It was with great fanfare that the Colombian government signed a peace deal in 2016 with rebel fighters, heralding a new beginning for the South American country after decades of war and conflict.But peace has proved elusive amid rising bloodshed, a spike in killings of civil rights leaders and former guerrillas by paramilitaries and criminal groups and the slow pace of reconciliation.Almost three years after the peace deal was signed, Colombian-Canadians will take to the streets on Friday as part of a global effort to draw attention to the situation in their homeland.“People outside of Colombia think everything is OK after the peace agreement, but it’s not,” said Sandra Cordero, a union activist who sought political asylum in Canada in 2002 after she and her family received death threats from paramilitaries in Bogota over her advocacy work. “People continue to be displaced and murdered. The only power we have is speaking out.” Raul Burbano of Common Frontiers, an international labour and human rights advocacy group, said Canada’s 100,000-strong Colombian-Canadian community was ecstatic when the peace accord was signed, but is now disappointed by the delay in land redistribution to people displaced by the conflict and the slow pace with which a truth commission is working to seek out facts about the killings committed during the war.“Colombia has had a history of peace agreements that failed and we don’t want history to repeat,” said Burbano, whose group is among the organizers of the Walk for Peace and Life in Toronto, one of 180 cities around the world staging the International Day of Mobilization, including Montreal and Ottawa.The 2016 agreement ended Colombia’s 50-year guerrilla war which left more than 220,000 dead and countless missing and displaced. As part of the peace deal, the guerrilla group — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, or FARC-EP — was disarmed and demobilized. A ...
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