News stories by Constanza Vieira, page 3

BOGOTA, May 09 (IPS) - "I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don't write down where I'm from, let alone my name," said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia's southern Pacific coast region.

, May 02 (IPS) - Nora Padilla, one of the six winners of this year's Goldman environmental prize, dedicates her days to organising informal recyclers in the Colombian capital, where the city's eight million inhabitants are just now reluctantly starting to classify their garbage at source.

BOGOTA, Mar 15 (IPS) - Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez played a key role in the current attempt to negotiate peace in Colombia. Along with Cuban President Raúl Castro, he confidentially urged the FARC guerrillas to agree to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos's secret proposal for peace talks.

BOGOTA, Mar 07 (IPS) - Victims of crimes of the state want their recommendations to be taken into consideration by the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas that are seeking to end half a century of armed conflict.

BOGOTA, Feb 23 (IPS) - Two weeks into an indefinite strike called by workers at Cerrejón, one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world, the company has agreed to sit down again and negotiate with Colombia's National Union of Coal Industry Workers (Sintracarbón).

BOGOTA, Jan 14 (IPS) - Colombia has suffered an internal armed conflict for so many decades that it almost amounts to a "forgotten crisis" for external donors. But the president of neighbouring Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is well aware of the conflict, and understands that it destabilises Latin America, where centre-left governments proliferate.

BOGOTA, Dic 20 (IPS) - Colombia's large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.

BOGOTA, Dic 10 (IPS) - Colombia will be removed from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights "blacklist" next year. In exchange, the government of Juan Manuel Santos facilitated a visit to the country by a delegation from the Commission.

BOGOTA, Oct 17 (IPS) - Closed-door talks between members of the FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government began in Oslo Wednesday, after the delegates were taken from the airport to an undisclosed location.

BOGOTA, Sep 13 (IPS) - What are the obstacles to peace in war-torn Colombia? When government and rebel negotiators asked themselves this question, they concluded that one problem was that the media in this country had turned “peace” itself into a dirty word.