On Jan. 7, the Colombian government authorized Senator Piedad Córdoba to participate in the release of six hostages from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The mission will be headed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). (President Uribe indicated previously that he didn't want Córdoba involved.) (Latin American Herald Tribune, Jan. 8)

On Jan. 8 the National Security Archive, a Washington, DC-based research group, released declassified US government documents showing that US diplomats and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew at least since 1994 that the Colombia security forces "employ death squad tactics in their counterinsurgency campaign," in the words of a 1994 CIA report. The military had a "history of assassinating left-wing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers and killing captured combatants," the CIA report said. The release of the documents came six days before Colombian president Alvaro Uribe was to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US president George W. Bush. (Latin America Herald Tribune, Jan. 9)

Leonidas Vargas, one of Colombia's most notorious drug lords, was shot dead in his Madrid hospital bed Jan. 8, Spanish authorities said. At least one gunman entered the room in Madrid's Doce de Octubre Hospital where Vargas was being treated for a serious illness, and shot him four times. The Spanish press reported the assassin asked another patient who was sharing the Colombian's room if he was Vargas. When the man said no, he took out a gun fitted with a silencer and shot Vargas, who was asleep.

Ten years after the fact, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CIDH) found the Colombian government guilty of the assassination of Jesús Maria Valle Jaramillo, an attorney and human rights defender of Medellín, in the northwestern department of Antioquia. The ruling—issued Nov. 25 and announced on Christmas Eve—is the first handed down by the special tribunal of the Organization of American States (OAS) against Colombia for the murder of a human rights activist. Valle was assassinated on Feb. 27, 1998, when he presided the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Antioquia, a post he assumed after the killing of his three predecessors, Héctor Gómez, Luis Vélez Vélez and Carlos Gónima.

The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced in a Dec. 21 letter to the Colombians for Peace organization that it is planning to release six hostages unilaterally in the near future: three police agents, one soldier, former Meta governor Alan Jara and former legislative deputy Sigifredo López. The FARC said it intended to release the prisoners to opposition senator Piedad Córdoba. Right-wing president Alvaro Uribe announced on Dec. 22 that he wanted to avoid a "political spectacle" and that the hostages should be turned over to the International Red Cross. (Adital, Dec. 22)

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a US-based interfaith peace organization with an affiliate in Colombia, is charging that Colombian government agencies have intercepted more than 150 e-mail accounts of nonviolent groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, along with Colombian nongovernmental organizations. FOR says Colombia's police intelligence agency was intercepting groups' e-mail from December 2006 until as recently as November 2008. In a letter to US ambassador William Brownfield, 14 US-based groups noted that in 2006 the US State Department gave the police intelligence agency a $5 million contract to provide "internet surveillance software." "As a result," the letter says, "US taxpayers were apparently paying for Colombian agencies to spy on legitimate US and Colombian humanitarian organizations."

On Dec. 20 the government of Bolivian president Evo Morales announced that a three-year literacy campaign had concluded successfully, making Bolivia the third Latin American country to end illiteracy, after Cuba (1961) and Venezuela (2005). The government said the campaign had succeeded with 819,417 (99.5%) of the 824,101 people who had been identified as illiterate. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) considers that a country has eliminated illiteracy as a social phenomenon when the illiteracy rate falls below 3.9%. However, the correspondent from the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada reported that some of the program's graduates "scarcely learned to sign their names and recognize some letters."

Nearly two million hectares of forest in Peru have been destroyed in order to grow coca, the country's Environment Minister Antonio Brack said in a Lima Dec. 28. "The traffickers invaded protected areas and cleared forests for land to grow coca," the minister said, adding that most of the damage has been done in the jungle regions of San Martín and Huanuco, and in the Valley of the Apurimac and Ene rivers, known as the VRAE region. Drug trafficking also hurt the environment by dumping chemicals into rivers. "The illegal trade has had a very strong impact on the environment," Brack told the official Andina news agency. "We can help restore forests and improve environmental systems in the drug zones, once they are pacified." (IANS, Dec. 29)