Newswire

The people of Colombia, like the people of Iraq, need us in the streets protesting at the Republican Convention. We need to stop the U.S. sponsored war in their country, to stop spending working peoples tax dollars to prop up a corrupt narco-trafficking regime. The American public is increasingly aware of the U.S. atrocities in Iraq and becoming more adamantly anti-war. This public outrage will manifest itself at the RNC. We have an opportunity to educate the 100,000 plus people who will come to St. Paul, MN to demonstrate at the RNC about how the U.S.' effort in Iraq is not the only example of this country's quest for empire causing death and destruction.

In 1996, a 41-year-old Colombian trade unionist applied at the Canadian embassy in Mexico City to immigrate to Canada. Amparo Torres was well-known in the region. She was a founding member of the Union Patriotica, a coalition of leftist political parties created a few years earlier at the behest of Colombia's then president in order to bring an end to decades of guerrilla warfare. She had also been kidnapped by one of the country's right-wing death squads.

By Daniel Santamaria (ANNCOL)

Q. The Vallejo diva, in her book published in the United States, "Loving Pablo Hating Escobar" claims that Mr. Alvaro Uribe has installed a narco-state originally concieved by Pablo Escobar? Commander, (Reyes), can you please give your opinion to the readers of ANNCOL?

At about 4pm on 27th September 2007, ANDRES DAMIAN FLOREZ
RODRIGUEZ (son of JOSE DOMINGO FLOREZ, a worker at a Coca-Cola bottli ng plant and a leader of the trade union SINALTRAINAL) was returning from college to his home at No 204-102, 38th Avenue in the Andes barrio of Floridablanca in Santander when he was accosted by three individuals from a black van, they were carrying arms, communications radios and were wearing balaclavas. The three men took Andres in the van by force, threw him on the vehicle floor and started hitting him.

Reprinted from FightBackNews.org

By Chapin Gray

Birmingham, AL - On July 26, Drummond Co., a Birmingham-based coal company, was found 'not liable' in the deaths Colombian trade unionists Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita - the head of a union local and his deputy - as well as the next union president Gustavo
Soler. The three leaders of the Sintamienergética miners union worked at the Drummond’s La Loma mine in northern Colombia. They were tortured and murdered in 2001.