THURSDAY 2 NOVEMBER. CANNING HOUSE, 2 BELGRAVE SQUARE, LONDON SW1 (nearest tube Hyde Park Corner)

Map at  http://www.canninghouse.com/about_us/map/index.htm

The Curse of Cocaine advertising campaign features a big nose, and has a second message of Shared Responsibility calling on consumers to kick the habit - Santos has made a point of targeting model Kate Moss.

The Colombia Solidarity Campaign states that Santos is involved in a well funded and carefully prepared attempt to manipulate public opinion, deflecting attention way from his own government’s responsibility in a conflict that has generated the worst human rights violations in the western hemisphere.

Campaign Secretary Andy Higginbottom said today: “The Colombia government’s ad campaign uses the symbol of a big nose. But an even bigger nose is on Santos, the nose of Pinocchio the liar because his version is full of half truths and downright lies”.

Higginbottom points to three areas of Colombian government responsibility, “Santos government continues to protect the AUC right-wing paramilitaries who are the direct authors of most of the violations; meanwhile his government is withdrawing protection for trade unionists and other social leaders under imminent threat of assassination, and it is co-ordinating massive detentions of the political opposition, human rights defenders, trade unionists and social leaders.”

The Campaign sees the problem of cocaine use as an issue of public health education rather than criminalisation. Higginbottom adds: “The real area of shared responsibility for the violence in Colombia lies with the UK government for lending military aid to Santos regime and UK multinationals such as oil giant BP and mining corporations Anglo-American and BHP-Billiton who make huge profits at the expense of displaced communities. This is a much deeper addiction, the profit addiction.”

Colombia Solidarity calls for an active consumer boycott of the other ‘Coke’, the products of the Coca-Cola corporation that is complicit in and has benefited from the assassinations of eight trade unionists by right-wing paramilitary groups.

Evidence of all these allegations will be available to the press outside the Colombian Embassy’s conference on drugs at Canning House today.

Contact: Andy Higginbottom Secretary, Colombia Solidarity Campaign


NOTE FOR EDITORS

According to the latest report by the Colombia Commission of Jurists (Colombia 2002-2006: Situación de Derechos Humanos y Derecho Humanitario Bogotá, September 2006)

“11,084 people were assassinated or disappeared outside of combat (that is in their home, in the street or at their place of work) by socio-political violence between June 2002 and June 2006, approximately the four years of the first government”

The report continues:
“where the author is known, 74.5% of the deaths outside of combat are attributed as the state’s responsibility: 12.1% (752 victims) due to the direct perpetration of state agents; and 62.4% (3,887 victims) due to toleration or support to violations by the paramilitary groups. 25.5% of the cases (1,588 victims) are attributed to the guerrillas.”

In fact this is a conservative estimate of state responsibility, as very few of the cases without attributed responsibility will be by the FARC and ELN guerrilla groups.

The state and supposedly demobilized paramilitary AUC were responsible for around 85% of all civilian deaths outside of combat, that is at least 6 people per day between 2002 and 2006.