Digital Security at PBI Colombia

Digital security is an area of comprehensive protection that is ever more important. PBI has seen how digital security incidents increase every year and, in parallel, human rights defenders’ concerns about their digital self-protection is also on the rise.

Concern from Colombian human rights defenders is not baseless and cannot be disregarded. Scandals appear periodically about the abuse of the state surveillance apparatus. One example, is the case of Laura Sarabia and Armando Benedetti. Former Chief of Staff, Laura Sarabia, and former ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, were the protagonists of a tangled case of wiretapping that ended with the dismissal of both individuals from their respective positions. In other cases, it is the State that suffers a cyber-attack, putting the data of millions of citizens at risk.

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An Interview with Reinaldo Villalba Vargas: Standing Firm for Justice

In a world where justice often struggles to prevail, Reinaldo Villalba Vargas, a dedicated Human Rights Defender (HRD) and lawyer, has stood firm against the tide of systematic human rights violations in Colombia. As a lawyer with the Corporación Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CCAJAR), Reinaldo is at the forefront of the battle for justice in Colombia. He is currently behind an initiative to prosecute ex-Colombian president – Álvaro Uribe Vélez – for the extrajudicial killings of thousands of ordinary civilians in what has come to be known as the ‘False Positives’ scandal.

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What Development Are We Talking About?

What is more desired that development?

It is odd for someone to say that they don’t want development. Yet, the Peace Community of San José de Apartado has been labeled as “anti-development.” Made up of peasants who were displaced and dispossessed in the 1990s by paramilitary actions, the community now represents territorial resistance and protection in a neutral zone amid the armed conflict, And, in fact, in a way it could be said that the community is anti-development, opposing the concept of “extractivist” development. A development that encourages a draining of the river and depleting natural resources at the expense of the environment. This article will lay out some of the socio-political, environmental, and systematic impacts and violence that the Peace Community’s life project has resisted, opposed, and denounced to build peaceful collective spaces amid the armed conflict.

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Accompany from diversity to re-existence

We offer a warm welcome to our three new field brigadistas who will accompany human rights defenders and organizations from the Apartado and Barrancabermeja Teams

 

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The people saying hi in this photo are: Yoxmara (Mexico) who accompanies from the field team in Apartadó, whereas Angie (El Salvador) and Cristina (Spain) will accompany from Barrancabermeja.

“Recognizing our histories and the histories from our territories, we wish to walk together with the processes that try to elaborate new narratives in which the pain and the violence seek to become a route for justice and dignity of peoples.

As PBI’s field brigades, we want to learn and accompany people and organizations that seek to cultivate a collective and common peace to re-exist from the diversity”.

Welcome to PBI Colombia!

Protecting this Beautiful World We are Creating

At PBI we have been talking about this idea of a protection circle and to protect ourselves we must also take into account the many dimensions and impacts of violence: a spiritual or feeling-based dimension, the psycho-emotional or corporal dimension, the group-relational dimension and, now, we want to talk about the territorial or project dimension. Here we want to discuss the importance of protecting what we fight for or defend: peace for our territory, access to justice, building a truth that is connected to the experiences of those whose rights have been violated, a life free of violence. We seek to build new worlds, or rather, we hope to expand the beautiful worlds that already exist, and we want everyone to have access to them. This brings us to our efforts to organize collectively and defend what we consider as fundamental for life.

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making space for peace