Human rights in Colombia: how bad do things have to get?

At the end of July, I found myself in sitting in the attorney general's office in Colombia. I had spent the previous week travelling across the country with the NGO Justice for Colombia, and the idea was for me to meet the attorney general's office and talk about the things I'd observed – the political prisoners I'd heard about, the state atrocities, the unsolved executions. And so I did: I sat there in unwashed hair and flip flops, a scruffy 5ft tall British writer in a room full of old men in suits, and I talked about the human rights violations I'd seen. The more I talked, the more terrified the men looked. It was like I'd discovered Colombia's dirty secret. They tried to convince me human rights were protected in Colombia. They wanted to give me a presentation which would explain all the things I'd seen. I told them I wanted to write a piece about it for the British press. They looked ashen.

A month later, they gave me the perfect spur to write. This week, the attorney general made the decision to arrest trade union leader and opposition leader Huber Ballesteros; a man with whom I'd eaten breakfast in Colombia, and who was scheduled to be the international speaker at this year's TUC conference in September. Ballesteros, a trade union leader whose life is so endangered he travels everywhere with bodyguards, had been eating lunch on 25 August when he was arrested and detained for "rebellion" and "financing terrorism". These are notoriously trumped-up charges, which have historically been used in Colombia to imprison trade unionists, students, activists, and defenders of human rights.

Ballesteros has been accused of channelling money from human rights organisations, including Justice for Colombia, to the Farc – the leftwing peasant insurgency which the government denounces as terrorists. Justice for Colombia rejects the allegations and says the government is sending a worrying message to the international community about its willingness to tolerate dissent. Having met Ballesteros and witnessed his dedication and how rooted he is in Colombia's social movements and communities, I find the charges highly suspicious.

Although the Colombian government insists the arrest is legitimate, it seems beyond coincidental that it comes at a time when there is widespread protest in Colombia, led by Ballesteros and a committee of nine others. The week before Ballesteros was seized, the country had seen strikes over free trade agreements with the EU and the US, which the protesters say make it impossible for them to make money off their own crops because they can't compete with foreign imports. Free trade agreements don't include any effective human or labour rights clauses, which mean the ability of workers in Colombia to challenge their poor pay, working conditions and so on is virtually zero. Despite its enthusiasm for commenting on humanitarian issues in Syria, Libya and so on, the British government is so far yet to utter a single word on Colombia, even though its own free trade agreement is part of the problem.

(2013-08-30/theguardian)