FOR COLOMBIA

Colombian Human-Rights Leader Says U.S. Aid Should Go Toward Development

A prominent Colombian human-rights activist spoke to a small audience
of Winston-Salem residents last night about the issues plaguing his
home country and what he thinks the U.S. government should do to make
the situation better.

Ricardo Esquivia visited the Triad on the last day of a two-week
speaking tour. He is the vice president of the Colombian Council of
Evangelical Churches.

Forty years of civil war has created deep social and economic problems
in Colombia. Esquivia said that the United States should direct its
aid away from military efforts and toward development if it wants to
end the production and flow of drugs into the states.

"The more military assistance there is, the more war there is,"
Esquivia said through a translator. "The more war there is, the more
displaced people there are, the more workers to grow coca there are,
the more coca there is, the more cocaine in the United States there
is."

The U.S. government has given Colombia more than $2.6 billion through
an anti-drug and rebel operation known as Plan Colombia. Started in
2000, the plan allows the United States to provide training and
technical assistance to the Colombian government and military.

This week, as Esquivia visited North Carolina, Colombian president
Alvaro Uribe met with President Bush and members of Congress in
Washington to lobby for an extension of the plan, set to expire next
year.

Uribe said that his government was pleased with the plan, and credits
the United States' assistance in helping his government combat
violence. Uribe has overseen an aggressive campaign against rebel groups.

Earlier this year, Esquivia's supporters abroad began a letter-writing
campaign on his behalf when they learned that he had been identified
by a paid government informant as a guerrilla terrorist. More than 1
million spies, Esquivia said, are paid by the government to identify
and find terrorists.

"For 45 years, Colombia has been in a very grave social situation," he
said. "Ever since it's become a republic ... there wasn't room for
indigenous people or Afros. It was just a republic for wealthy people.

"They accuse their mothers, their fathers, grandmother. That's how
they make their money," Esquivia said.

Human-rights activists are often accused of being identified with
guerrilla groups, he said.

Esquivia said that, with help from supporters and international
recognition, his situation has improved since the accusation against
him. Still, he said in Colombia, a "culture of violence" has bred into
an environment of distrust.

"Sixty-eight percent of people live in poverty, 25 percent in absolute
misery. Three million people have been displaced.... People tend to
seek justice from their own hands."

Esquivia said he is not afraid to return to Colombia today. "If they
want to put me in jail, they can. It's no place that I haven't been
before," he said.

While in the United States, among other meetings, Esquivia met with
members of Congress and the State Department, which invited him to
talk about human rights in Colombia.

Last night, he spoke in the basement of Brenda Humphrey and Robert
Stern. Humphrey, the president of Peace Brigades International and
former coordinator of Witness for Peace teams and delegations to
Central America, met Esquivia in January 2003, while in Colombia on a
Witness for Peace trip.

"We kind of made a promise then to work together once we were back
here to work with and for the Afro-Colombians as much as we could,"
Humphrey said. "That's how he ended up here tonight."