On Thursday, 3 July, people from CPT Colombia's Barrancabermeja district marched to express their opposition to the surge in violence that has invaded the community. Since the beginning of 2008, thirty-seven people have been assassinated in Barrancabermeja (the same number killed in all of 2007). Barrancabermeja's civil and police authorities have ignored or even denied this increase in violence, leaving the community feeling abandoned to the armed actors. The settling of accounts between different criminal groups linked to paramilitaries reportedly has fueled much of the violence. In what they call "social cleansing," these armed groups kill people they have labeled "undesirable.'

For the past two years, CPT has accompanied the indigenous Awa people in the province of Nariño. In May of 2008, CPT organized an international delegation to the zone in solidarity with the Awa and with Afro-Colombians. As a continuation of this accompaniment, the Colombia team is relaying an urgent action issued by the Organization of Indigenous Unity for the Awa People (UNIPA) on 30 June 2008, in which they report the deaths of three members, all minors. The Colombia team urges you to accompany UNIPA in their struggle "for respect of life, of autonomy and of the cultural identity and defense of the territory of the Inkal Awa people."

The Government of Colombia, in cahoots with big business, is touting a system of contracting workers through what they call "cooperatives." Workers must join cooperatives, and contract their services to companies. The coops, and not the companies must pay the workers, buy their tools from the company and receive a fixed (low) price for the product. After discounting pension and benefits, workers make less than minimum wage working for a high profit industry in Colombia. The workers have no ownership of the land, the company or the product -which means these coops are not "cooperative" in the sense of the traditional model found working well in other places around the world.

The first Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Nariño province spent three days in Bogotá and a week in Nariño, meeting with representatives from Awa and Afro-Colombian communities, as well as human rights and government organizations. Because of the harsh punishment that Colombia's tragic, unending conflict has imposed on the Awa and Afro-Colombian communities, I began to ask each of the people with whom we met, "In the context of the violence in Nariño, what gives you hope?"