Colombia: Union protest teacher deaths

A trade union group says 2 more teachers are killed -- one in May, one in JuneThey were both members of the Teachers' Association of CordobaColombia is the world's deadliest country for trade unionists, the group says49 of the 90 union members killed worldwide in 2010 were from Colombia

(CNN) -- Two teachers in Colombia have been killed in as many months, a prominent alliance of trade unions said Friday, calling on the government there to do more to bring those responsible to justice.

Dionis Alfredo Sierra Vergara and Alejandro Jose Penata Lopez were both members of the Teachers' Association of Cordoba, according to a statement from the International Trade Union Confederation, or ITUC, the world's largest federation of trade unions.

Sierra Vergara, a primary school teacher, was reportedly killed on May 15. Citing an eyewitness, the union confederation said he received a call on his cell phone. Where he went outside to answer it, Sierra Vergara was attacked and shot three times.

Penata Lopez was murdered on June 20, according to the ITUC. He disappeared after he left school. His body was found later having shown signs of torture, having reportedly been hung with barbed wire.

The men were the latest trade unionists apparently targeted in Colombia, which the ITUC calls the most dangerous country in the world for union members.

In the department of Cordoba, alone, 20 teachers have been killed since December 2008, according to the ITUC. At least six of those teachers -- including Sierra Vergara and Penata Lopez -- were reported slain this year.

"The context of almost total impunity for these murders has led to an alarming humanitarian crisis in the education sector and has put teaching and trade union actions at risk," the trade union alliance said Friday. "(It) clearly refutes the Colombian governments' statements in international forums about human rights' improvements."

According to the group's 2011 survey of 143 countries, Colombia is the deadliest country in the world for trade unionists.

Of the estimated 90 trade union members killed in 2010, 49 of them were in Colombia. Another 20 people were reported to have escaped attempted attacks that year in the South American nation.

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Colombia car bomb wounds 17, "calamity" averted (Reuters)

BOGOTA (Reuters) – A car bomb wounded 17 people in Colombia's colonial-era city of Popayan, but a "calamity" was averted when police intercepted the vehicle before it reached its target in the main square, authorities said on Sunday.

Acting on a tip, police stopped the car late Saturday night in an outlying neighborhood before it reached its intended destination, where soccer fans were celebrating a victory.

When officers suspected an explosive device was inside, they hauled out the driver and warned passers-by to leave the area before it exploded, police said.

The car was packed with 70 kg (154 pounds) of explosives and went off seven minutes after the auto was intercepted.

"Dozens of people would have been killed ... it would have been a calamity," a police officer in Cauca said of the potential casualties if the bomb had gone off as planned.

The blast injured 17 people, two seriously, according to the presidential administration in Bogota. Thirty-five homes and 12 motor vehicles were damaged and the explosion knocked out power in parts of Popayan, a city of about 300,000 people.

A Reuters photographer said the blast ripped off roofs and knocked down walls in several nearby homes. Police said windows were also blown out of buses in the area.

The driver of the car, who was arrested, told police he belonged to the National Liberation Army (ELN), according to police commander Orlando Pineda, who said the bomb could have been in retaliation for anti-narcotics operations.

The ELN is Colombia's second-biggest guerrilla group behind the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC.)

Police say both groups seek to benefit from the cocaine trade in Cauca, a region of mountains and jungles dotted with coca farms and refining centers, and the area has long been a focus of U.S.-backed anti-drug sweeps.

The Popayan blast is the first car bomb set off in a major Colombian city since August 12, when an explosion in a vehicle wounded eight people in Bogota outside the offices of a leading broadcast network.

That attack was widely seen as a FARC rebel challenge to President Juan Manuel Santos, who took office five days earlier. A former defense minister, Santos vowed to continue the U.S.-backed campaign against the FARC and other leftist guerrillas.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Victims' law enacted in Colombia (AP)

BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos enacted Friday a landmark "Victims' Law" aimed at redressing the estimated 4 million victims of the country's long-running internal conflict.

It marks the first attempt by a country beset for more than a half century by class-based conflict to reckon with the magnitude of its social costs.

The law creates mechanisms for compensating survivors of the tens of thousands, mostly civilians, killed since 1985 in Colombia's dirty war. Stolen land is to be returned to hundreds of thousands of displaced.

Santos signed the law in the presence of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

"Today is a historic day," Santos said of the law he has made the centerpiece of his 10-month-old administration, speaking to a crowd of 600 guests including the military brass, the nation's most senior judges and representatives of Colombia's more than 2 million internally displaced.

"Our country is not condemned to 100 years of solitude," Santos added, invoking the title of the novel by Colombia's literature Nobel-winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which depicts the nation fatalistically as one that can't seem to escape endless cycles of violence.

Authorities say the law will take a decade to implement and cost at least $20 billion. The challenges are immense. The conflict is anything but over, and the CODHES human rights group says say 49 people have been killed since 2002 seeking to reclaim stolen land, eight of them in this year alone.

In a brief speech, Ban's praised the law but said the work has just begun and it must produce results.

After all, the number of victims, arrived at by a public registration process, accounts for nearly one in 10 Colombians. And the country remains beset by conflict, though leftist rebels and right-wing bands hold sway over far less territory than they did a decade ago.

Many victims, though applauding the law, also expressed concern.

"I think that without seriously getting under control 'parapolitics,' 'the 'para economy' and those who have cleared out lands it will be very difficult to produce processes of restitution of land and reparations," said Rep. Ivan Cepeda, longtime head of Colombia's organization of victims of crimes of the state.

He was referring to Colombia's so-called paramilitaries, privately funded far-right militias that emerged in the 1980s to counter kidnapping and extortion by leftist rebels.

The paramilitaries devolved into drug-trafficking gangs, however, who wealthy landowners used to extend their holdings at the expense of poor peasants, indigenous groups and Afro-Colombians.

The paramilitaries continue to exert a powerful, violent and corrupting influence in rural Colombia, where the central government remains relatively weak and local politicians and military officials sometimes aid and abet them.

Jailed paramilitary warlords who surrendered in exchange for promises of relative leniency have admitted to ordering more than 50,000 murders. Human rights activists say the death toll could be triple that amount.

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Associated Press Writer Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.

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