Tag Archives: Colombia

Colombia the latest Latin American country to break diplomatic relations with Israel

Colombian President Gustavo Petro

Important Takeaways:

  • Colombia has become the latest Latin American country to announce that it will break diplomatic relations with Israel over its military campaign in Gaza, but the repercussions for the South American nation could be broader than for other countries because of longstanding bilateral agreements over security matters.
  • This could affect Colombia’s military, which uses Israeli-built warplanes and machine guns to fight drug cartels and rebel groups, and a free trade agreement between both countries that went into effect in 2020.
  • Also in the region, Bolivia and Belize have also severed diplomatic relations with Israel over the Israel-Hamas war.

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Volcano Nevado del Ruiz [Columbia] increased rumblings have locals preparing to evacuate

Mathew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • Colombia urges evacuation near deadly volcano after increase in seismic activity
  • Authorities in Colombia on Saturday recommended that towns closest to a rumbling, notorious volcano be evacuated, ahead of a possible eruption.
  • The Disaster Risk Management Office said it was moving to evacuate communities that are located within 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the main crater of three that make up the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in the Colombian Andes.
  • On November 13, 1985, it erupted and emitted so much heat that it melted the snow that caps the mountain.
  • This triggered a cascading wall of mud that swallowed the town of Armero, killing half its population of 50,000.

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Volcano experts are watching Colombian Volcano Nevado del Ruiz as earthquakes are increasing

Mathew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • The Western Hemisphere’s deadliest volcano is showing signs of increased activity, prompting evacuations in Colombia
  • In 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, killing 23,000 people in Colombia and wiping out the town of Armero. Now, authorities warn, the volcano could be ramping up to erupt again.
  • Experts say the volcano is showing signs of increased activity, which haven’t been observed since the tragedy in the 1980s. As a result, the alert level has been raised from yellow to orange, the second-highest level on the scale and residents on the upper slopes of the volcano are being evacuated.
  • Last week, the volcano registered an unprecedented average of 6,000 earthquakes per day, likely caused by magma moving through the main fault system, says Colombia’s Geological Service (CGS). Prior to the change in status, the average was 50 per day.
  • On peak days, the CGS says, there have been as many as 12,000 earthquakes in a single day

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Exclusive: Major coffee buyers face losses as Colombia farmers fail to deliver

By Maytaal Angel

LONDON (Reuters) – Coffee farmers in Colombia, the world’s No. 2 arabica producer, have failed to deliver up to 1 million bags of beans this year or nearly 10% of the country’s crop, leaving exporters, traders and roasters facing steep losses, industry sources told Reuters.

World coffee prices have soared 55% this year, mainly due to adverse weather in top producer Brazil, prompting Colombian farmers to default on sales clinched when prices were much lower in order to re-sell the coffee at higher rates.

“Traders are getting defaulted on, it’s a mess. If drought continues (in Brazil), 300 cents (per lb. of coffee) is possible. It’s going to be mayhem,” said a dealer at a global agricultural commodities trade house.

He said leading global roasters are planning to change the branding on their ‘single origin Colombia’ coffees due to sourcing problems.

Delivery defaults in a major producer like Colombia can exacerbate price spikes on world markets, although these would be temporary because the coffee ultimately exists and will weigh on markets once it is re-sold.

Colombian farmers say they will deliver the coffee later this year or next but buyers are unconvinced.

Many are opting to see losses now and write the purchases off as defaults rather than wait and risk even bigger losses if farmers still don’t deliver next year and prices rise further, according to a senior trader at another global trade house.

He said several global trade houses are looking at losses of $8-10 million each on undelivered coffee, while Colombia’s coffee growers federation FNC, which represents farmers but also accounts for 20% of the country’s 12.5 million bags of annual coffee exports, faces higher losses.

TAKING THE HIT

“There was easily 1 million bags of forward (Colombian coffee sales) done before the market started rallying mid-May,” said the senior trader. “If you work for a multinational (trade house) your boss will say come on, we have to take the hit.”

Delivery defaults in a rallying coffee market are a huge issue for commodity exporters and traders who often hedge physical purchases by taking short positions in the futures market, causing them to sustain steep losses as prices rise.

Usually, traders would be able to sell the physical coffee they are owed at current lofty rates in order to offset their futures market loss, but in the case of a default, they can’t.

