A Glass Half-Full

Villagers of San Jose de Apartado carry the casket of a victim of a massacre allegedly committed by soldiers and right-wing paramilitaries. 

The other day, in an annual ritual, the United States recertified Colombia's human rights record, permitting Colombia's military to receive all alloted U.S. funding.

The U.S. State Department could hardly have done differently. With Colombia about its only firm  ally remaining in the region, relations already chilled by Washington's failure to ratify the bilateral free trade agreement, and Bogotá's increasing ties to China and Venezuela, Washington could ill afford to damper relations further.

The certification has been widely criticized by human rights groups, who point out that killings of union leaders have continued, lack of prosecution of military officers involved in the 'false positives' killing, alleged continued collaboration between the military and right-wing paramilitaries, and other rights violations.

Even the State Department's own press release announcing the certification sounded pretty damning:

"Threats and attacks against human rights defenders continue to be a significant problem, as the Colombian government acknowledges. As the government has advanced its land restitution policy, criminal interests have targeted land activists; more than a dozen have been murdered this year."

Painting by Fernando Botero
depicting violence in Colombia. 

The lead editorial in today's El Tiempo also observes that after six years of the Law of Justice and Peace, meant to bring paramilitaries and others to justice, despite 26,086 crimes confessed, by 4,634 ex-fighters against 350,000 víctimas, only four offenders have been sentenced.

It looks pretty clear that if instead of Colombia this were the anti-American Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, certification would have been out of the question.

Still, the State Department's points about Colombia's progress are also valid. Under Pres. Juan Manuel Santos, prosecutors have more aggressively investigated scandals and alleged abuses committed under his predecessor, Pres. Alvaro Uribe. Santos also backed an ambitious plan to return land to victims of Colombia's seemingly interminable armed conflict.

By engaging Colombia's government and economy, does the U.S. push the country to clean up its act? Even that is disputable, unfortunately. Several U.S. companies, including ones in the coal and banana and oil industries, have allegedly helped finance, perhaps under threat, right-wing death squads.

and, if engagement works here, then why does Washington refuse to try the policy in Cuba, which is closer to home and whose economy is so tiny that U.S. influence would presumably be much more powerful?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

September Snapshots of Bogotá

A few photos of scenes seen recently in Bogotá:

A homeless woman known as 'La Guajira' greets one of her dogs in front of a mural along La Jimeenz Ave.

A person dressed as death for a photo shoot in Bogotá's Central Cemetery. 

A child sleeps on a cart selling mamoncillos, a sweet fruit. 

A young man dressed as a nun skateboards on La Plaza del Chorro. They wrere shooting photos for a skateboard commercial.

An older man dances away during a concert on La Plaza del Periodista. 

Another concert, this one mellower, on La Plaza del Periodista.

In Simón Bolívar Park, a visitor carries a tent. 

A man cleans the statue on Santa Ana Church, in the Teusaquillo neighborhood. 

A dress rehearsal for a presidential ceremony, on Plaza Bolívar. 

A young woman smokes in front of a sign discouraging smoking at Jorge Tadeo University. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Slashing Poverty by the Numbers

This vendor on Plaza Bolívar said she earns just a few thousand pesos per day, making her poor. 

Recently, Colombian Pres. Juan Manuel Santos dramatically reduced the nation's poverty rate with a simple method: defining down the poverty threshold.

According to the government's new definition, if you earn more than 187,000 pesos per month per person in your household (about $104 dollars), you're not poor. Suddenly, only just above 36% of Colombians are poor - compared to almost half, according to other stats I've seen.

These vendors said they can earn 10 - 20,000 pesos
each  per day when the police let them sell. And
they've got a prime location, albeit an illegal one. 

Even Vice President Angelino Garzon called the poverty definition "a real offense to poor people," and offered to take the economists who generated the number to a public market to see what 190,000 pesos would buy. That translates into an income of 6,333 pesos per day - barely enough to rent a room in a fleabag rooming house in the city center, not to mention buying food and clothing. No wonder so many non-poor Colombians are digging thru trash cans.

