News stories by Constanza Vieira, page 6

'Another one? Another rape?' was the response Mari got at the Attorney General's Office in Colombia when she went to report what she had been through. 'When they said that, I froze and got up and said 'Thank you, I’ll come back another day',' she told human rights defenders later.

Jorge Noguera, a regional manager of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe's (2002-2010) election campaign in 2002 and head of the secret police during the Uribe administration, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. 'I trusted him; if he committed a crime it pains me, and I apologise to the people,' Uribe said Wednesday.

One of Colombia's most popular national radio stations broadcast the wiretapped telephone conversations of a leader of a regional movement of displaced persons, David Martínez, misreporting that the voices heard were those of 'guerrilla ringleaders'.

'Dialogue is the Path' is the slogan that drew 25,000 people to this northern Colombian oil port city on the Magdalena river that has a history of social struggle. Most of the participants came from remote corners of the country where the brutality of war is experienced in daily life in ways unimagined by city dwellers.

'I accept this apology as a sign of a new time in Colombia, when democratic participation by all political forces will be possible,' leftwing legislator Iván Cepeda said — and a ripple ran through the crowd in the packed gallery in Congress.

While President Juan Manuel Santos described his government's land restitution policy as 'a veritable revolution' during a speech in northwest Colombia, some 300 far-right paramilitaries were taking up positions less than 100 km from there to fight the effort to return land to small farmers displaced by the violence, human rights activists say.

The powerful Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), in southwest Colombia, has called a 'minga' or protest march to 'curb the militarisation driven by the army and the FARC,' the main guerrilla group, which set off a car bomb on a busy market day in a Nasa Indian town on Jul. 9.

Colombia's DAS domestic secret police service was under the authority of then president Álvaro Uribe 'and it is impossible to think that he didn't know about' the intelligence agency's illegal spying activities, Isabelle Durant, a vice president of the European Parliament, said on a recent visit to this South American country.

The film 'Impunity' has only just now arrived in Colombia, although the filming was completed a year ago and it was first shown to the public in Geneva in January. But the wait was apparently worth it because the documentary contributes key elements to the heated debate on the so-called 'black hand' behind many of the atrocities committed in this South American country.

'Today we are launching the new campaign for demobilisation in Caguán. Planting seeds of hope against the terror of the FARC,' Colombian Defence Minister Rodrigo Rivera recently wrote in his Twitter account.