Defaults can also force traders to purchase supplies pre-sold to roasters at a loss in the pricey spot market.

FNC head Roberto Velez confirmed to Reuters that Colombia is facing widespread defaults.

“I can tell you there are few Colombian exporters not suffering (from defaults). All the major trade houses and also the federation as a major exporter, we’re all suffering (losses),” he said.

“When a grower doesn’t deliver, the whole chain gets stuck losing money,” he added.

Traders told Reuters the federation has given Colombian farmers at least another year to deliver the coffee – a move that could force the industry body to approach the government for bail-out funds if the farmers still don’t deliver in time.

MOUNTING LOSSES

A senior Columbia-based coffee trader with Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) left the company in the wake of losses, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.

LDC said it does not comment on organizational changes except in relation to executives.

“Companies will be in trouble with (the scale of the losses), big guys will change their team, but smaller guys will go bankrupt,” said a senior trader.

He added major local Colombian exporter La Meseta has been hard hit by farmer defaults and is struggling to make good on its supply deals with international roasters, leaving them exposed to losses.

La Meseta did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Selling coffee forward in Colombia has become popular in the last few years, but up until this year, the move had mostly worked out in favor of farmers as world prices drifted lower so farmers received better prices for their coffee on delivery, not worse.

About 550,000 Colombian families make their living growing coffee and the Andean country is the largest producer of the washed arabica grade on which benchmark futures contracts on the ICE exchange are based.

(Reporting by Maytaal Angel in London; Additional reporting by Oliver Griffin and Julia Symmes Cobb; in Bogota; Editing by David Gaffen, Veronica Brown and Susan Fenton)

Colombia’s cemeteries may hold answers for families of disappeared

By Julia Symmes Cobb

LA DORADA, Colombia (Reuters) – When her 17-year-old son Jose Andres was kidnapped by paramilitaries at the height of Colombia’s civil conflict, Gloria Ines Urueña vowed she would not leave the sweltering riverside town of La Dorada until she found him.

She has been true to her word for more than two decades – searching for her son’s body despite threats from the group that killed him.

An estimated 120,000 people have gone missing during Colombia’s nearly 60 years of conflict. A 2016 peace deal between the government and the Marxist FARC rebels brought some respite, but another left-wing insurgency and armed criminal gangs – many descended from right-wing paramilitaries – persist.

Now a national plan to identify victims buried anonymously in cemeteries has renewed the hope Urueña and thousands like her hold of finding their loved ones’ remains.

The Search Unit for Disappeared People, founded under the 2016 deal to fulfill one of its key promises, is investigating cemeteries across Colombia, hoping to untangle years of chaotic record-keeping and neglect, identify remains, and return them to families.

“Back then, I spent a month looking near the river, near the dump, farms, all that, and I was alone,” said Urueña, as a forensic team examined human remains at La Dorada’s cemetery.

“I’ve always said I don’t just want to find my son: I want to find all of the disappeared.”

Many of Colombia’s disappeared were killed by leftist rebels, right-wing paramilitaries or the military. Others were kidnapped, forcibly recruited, or willingly joined armed groups.

Most are likely dead, buried in clandestine graves high in the windswept Andes or deep in thick jungle, dumped in rivers or ravines.

But some ended up in graveyards. Found by the roadside or pulled from waterways, remains were buried anonymously by locals risking the wrath of armed groups, their graves marked with NN for ‘no name’.

The strategy may be unique: the recovery of potentially tens of thousands of bodies from cemeteries has likely not been tried before, especially during an ongoing conflict.

Some remains have been moved or mixed together, exhumed multiple times during efforts to identify them or saved in trash bags in storage rooms.

Some remains have been assigned multiple case numbers, while others were buried in cemeteries but never autopsied and so have no case number at all.

Other remains have case numbers, but cannot be located.

“It’s not just a recovery of bodies, but also of information,” said unit head Luz Marina Monzon. “It’s a jigsaw puzzle.”

PIECING IT TOGETHER

The unit has no estimate of how many disappeared people may be in Colombia’s cemeteries. Many graveyards have had no consistent management or resources, or are run by religious organizations with their own records and rules.

DNA from nearly 5,200 unidentified bodies is stored in a database at the government’s National Institute of Legal Medicine, along with nearly 44,400 samples from families of the disappeared to cross-check genetic material with newly-discovered remains.