Poor guy: Senate Pres. Corzo.

Most likely, Senate Pres. Juan Manuel Corzo would define poverty very differently. In fact, he apparently feels poor himself, recently complaining that "it's impossible, with (a senator's) money to maintain two cars." Corzo wants Senators' gasoline subsidy restored. That upset lots of Colombians, since senators earn almost 40 times the minimum wage, of 535,600 pesos per month, or $297.500. Of course, the many Colombians working in the informal economy often make less than the minimum.

To resolve this inequity, Corzo brought back a policy providing free gasoline stipends to congressmembers, including himself.

The World Bank pegs Colombia's per-capita GDP at $5,500 per person using the Atlas methodology (whatever that is) or at $9,000 in terms of purchasing power.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Abortion Un-Rights in Colombia

A pro-choice protest.

In case anybody had any doubts about why so few legal abortions have been performed in Colombia, despite a six-year-old law legalizing the procedure in certain cases, Colombia's attorney general recently gave us the answer.

The story involves a woman from near Villavicencio who claimed that her pregnancy threatened her life according to doctors. That's one of the situations, along with rape, incest or a grave malformation of the fetus, when abortion is legal. The 24-year-old woman went to several local hospitals, but the doctors either demanded more proof that her pregnancy was life threatening or refused to perform the abortion by claiming concientious objection, according to news reports. The law gives a doctor a personal right to refuse to perform an abortion on grounds of conscience, but requires a hospital to find someone or another hospital to perform the procedure for a woman who has a right to abort.

The woman sought an order from a local court authorizing the abortion, but was refused.

Finally, she went to one of the many clandestine abortion clinics and ended her pregnancy there.

'I abort, you abort, we all keep quiet.'

Hers is a common story. A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute calculated that in 2008 some 400,000 abortions were performed in Colombia - of which only 322 were legal. Of those women who aborted illegaly, sometimes in dangerous, fly-by-night clinics, 132,000 suffered complications, according to the study. Of those, only 11 percent received the post-abortion treatment they were entitled to.

But this woman's story has a jarring postcript. Her appeal continued making its way up thru Colombia's court system, until the Constitutional Court ruled in her favor - that the Villavicencio hospitals had not carried out required tests to determine whether the pregnancy threatened the woman's health.

Then, court officials telephoned the woman, only to learn that she was no longer pregnant - and hadn't given birth, either. The unavoidable conclusion: she'd had an abortion.

Now, Alejandro Ordoñez, Colombia's very anti-abortion attorney general, has ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate the Constitutional Court judges for having failed to denounce the woman for aborting. In Ordoñez's view, two of the magistrates are accesories to the illegal abortion.

This is all despite the fact that the woman in all probability had a legal right to abort, but was denied her right by doctors and hospitals.

Ordoñez, in fact, wants to roll back Colombian women's very limited right to an abortion. That's a startling example of blindness by ideology. As the Guttmacher study showed, the existing abortion limits have done little to actually prevent abortions, instead making the procedure clandestine and dangerous.

Other studies demonstrate why the best way to reduce abortion isn't banning it, but educating people about constraception. Mind-blowingly, more than half, and perhaps as many as two-thirds, of all pregnancies in Colombia are unplanned. Reducing that number would do more than anything else to cut the number of abortions, legal or illegal, in Colombia. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Bogotá's Rolling Relics

The owner of this 1966 Ford said it runs on natural gas, making it pollution-free.
Many new car owners can't say that. 

They were designed and built in another era, when pollution and fuel efficiency laws barely existed or not at all. What would the men who assembled these cars a half century ago think if they knew their creations were still sharing the world, and maybe even the road, with their grandchildren?

A1954 Chevy truck: a half-century of  polluting, and counting. 

Government officials are working on a law to remove these rolling museum pieces from the road, because many are highly polluting and are bad mechanical shape. But the old cars' owners have protested: they say their cars are in good shape and meet pollution laws. That's not often true, but these people do have a real point: a decades-old vehicle might be well-maintained and have a new engine.

