RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Paramilitaries Extend Their Tentacles

Local secretariats of finance, roads and health - "that's where the money is, that's where the show is run," a member of a paramilitary militia in Colombia can be heard saying in the taped telephone conversation.

COLOMBIA: Indigenous People Say ‘No’ to IDB Loans

The leaders of Colombia's indigenous peoples categorically stated that they would refuse any loans from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and said they would not take part in the "formal markets, financial circuits or market economy."

COLOMBIA-VENEZUELA: No One Takes Responsibility for Deaths Along Border

It is still far from clear who was responsible for the recent killings of seven Venezuelans near the Colombian border as well as other murders in Venezuelan territory.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Indigenous March for Peace – Just 100 Kms of a Long Road

"We know bad things could happen, even on our way back to our territories after this (mobile) congress," indigenous leader Feliciano Valencia told IPS in the southern Colombian city of Cali at the end of a 100-km march "for life, justice, happiness, freedom and autonomy", described as the biggest indigenous demonstration in the history of Colombia.

COLOMBIA: 50,000 Indigenous People March for Basic Rights

A tandem bicycle with a loudspeaker moves back and forth from one end of the massive indigenous protest march to the other, as the 50,000 demonstrators make their way along the Pan-American highway to the city of Cali in southwestern Colombia.

COLOMBIA: 50,000 Indigenous People March for Basic Rights

A tandem bicycle with a loudspeaker moves back and forth from one end of the massive indigenous protest march to the other, as the 50,000 demonstrators make their way along the Pan-American highway to the city of Cali in southwestern Colombia.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Just the Mother of a U.S. Spy

"What? The Colombian government doesn't recognise that there's a war going on here? But people are killed here every day!" Jo Rosano, the mother of Marc Goncalves, a U.S. intelligence agent kidnapped on Feb. 13, 2003 by the leftist guerrillas, said in the capital.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Economic Motives Behind Killings of Kankuamo Indians

To be a Kankuamo Indian in Colombia today is dangerous. In the past two decades, 261 members of that ethnic group have been killed, 92 (more than one-third) in the two years since the government of President Alvaro Uribe took office.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: ‘We Are Afraid to Speak Out in Public, to Show Our Faces’

''We would like to be here standing in front of all of you so people could know, through our voices, what is happening to us. But we are afraid of speaking out in public and of showing our faces,'' said a statement read out in the sweltering jungle heat in a war zone in northwestern Colombia.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: ‘We Are Afraid to Speak Out in Public, to Show Our Faces’

''We would like to be here standing in front of all of you so people could know, through our voices, what is happening to us. But we are afraid of speaking out in public and of showing our faces,'' said a statement read out in the sweltering jungle heat in a war zone in northwestern Colombia.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: In the Territory of Plan Patriot

The scenario of peace talks for three years and now the focus of the main military offensive against the guerrillas, the southern Colombian province of Caquetá is the scene of an appalling humanitarian crisis that has received virtually no media coverage.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Gov’t Ordered to Respond to Indigenous Cry for Help

The Colombian government has until Thursday to report to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights the steps it has taken to protect the Kankuamo indigenous people from mass killings by the right-wing paramilitaries.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Gov’t Ordered to Respond to Indigenous Cry for Help

The Colombian government has until Thursday to report to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights the steps it has taken to protect the Kankuamo indigenous people from mass killings by the right-wing paramilitaries.

COLOMBIA: Gov’t Hopes to Demobilise Thousands of Paramilitaries

The Colombian government hopes to demobilise 14,000 right-wing paramilitary fighters by late 2005 - 95 percent of the combatants that the paramilitary leaders sitting down at the negotiating table in a remote village in northwestern Colombia claim to represent.

COLOMBIA: Plan Patriot Starts to Emerge from the Shadows

Shrouded in silence in Colombia, the Plan Patriot has begun to emerge as the most ambitious military offensive to date against the leftist guerrillas, in which the U.S. military is providing tactical and logistical support.

REFUGEE DAY-COLOMBIA: The Smell of Panic

Panic has a smell and even a sound of its own, perhaps a heartbeat or a way of breathing, ''something you can't explain,'' says United Nations official Alfredo Witschi-Cestari.

U.S.-COLOMBIA: Free Trade Without Biopiracy?

Biopiracy could be a sticking point in the free trade negotiations that the United States is pursuing with three of the countries with greatest biodiversity in the world: Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

COLOMBIA: Decades of War Over Land

In Colombia ''it isn't that there are displaced people because there is war,'' but ''there is war so there will be displaced people,'' says peasant activist Gilma Benítez, unwittingly summing up the conclusion arrived at by researchers after five decades of armed conflict.

COLOMBIA: Decades of War Over Land

In Colombia ''it isn't that there are displaced people because there is war,'' but ''there is war so there will be displaced people,'' says peasant activist Gilma Benítez, unwittingly summing up the conclusion arrived at by researchers after five decades of armed conflict.

COLOMBIA: Rebel Group Proposes Land Mine Ban

The possible release of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and an agreement to curb the use of land mines, with which the guerrillas kill hundreds of soldiers every year, could form part of eventual peace talks between the government and the country's second-largest rebel group.

COLOMBIA: Commission to Investigate Massacre of Wayuu Indians

A commission will be sent Saturday to the northern Colombian desert region of La Guajira, home to the Wayúu Indians, to verify reports of brutal attacks on indigenous men, women and children, including a massacre.