The institute also holds a separate database of reports of missing people. So far, the unit has uncovered some 15,000 reports of disappeared persons that were not previously in it.

Threats to families and ex-combatants providing information to the unit can stymie its work, Monzon said.

“The persistence of the armed conflict is a huge challenge to accessing information, to accessing locations and to guaranteeing the participation of victims in the search,” Monzon said.

This scale of cemetery exhumations is unusual, largely because many people disappeared in countries like Argentina, Chile, Bosnia, Guatemala and Kosovo were buried in clandestine graves. Scattered graveyard exhumations have been conducted in some places.

But Colombia’s effort may hold particular lessons for Mexico, which is facing perhaps the world’s most active disappearance crisis and where the unidentified are sometimes buried in cemeteries but rarely exhumed.

“Mexico needs to start looking at what the Colombians are doing,” said Dr. Arely Cruz-Santiago of the University of Exeter, who researches citizen forensics in Mexico and Colombia. “Especially because they are very similar countries in the sense of the scale more or less of the conflict.”

BONES IN BAGS

Beads of sweat bloomed at the temples of forensic anthropologist Carlos Ariza as he cradled a cranium in one hand, using his finger to indicate the bullet’s likely trajectory.

This skull belonged to a man, about 40. Later during the examination in a stifling tent in La Dorada’s cemetery, Ariza discovered a second bullet hole in the cranium, hidden under caked mud.

“NN Mar. 17 2003,” read the label on the plastic trash bag which had held the remains in a dark storage room.

Over a few days, forensic staff opened the bags, delicately removing each bone, fragment of fabric or tuft of hair. They packed 27 sets of remains off to a regional lab for DNA testing.

La Dorada lies in the southernmost point of the Magdalena Medio region east of Medellin, once a hotbed of violence where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, disappeared, raped and displaced.

Paramilitary groups were frequent perpetrators. They demobilized between 2003 and 2006 under a peace deal, though many members later formed crime gangs.

HOW MUCH LONGER?

About a month after Urueña’s son was taken in 2001, two men showed up at her house in La Dorada on a motorcycle and told her to stop looking.

“‘He was my son and I will not move from this house until I know what’s become of him. And if your boss wants to kill me that’s my answer’,” she said she responded. “I told him ‘do it now if you want and that way you’ll end my suffering too.'”

Jose used to bring his mother flowers on his way home. When his sister became pregnant as a teenager, he helped support the baby.

“If he were here it would be different, as much for the family as for me, because the family fell apart,” Urueña said.

Her older son fled town in the face of paramilitary threats, not returning for 11 years. Her older daughter left to find work, leaving Urueña to raise her grandchildren.

Her granddaughter, now 18, has promised Urueña she will continue the search for Jose even after Urueña’s death.

“We ask how much longer we have to wait,” Urueña said. “Even though the years pass, I am still full of hope.”

“And though you don’t want to cry, the tears come.”

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb, additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City, Nicolas Misculin in Buenos Aires, Gabriela Donoso in Santiago, Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City and Daria Sito-Sucic in Sarajevo, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

U.S.-bound migrants fill Colombia town as COVID-19 border closures lifted

By Steven Grattan

NECOCLI, Colombia (Reuters) – After traveling for more than a year by ship, bus and car from Africa in hope of reaching the United States, Simon Gyamfi found himself stuck in a remote tourist resort on the coast of Colombia with thousands of other migrants.

The 42-year-old carpenter, a Christian, fled his home in Ghana because of a dispute with his late wife’s Muslim family, he said, and took a month-long ocean voyage to Brazil. The closure of borders due to the coronavirus pandemic left him stranded there for months.

Now, after the frontiers finally reopened, he has made his way by road to the northern Colombian town of Necocli, a gateway for migrants heading northward into Central America.

Every year, thousands of migrants pass through the small town, looking to catch a boat across the Gulf of Uraba toward the jungles of the Darien Gap on the isthmus of Panama.

There, people smugglers guide groups across the wild, road-less region, one of the most treacherous barriers on the clandestine route to the United States.

Now borders closures have lifted, the number of migrants arriving in Necocli is soaring.

In a typical year, an estimated 30,000 migrants pass through Necocli. But by August of this year, 25,000 have already been through, according to Colombian government figures.