And even if many old cars are dangerous rolling chimeneys, well, so are lots of those 

showy but cheap new diesel vehicles. Shouldn't the owner of your grandfather's tank 

have the same right to waste natural resources as the purchaser of a gas guzzling SUV ego car? Why shouldn't the owner of an old junker have the same right to belch diesel fumes into the air as does the purchaser of one of those shiny new Chinese-made pickups, which apparently have no environmental controls?

How much history has this red van seen?

The solution isn't to discriminate against the owners of old vehicles, who are primarily people of modest means, but to actually enforce environmental and safety standards on all vehicles - including those shiny new ones. If authorities actually fined polluters, that'd convince a lot of motorists to fix or retire their vehicles. Lots would probably get exported - to Venezuela, where fuel efficiency doesn't matter because gasoline almost free and they don't even think about enforcing pollution laws.

An old truck gets a little help from friends. 

Previous Bogotá mayors actually did force bus companies to junk thousands of old buses. But current suspended Mayor Samuel Moreno got into office on support from the bus companies, and found it convenient to not enforce laws - no matter the impact on Bogotanos' health and safety.

This ancient vehicle is on bricks now, but will roll again soon. 

Finally, this situation gives the lie to the car industry's portrayal of new cars as 'green' because they supposedly pollute less than do the old ones. That's wrong for many reasons, including the fact that many of those new cars are cheap diesels lacking any pollution controls. But even if all new cars were zero-emission electrics it would still be a lie, because those used cars don't go away - they just get sold to someone else, and contine rolling across Colombia, poisoning its air.

Private university students with their new Land Rover. Why should they be the only ones allowed to waste resources?

Classic cars for sale along Jimenez Ave. - some almost a century old.

These old classics are well guarded. 

The 1966 Ford's banged up grill. 

Detail of the 1966 Ford. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The National University: An Open-Air Canvas

Latin American leftist icons cover a wall near what students have named 'Lenin Plaza'

There's always something going on at Bogotá's National University, fondly known as La Nacho, and it's usually colorful and very leftist.

The university is known for its political activism and colorful graffiti - which is constantly changing. Today, we saw examples of both things. Medical students on la Plaza del Ché were taking direct action by building themselves a hospital out of cardboard. And the campus's graffiti was particularly radical, thanks to painting done during recent protests by students and teachers.

Lots of the murals defend and celebrate Colombia's leftist guerrillas, who have waged a half-century-long war to overthrow Colombia's government and replace it with a Marxist state. The guerrillas finance themselves thru extortion and narcotrafficking and have committed countless human rights violations, including kidnapping, planting land mines, recruiting children and driving peasants from their farms. But there's a saying here:

'If you're under 30 and not a communist, you don't have a heart; if you're over 30 and still a communist, then you don't have a brain.'

A student reads political information hung along a campus walkway. 

Riot police yell: 'He's got a book! He's got a book!'

Freedom for political prisoners

The always-changing, but still changing, portrait of guerrilla priest Camilo Torres, on La Plaza del Ché. Torres, a leftist idealist, was the university chaplain but ran off to join the ELN guerrillas and was killed in his first battle, creating a martyr.

'We are not painted on the wall.' Sure about that?

Cycllists with Bogotá Bike Tours with their hero Che Guevara.

'...silence is oppresion and violence.'

Overthrow the Neoliberal Education Model.

Jaime Garzon, a radio satirist assassinated in 1999 by paramilitaries. 

'Sow rebellion, reap liberty.'

Che Guevara, another portrait which is never erased.

A poster celebrates leaders of the FARC guerrila group - who have caused untold suffering to Colombia. I guess  that many of us were once young and blinded by romantic idealism.

A satire on Pres. Manuel Santos, whose surname means 'Saints.'  'I don't believe in saints, nor in his law of higher education.'

Solidarity with students protesting in Chile. 

'Freedom for Simon Trinidad.' Trinidad was a leader of the FARC guerrillas now imprisoned in the United States.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours, which offers graffiti bike tours.