Gustavo Petro tells May Day rally ‘if Palestine dies, humanity dies’, as Israeli foreign minister accuses president of antisemitism
Colombia’s president has announced that his government will sever diplomatic relations with Israel, in the latest escalation of a furious row between the countries over the war in Gaza.
Addressing a May Day rally in Bogotá on Wednesday, Gustavo Petro again described Israel’s siege of Gaza as “genocide”.
Continue reading...Celebrity fashion designer, who recruited couriers to transport bags from her native Colombia to US on commercial flights, receives 18-month sentence
A leading fashion designer whose accessories were used by celebrities from Britney Spears to the cast of the Sex and the City TV series has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty in Miami federal court on charges of smuggling crocodile handbags from her native Colombia.
Nancy Gonzalez was arrested in 2022 in Cali, Colombia, and later extradited to the US for running a sprawling multiyear conspiracy that involved recruiting couriers to transport her handbags on commercial flights to high-end showrooms and New York fashion events – all in violation of US wildlife laws.
Continue reading...In announcement three weeks before election, José Raúl Mulino gave no details of how he would stop migrant flow
Panama’s presidential frontrunner has vowed to “close” the Darién Gap, the swampy jungle straddling the border with Colombia that has become an unavoidable ordeal for many US-bound migrants – but experts criticised the idea as unworkable and potentially dangerous.
Presided over by criminal groups and corrupt officials, the Darién Gap is one of the world’s most dangerous and fast-growing border crossings.
Continue reading...Bogotá brings in water rationing with El Niño weather phenomenon meaning city could run out in under two months
Couples in Bogotá are being asked to shower together as water supplies are rationed in the Colombian capital.
Major neighbourhoods were cut off from the water grid on Thursday to preserve dangerously low water levels at reservoirs that have been starved of rain by the weather phenomenon known as El Niño.
Continue reading...Country had previously turned the tide on deforestation but armed rebels have revoked ban
Deforestation in the Colombian Amazon is surging and could be at a historic peak as armed groups use the rainforest as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations with the government.
Preliminary data shows that deforestation in the region was 40% higher in the first three months of this year than in 2023 as armed groups tightened their control over the rainforest, said Susana Muhamad, the country’s environment minister.
Continue reading...Álvaro Uribe, one of country’s most powerful figures, denies working with paramilitary death squads against leftist rebels
Colombia’s ex-president Álvaro Uribe will face trial for witness tampering and fraud, prosecutors have announced, once again casting the spotlight on allegations that the former leader partnered with paramilitary death squads in his war against leftist rebels.
Uribe has long been accused of committing a litany of crimes at the peak of Colombia’s six decades of brutal conflict, but has never been brought to trial, and remains one of the country’s most powerful political figures.
Continue reading...Despite major progress in Brazil and Colombia, deforestation led by farming still cleared an area nearly equal to Switzerland
The destruction of the world’s most pristine rainforests continued at a relentless rate in 2023, despite dramatic falls in forest loss in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, new figures show.
An area nearly the size of Switzerland was cleared from previously undisturbed rainforests last year, totalling 37,000 sq km (14,200 sq miles), according to figures compiled by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland. This is a rate of 10 football pitches a minute, often driven by more land being brought under agricultural cultivation around the world.
Continue reading...Descendants of miners who dug up gold, silver and emeralds worth billions call on Colombia to halt plan to lift cargo
Indigenous communities in Bolivia have objected to Colombia’s plans to recover the remains of an 18th-century galleon believed to be carrying gold, silver and emeralds worth billions, calling on Spain and Unesco to step in and halt the project.
Colombia hopes to begin recovering artefacts from the wreck of the San José in the coming months but the Caranga, Chicha and Killaka peoples in Bolivia propose that the galleon and its contents should be considered “common and shared patrimony”.
Continue reading...The Republican challenger to Democrat Sherrod Brown for US Senate in Ohio has made dubious claims in his campaign
Bernie Moreno, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio who expected to mount a stern challenge to Sherrod Brown, the incumbent leftwing Democrat, says his family fled socialism when they came to the US from Colombia in 1971, when he was four years old.
Though such statements formed a central part of Moreno’s campaign message on his way to securing the Republican nomination with support from Donald Trump, they do not withstand historical scrutiny.
Continue reading...South American neighbours respond to blocking of Corina Yoris, who was favoured to beat strongman Nicolás Maduro in elections
A chorus of Latin American nations, including Brazil and Colombia, have voiced concern over the deteriorating political situation in Venezuela after the opposition politician best-positioned to challenge its strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, in July’s presidential election was prevented from registering for the vote.