Panama’s Foreign Affairs ministry said it expects to receive over 70,000 migrants crossing the country en route to the U.S. by the end of 2021, an unprecedented number in the country’s history.

The town has been struggling to accommodate migrants from Latin America and beyond – many of them driven by the economic hardship worsened by the pandemic – clamoring for scarce places on boats across the Gulf. Thousands crowd hotels and the beach as they wait weeks for a spot.

Colombia and Panama vowed last week to impose order on the migrant flows as they seek support from allies, including the United States, after the number of travelers stranded in Necocli topped 10,000.

The majority of the migrants moving through Necocli are Haitian or Cuban, fleeing dire economic circumstances in their homelands. But Reuters spoke to several others from further afield, including African nations such as Ghana and Mali.

Gyamfi had been in Necocli for almost a week, paying $7 a night for a hotel room.

“The journey has been hard and full of surprises. Last month, a friend of mine died on the road,” said the widowed carpenter, who hopes to save enough to bring his young daughter to join him if he reaches the United States.

“It takes a lot of money to get here and great risks.”

Necocli became a staging area for migrants just five years ago. Though it has thrived by charging migrants in dollars, not Colombian pesos, local officials say public services and housing in the town of 20,000 are not robust enough to cope with recent numbers.

DANGEROUS CROSSING

More migrants has meant increased profits for many in Necocli: especially for the guides, called coyotes, who take people on the week-long trek through the Darien Gap.

“Everyone here is benefiting from the migrant issue,” said a local guide leader, a man in his early 40s, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities.

Colombia’s government has warned of criminal dangers to migrants moving through Darien, as well as the risk of injury or disease.

The man acknowledged some groups – usually comprising 20 migrants and a guide – have been robbed and women sometimes suffer rape.

The guides have increased the size of their groups to meet recent demand, but the man denied any criminal connections.

“People look at us like the monsters of this place. They think we are rich,” he said. “Those who do this make a living day to day. The coyotes aren’t millionaires.”

At 6 a.m. the sound of adhesive tape being ripped from its rolls sounded around Necocli’s port, as migrants with spots on that day’s boat frantically sealed their possessions into plastic trash bags for the 2.5-hour, $50 boat ride across the Gulf of Uraba.

The day Reuters visited, the mayor of Acandi – which lies on the other side of the Gulf, near the Panama border – decided to let just 200 of the usual 1,000 migrants cross because of what he said were environmental and security concerns.

The decision caused chagrin among local Colombian officials and nonprofits – who feared some migrants might make a dangerous informal crossing at night. In Necocli, angry migrants who had paid days in advance for boat tickets protested in the streets.

In Capurgana, 44-year-old Haitian Lenos Dorvilien, was frustrated after he had traveled across the Gulf ahead of his wife and 12-year-old daughter, who were now stuck in Necocli.

The family had left their homeland for Chile in 2016, but found work there was badly paid. They had planned to leave sooner but were delayed by coronavirus and finally left two weeks ago by bus.

Chile – which has one of the highest levels of income per capita in Latin America – is a popular destination for Haitians, but migrants there regularly complain of experiencing xenophobia.

“I put up with living in Chile but it’s a racist country,” said Dorvilien. “I had to work hard like the devil to be able to leave.”

Dorvilien eventually took another boat back to be with his family. Their money for hotels exhausted, they slept on the beach.

(Reporting by Steven Grattan, additional reporting by Aislinn Laing in Santiago; Editing by Julia Symmes Cobb, Aurora Ellis and Daniel Flynn)

Thousands stuck in Colombia’s Caribbean amid migration surge

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Some 9,000 migrants are stranded in a Caribbean municipality in Colombia amid a surge of people passing through on their way to north America following the re-opening of international borders post-lockdown, the Colombian migration agency said.

The irregular migrants – who are mostly Haitians but also include Venezuelans and Cubans, as well as a number from African countries – are stuck in Necocli, in Colombia’s Antioquia province, migration agency director Juan Francisco Espinosa said in a virtual press conference.

“This is a recurring and historical phenomenon. Colombia is not the cause or the destination of this migration,” Espinosa said.

The migrants hope to pass from Necocli and on through the dangerous Darien Gap towards Panama and then onwards to north America, principally the United States or Canada, he added.

Though the region typically sees 30,000 migrants pass through in a normal year, Espinosa said just 4,000 people transited the region last year due to the impact of measures implemented by countries to control the spread of coronavirus.

