Coffee Hour: Human Rights in Colombia 10/30
Saturday, October 30th
10:00am-11:45am
At the Resource Center of the Americas
Presented in Spanish (translated to english)
Description:
Padre Alberto has been a featured speaker for the World Council of Churches in front of the UN in NYC 2009, as well as a featured speaker at the 2009 School of the Americas Watch protest. In 207 and 2008, he lobbied in Brussels in front of the European Parliament and the European Commission. Also in 2008, he testified at the Alternative Network Against Impunity and Market Globalization in Spain, the Public Hearing of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes and a session for the Ethics Commission for Truth in France regarding exiled Colombians.
For his extensive human rights work, Padre Alberto has received multiple death threats, which to him illustrates that repressive powers are threatened by his work and symbolizes that he is doing something right. Although he has been receiving threats for years, starting in 2008 they began to intensify, popping up in pages all over the internet and in graffiti all around the capital. Those responsible for most of the threats are the people with business interests in the Curvarado and Jiguamiando River Basins. Despite all the danger he faces to defend the rights of the communities, death threats do not faze him. He stresses the importance of recognizing it is not just his personal safety that is being jeopardized through these threats, rather it is the Commission as a whole that is targeted.
The Inter-church Justice and Peace Commission, founded in 1988, is a leading NGO for community organizing and human rights in Colombian. It provides accompaniment to Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and mixed race communities who have been victimized and affirms their rights without the use of violence in zones of armed conflict. It supports concrete processes that seek truth, justice, and reparation, and favors political negotiations that seek to end the internal armed conflict. It has an inter-discipline approach focused on the psycho-social, judicial, environmental, and theological preservation of memory and gender aspects of the community processes, to help communities rebuild their social fabric.
Speaker:
Padre Jesús Alberto Franco is a renowned leader in the Colombian human rights movement. He is a Colombian missionary priest, as well as the executive secretary of the Colombian human rights NGO Inter-church Commission for Justice and Peace (Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz). He has spent the last 3 years in his current role accompanying the resistance processes of Afro-Colombian, Indigenous and mixed race farmers, overseeing the operations of the commission, and coordinating and overseeing the work of the teams that accompany the processes of the community. He has been part of the commission for over 21 years and helped to support the NGO’s founders in the creation of the commission. He was born and raised in Aranzazu, Caldas in Colombia. His work as a missionary brings him all over Colombia.
Contact Information:
Witness for Peace – Upper Midwest
