Note #9143 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
06100 Feb. 17, 2006
Colombian church leaders face renewed death threats
Ufford-Chase says PC(USA) is 'watching this situation with grave concern'
by Alexa Smith
LOUISVILLE - Presbyterian and Roman Catholic leaders active in human-rights ministries in Colombia reportedly are facing death threats once again.
The supposed targets include the Rev. Milton Mejia, executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, and Mauricio Avilez, an ecumenical peace worker once detained without charges in Colombia and released for lack of evidence.
The person who reported the new threats has gone into hiding after assassins killed two of his companions but missed him.
Both Mejia and Avilez are now in Puerto Allegro, Brazil, attending the Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) - while two full-time "accompaniers" from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are visiting threatened communities along Colombia's north coast.
"Members of the church are scared," Mejia told the Presbyterian News Service by telephone. "They're telling me and Mauricio to be careful. And they're also advising us to leave (Colombia)."
Mejia has faced death threats before, but always has refused to leave the country. He argued that part of the strategy of the death squads is to cripple progressive organizations by terrorizing their leaders.
PC(USA) Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase sent a letter to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez on Feb. 13, urging him to "take whatever measures are necessary to investigate" the threats. Ufford-Chase said it appears that the intimidation is originating from a faction of Colombia's military-intelligence agency.
He copied the letter to William B. Wood, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia.
"We are watching this situation with grave concern," he said. "If any of our church colleagues are targeted in the growing violence, our church will respond immediately. We will work to educate and encourage Presbyterians in the United States to urge their congressional representatives to initiate a formal investigation."
Ufford-Chase told Uribe that volunteer accompaniers from the United States have lived in the Barranquilla church since September 2004 in support of Christians living out non-violent witness in the midst of the intense violence that grips Colombia.
"They are clear that they stand against the violence of the guerilla movements, the ever-growing violence of the paramilitary forces, and the violence of the government, insofar as it targets intentionally or unintentionally, the civilian population in your beautiful country," Ufford-Chase wrote.
Efforts to reach officials in the Colombian Embassy in Washington, DC, were unsuccessful.
Religious leaders who work with Colombians displaced by violence say millions of internal refugees are defenseless against paramilitary and guerrilla militias and government forces. In a country with virtually no social safety net, the poorest people turn to the church for help with shelter, food and medical care.
Responding, Mejia says, is increasingly risky.
During the 2004 incarceration and interrogation of Avilez, the Presbyterian church learned that its Barranquilla headquarters was under constant surveillance, and that ring-wing forces were trying to link the church to the leftist guerrilla movement.
Mejia has denied such allegations, insisting that the church works through peaceful and democratic means. He claims elements within the government use a clandestine system of paid informants and false witnesses to arrest and silence human-rights workers, or to silence them by assassination.
In the Colombian justice system, prisoners are jailed while the charges against them are investigated. If evidence is found, formal charges are filed; if not, they must be released. The process can take months or years.
According to sources within Colombia's Inter-ecclesial Commission of Justice and Peace - of whose board Avilez is a member - a displaced man was offered $1,000 to testify against human-rights workers who had helped him in the past. The man reportedly said that Mejia and Avilez are to be shot for associating with guerillas.
The man's home was later ransacked, and his family has gone into hiding. Before his disappearance, the man said he and two other men were attacked by gunmen on motorcycles, and his two companions were killed.
Mejia says: "The displaced are so poor, the government offers them money" for false testimony.
According to Mejia, reports from human-rights agencies, more than 7,000 people have been detained under false testimony during the Uribe administration.
"Sadly, in this country we live with repression against people working for human rights," Avilez said by telephone, adding that he believes he has been under surveillance since his October 2004 release from prison. "You just have to be aware. If you're not careful, you can be assassinated."
In the past two years, two other Presbyterian ministers, one in Bogota and the other in Cartagena, have left their parishes after their lives were threatened. The pastor from Bogota has returned to his ministry there. The other minister is serving in another part of Colombia.
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