04404
September 15, 2004

Colombia’s Presbyterian church denounces ‘harassment’ by authorities 

By Manuel Quintero
Ecumenical News International

Editor’s note: Presbyterian News Service reporter Alexa Smith is in Colombia with General Assembly Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase. In the next few days, PNS will publish her accounts of the moderator’s visit. — Jerry L. Van Marter 

QUITO,  — Ecuador Church leaders from the United States and Puerto Rico traveled Monday to Colombia in response to an appeal for support from Presbyterians there in the face of what they say is harassment by security forces.

    “We fear that they [security forces] are preparing a possible search of our headquarters or that they will arrest members of the human rights coordination of the Ecumenical Network in Barranquilla,” the Rev. Jairo Barriga, moderator of the North

Coast Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (PCC), had said in an appeal to churches abroad.

      Colombian church, peace and human rights groups who have provided assistance to internally displaced people over the past seven years, have complained of being unfairly targeted in President Alvaro Uribe’s campaign to eradicate militant opponents.

      Suspects detained after a series of bomb attacks in December 2003 in Barranquilla have been questioned about the work and leaders of the presbytery, which has its offices in the coastal city.

      The moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Rick Ufford-Chase, and of the church in Puerto Rico, Rev. Cruz Negron, were scheduled during their visit from Sept. 13-18 to meet local pastors and leaders, and Colombian authorities in Bogota and Barranquilla.

      Hundreds of church and human rights workers are currently jailed under Colombia’s sweeping anti-terrorist statutes, and more are under judicial charges, a U.S. church-related delegation was told earlier this year.

      The PCC says its North Coast Presbytery offices have been under constant security surveillance since July. Attempts have been made to label it a place of logistical support

for the Colombian Revolutionary Army Forces (FARC), the biggest guerrilla group in the country, the church has said.

      Staff of the presbytery were quizzed in August about the denomination’s executive secretary, the Rev. Milton Mejia.

      “Right now, the government is aggressively attacking people who fight for human rights,” Mejia told the Presbyterian News Service. “They’re treating human rights workers as terrorists,” he said.

       Colombian prosecutors last week charged three soldiers with homicide after the deaths of three trade union leaders in what an army commander originally claimed had been a gun battle.

      Church people and human rights activists have also been the target of guerrillas, paramilitary groups and even the army in Colombia’s protracted civil war. In the most recent attack on Sept. 4, suspected Marxist guerrillas stormed into a church in the rural Putumayo province near the border with Ecuador, and opened fire, killing at least three persons and injuring 14.