However, with borders opening up, the level of migration in the region so far in 2021 has been much greater compared to the same period last year, Espinosa added.

“This year is presenting numbers that are absolutely alarming, where right now more than 25,000 irregular migrants have passed through this part of the country,” he said.

Some 74% of the more-than 25,000 migrants recorded passing through the region in 2021 are Haitian, a migration agency spokesman told Reuters.

Colombia reopened its land and river borders with Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Panama in May, following a 14-month closure it used to try and curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The country opened its border with Venezuela in early June.

(Reporting by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

COVID still devastating in the Americas, health agency says

BRASILIA (Reuters) -COVID-19 continues to inflict a devastating toll on the Americas, with Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador and Paraguay among the countries with the world’s highest weekly death rates, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

Cases have more than doubled in the United States over the past week, mainly among unvaccinated people, PAHO Director Carissa Etienne said in a briefing.

The more transmissible Delta variant of coronavirus has been detected in 20 of the 35 countries in the Americas already, she said.

Cuba is seeing higher COVID infection and death rates than at any other point in the pandemic there, she said, adding that more than 7,000 minors and nearly 400 pregnant women have tested positive there in the last week.

Over the last week there were over 1.26 million COVID-19 cases and nearly 29,000 deaths reported in the Americas.

Infection hotspots have been reported in Argentine provinces bordering Bolivia and Chile, and in Colombia’s Amazon region.

“As COVID continues to circulate, too many places have relaxed the public health and social measures that have proven effective against this virus,” Etienne said.

So far, only 16.6% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, as countries in the regions have yet to access the vaccines needed to keep their people safe, she said.

“The good news is that vaccines work against the variants, including Delta, in terms of preventing severe disease and death. The bad news is that we do not have yet enough vaccines to stop community transmission,” Etienne said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Colombia arrests 10 over bombing, shooting of president’s helicopter

By Oliver Griffin

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia arrested 10 people accused of involvement in attacks on a helicopter carrying President Ivan Duque and a military base last month that officials said on Thursday were planned by former FARC rebel leaders based in Venezuela.

The car bombing at the base in the northeastern city of Cucuta, home to the army’s 30th brigade, wounded 44 people, including two U.S. military advisers. Later in June, a helicopter approaching city with Duque and other officials aboard was strafed by bullets.

The 10 people captured in Norte de Santander province are former FARC rebels who reject a 2016 peace deal, Attorney General Francisco Barbosa said in a press conference broadcast via social media, and belong to the dissidents’ 33rd front.

Three took part in the planning and execution of both attacks and have been detained and charged, while another is a retired army captain, Barbosa said.

Orders to carry out the attacks came from former FARC leaders who are operating from Venezuela, Defense Minister Diego Molano said during the conference.

He said the incidents demonstrated the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sheltered FARC dissidents, calling them “terrorists”.

“It’s clear that this attack against the president, against the 30th brigade, was planned from Venezuela,” Molano said.

The Venezuelan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Colombia’s government has long accused Maduro of turning a blind eye to the presence of Colombian rebels on his country’s territory. Maduro, in turn, has said Venezuela is a victim of criminals from Colombia.

(Reporting by Oliver Griffin in Bogota; Additional reporting by Vivian Sequera in Caracas; Editing by Joe Bavier)

Colombian children learn to identify landmines buried during country’s civil war

(Reuters) – A non-profit organization is teaching children in rural Colombia how to identify landmines placed near their communities by armed guerrilla groups during the country’s long civil war.

Since 2013, the HALO Trust Foundation has created programs to deactivate anti-personnel mines in the regions of Antioquia, Meta, Tolima, Cauca, Valle del Cauca, Nariño and Putumayo. So far, they have been able to declare 900 free of mines. They also teach children and their communities about the risks of the mines, how to spot them, and what to do if they find one.

“Younger people do not know how to correctly identify explosive artefacts. This has always been and still is a concern,” said community leader Juliana Arango.

According to the HALO Trust Foundation, since 1990 around 12,000 people have been injured or died in Colombia because of undetonated explosives.

“We try to… create safe surroundings for the communities, to reduce the problem of the anti-personnel mines and also reduce the accidents they cause,” said Juan Jose Granada, who works for HALO Trust.

(Reporting by Reuters TV; Editing by Diane Craft)