Mr. Tom Geraghty:

I want to be clear about what we are asking of the committee and the Oireachtas. Ireland is due to ratify a free trade agreement between the EU and Colombia and we are asking that, at the very least, it be delayed. We are here to share our experiences of Colombia and explain why we feel it should happen. We are not naïve and do not expect that a small group of trade unionists from Ireland alone will stop the human rights abuses in Colombia and suddenly achieve a dramatic improvement in the situation there. A group of trade unionists appearing in this forum with a message about the oppression of trade unionists is not a message that would necessarily resonate with everybody in these Houses. However, while it is true, as Mr. Bunting said, that Colombia is the worst country in the world in which to be a trade unionist, this is a subset of a much larger problem. The real problem with Colombia is that it is a state whose forces murder its own citizens with impunity.

Ms Morrissey described the situation of the women we met in Soacha. Members of the state military forces, not paramilitaries, murdered perhaps as many as 2,000 young men in order to make it appear the state was winning the ongoing civil war against FARC. They enticed these young men, who had nothing to do with FARC or trade unions, to a particular place where they murdered them in their thousands. This was done by state forces who are supposed to be under the control of a Government that seeks to enter a free trade agreement with us. That is a reason for us to delay the agreement, at the very least.

In addition to the experience we had with these poor, unfortunate mothers, we visited a number of other parts of Colombia, including the province of Putumayo, an oil rich region close to the border with Ecuador. One can see oil rigs at regular intervals there. There has been an ongoing problem there in that once land is deemed to be valuable, the people who live on it are displaced without any great ceremony or effort to compensate them. They are pushed off the land, it is taken and the resources are exploited. Although many oil tankers travel through this area, the roads are unpaved. The oil companies could not even be bothered to pave them, and the local government could not be bothered to make them do so. This gives an idea of how much the state values the lives of its citizens.

In those circumstances, it is not surprising that there is civil resistance. When we were there, the local people had lifted some of the rudimentary wooden bridges to prevent the oil tankers from driving across them. As Mr. Bunting said, a few months before we visited, four people were murdered by the state authorities, not by paramilitaries, including a 16 year old boy. Since we have been there, one of the people we met has been murdered. At the very least, the state is not in control of its own forces and, perhaps, has no intention of trying to exert any great control over them.

We also visited the port of Buenaventura. It was perhaps the most poverty-stricken place I have ever been. It was comparable to the villages one would see in sub-Saharan Africa, which is extraordinary when one considers that it is the busiest port in Colombia. There is no sign of any of the wealth one would associate with a port trickling down to the people who live in those communities. What is particularly noteworthy about Buenaventura is that it is in the grip of right-wing paramilitaries. These are organised gangs established by landowners and businesses to protect them in the context of the civil war and which have since developed a life of their own. One can easily recognise them in Buenaventura because it is predominantly Afro-Colombian, and these people are white. They openly fraternise with the security forces on the streets and no serious attempt is made to control them.

We met the bishop of Buenaventura, an elderly, worn-out, but good and decent man making a serious effort to do something about the situation in his city and getting absolutely no help whatsoever from the authorities. He reports horrific, almost unimaginable atrocities to the authorities. One of the ways the paramilitaries exert control and terrorise the local population is that anybody who crosses them is chopped to pieces with machetes in what they call chop houses, which are no more than shacks, in the middle of communities. The screams of these poor people are used to terrorise the local population and, thereby, continue the control of the paramilitaries.

The Colombian Government’s narrative is attractive and seductive. On our last day, we met the Government representatives. Their narrative is that the situation is terrible, it is a consequence of the civil war, the Government is doing its best to end the civil war and, hopefully, it will all go away. We met various people who are representatives of different commissions on human rights within different parts of the state. I am sure the people concerned were genuine and earnest. They were predominantly very well educated young women and spoke perfect English with American accents. While I do not doubt the sincerity of their conviction in trying to get to grips with the situation there, it does not matter. All these commissions in the military, police and other state agencies are not stopping the killing. Whatever the good intentions, the translation of those intentions into an impact on the ground is not evident, in fact it is the opposite. Considerable brutality is directed against the citizens by state forces which are unchecked and act with absolute impunity.

One might be cynical and take the view that much of this activity about establishing commissions on human rights is window-dressing to appease the sort of demands that came from the United States during its negotiation of the free trade agreement, as well during the one with the European Union. One might be led to that conclusion when one visits Colombia and sees the ongoing abuses, not by paramilitaries or the FARC, but by state forces. The Colombian Government has developed this attractive narrative that this is a thing of the past, that it is moving into a new future and that the free trade agreement will enable it to do all of this. However, at the same time, it pays no serious attention to dealing with the abuses of human rights in the country. For that reason, we ask the Irish Government to delay, at the very least, the ratification of this treaty and use it as an opportunity to bring some pressure to bear on the Colombian Government, as it is susceptible to pressure on this issue. The Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, intends to visit several European countries in November. While Ireland is not on his itinerary, we could make it of interest for him to come here if he were of the view Ireland was unlikely to ratify this particular treaty. We want to share that message with the committee in the hope that the elected representatives of our people will take a stand beside the people of Colombia who are under the oppression of their own authorities.