramilitary
organisations. Last year 160 trade union leaders were assassinated and
so far this year there have been 52, Tito Hernandez being the latest.
'Para' in Spanish means 'for', 'for the military', and this is an
appropriate translation as countless human rights reports have clearly
shown the collusion between the military and paramilitary in these
violent acts.

This is a social war waged by the rich against the poor, a dirty war of
such immensity that the senses become numbed by the horror of it all. A
war directed against community, social and trade union leaders who seek
to organise, resist and attempt to hold on to what little the people
have left, and a war waged against all the rural communities that live
in areas where natural resources are abundant. The first get
selectively assassinated, threatened, and kidnapped, and the second get
massacred or forcibly displaced to clear the way for mega-projects.

The National and International Press continue to ignore these facts and
portray the conflict in Colombia as being either about drugs or about
guerrillas. But the presence of both drug production and the guerrilla
movement are results of this social conflict and will only disappear
when that social crisis is addressed. This week the US Congress will
vote on whether to change the regulations governing the use of the over
$2 billion dollars of aid given to the Colombian government under 'Plan
Colombia' supposedly to fight the drug war. If approved it will allow
the government to use those funds to fight the domestic guerrilla
movement. With the post September 11th political climate in the United
States, Congress is likely to approve this, and those resources will not
just be used against the guerrilla movement. They will also find their
way to the paramilitaries, and pay for more bullets that will be used
against people like Tito Hernandez.

Today Tito will be buried, and will be surrounded by family, friends,
students and comrades. They will look over their shoulders as they
march together to the cemetery, wondering who is filming or
photographing them and whether they will be the next on the list. But
despite the risks, people will still be there, and they will carry on
that struggle with resolve, dignity and courage. A struggle that every
day becomes more difficult, but also more just. In the minds of those
people engaged in this search for a peace with social justice in
Colombia is a simple question: How many more friends will we have to
bury before the world wakes up to what is going on?


Mario Novelli

April 19th, Cali, Colombia


PUBLIC MEETING - FINAL CALL
---------------------------

BP IN COLOMBIA - THE HUMAN COST OF OIL

7pm Tuesday 23rd April

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1
(nearest tube Holborn)

Speakers: Lawyers representing victims of BP's operations
Michael Gillard, investigative journalist
British trade unionist recently returned from Colombia
Colombia Solidarity Campaign

COLOMBIA PIPELINE VICTIMS DEFENCE FUND
--------------------------------------

There is an urgent need to support the victims. Their cases have been
held up for several years in Colombia's interminable legal system as the
multinational's OCENSA/ODC consortium put in one blocking move after
another. Meanwhile the victims are in need of health care, food and
welfare as well as financial support for their legal defence. All
donations will be put to supporting the victims and their claim. Make
payable to "Colombia Solidarity Campaign" and write on the back "CPV
Defence Fund" and send to our address below.

For more information contact the Colombia Solidarity Campaign.

 colombia_sc@hotmail.com tel: 07950 923 448
Post: PO Box 8446, London N17 6NZ

regards
--
Andy Higginbottom
Co-ordinator