Corina Yoris, an 80-year-old philosopher, was little-known outside academic circles until last Friday, when she was catapulted on to the frontline of Venezuela’s long-running political crisis by being named as the substitute for María Corina Machado, a prominent opposition figure who had been banned from running in the election.
Continue reading...Attempt to stop movement through perilous rainforest leaves people stuck in two remote Caribbean towns
Migration towards the US through a perilous but increasingly well-trodden rainforest border crossing has ground to a halt after the Colombian navy arrested two boat captains for trafficking migrants.
But the attempt to stop movement through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama has left more than 3,000 people stranded in two remote Caribbean towns, where officials fear the bottleneck could cause a public health emergency.
Continue reading...Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear how climate is driving forced migration across the Americas
Communities under imminent threat from rising sea level, floods and other extreme weather will testify in Washington on Thursday, as the region’s foremost human rights body holds a first-of-its-kind hearing on how climate catastrophe is driving forced migration across the Americas.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will hear from people on the frontline of the climate emergency in Mexico, Honduras, the Bahamas and Colombia, as part of a special hearing sought by human rights groups in Latin America, the US and the Caribbean.
Continue reading...Salvatore Mancuso was taken into police custody and is expected to cooperate with investigation into war crimes in 1990s and 2000s
A Colombian warlord found responsible for more than 1,500 murders and cases of forced disappearance has been returned to his native country after serving a drug-trafficking sentence in the United States and being denied several requests to be sent to Italy, where he also has citizenship.
Salvatore Mancuso arrived in Bogotá’s El Dorado airport on a charter flight that also carried dozens of Colombians who had been deported from the US after illegally crossing the southern border. Mancuso was quickly taken into police custody, wearing a green helmet and a bulletproof vest.
Continue reading...The environment minister Susana Muhamad says nature is a ‘pillar’ of fighting the climate crisis
The next round of global biodiversity negotiations will put nature at the heart of the international environment agenda, Colombia’s environment minister has said, as the country prepares for the Cop16 summit.
Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who is expected to be the Cop16 president, said the South American country would use the summit to ensure nature was a key part of the global environmental agenda in the year building up to the climate Cop30 in the Brazilian Amazon in 2025, where countries will present new plans on how they will meet the Paris agreement.
Continue reading...Adil Meléndez Márquez received call from bodyguards 20 minutes after Sir Henry Brooke award from Alliance for Lawyers at Risk
“I’m very afraid,” says Colombian lawyer Adil Meléndez Márquez, the day after being presented with an award in London honouring human rights defenders.
Meléndez is no stranger to death threats, because of his work on cases related to Colombia’s decades-long civil war, environmental justice and corruption, but things have just got a lot scarier. With bitter irony, 20 minutes after receiving the Sir Henry Brooke award from the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, his bodyguards called him to say that they had been stood down from, leaving him without protection.
Continue reading...Cluster of cases in seven days follows spate of druggings and robberies of tourists, some of which have ended in death
Authorities in Medellín will meet representatives of embassies and popular dating apps this week after five foreigners were found dead in Colombia’s second city in the past seven days.
Police say none of the deaths were violent, though one of the cases appears to involve a man who was found dead in his hotel room hours after entering accompanied by two women.
Continue reading...More than half a million people made treacherous, weeklong trek in 2023, facing horrors including mass rapes by armed bandits
A sevenfold increase in sexual attacks against people crossing the Darién Gap is compounding the misery for people trekking one of the world’s most dangerous and underreported border crossings, said Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Complete impunity for armed gangs in the lawless stretch of jungle that links South and Central America meant one person became a victim of sexual violence every three and a half hours in December, the overstretched medical organisation said.
Continue reading...Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a former vice-president of the European parliament and co-founder of Spain’s Vox party, was shot in the head in Madrid last year
Colombian police say they have arrested a Venezuelan suspected of involvement in the alleged attempted assassination in Madrid last year of a co-founder of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Greg Oliver Higuera Marcano was wanted in connection with last year’s shooting of Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a former leader of Spain’s main rightwing political party in Catalonia who went on to co-found Vox, and is a former vice-president of the European parliament.
Continue reading...Dozens of people also injured after mudslide in mountainous area on road connecting major cities
The death toll from a mudslide in western Colombia has risen to 34, authorities have said.
The mudslide struck a busy municipal road on Friday in a mountainous area connecting the cities of Quibdó and Medellín.
Continue reading...Daniel Noboa designates nearly two dozen gangs as terrorist groups after wave of violence across country
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, said on Wednesday that his country was “at war” with drug gangs who are holding more than 130 prison staff hostage and who briefly captured a TV station live on air, in a wave of violence that has left city streets deserted.
At least 10 people have been killed, including police officers, in the attacks.
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