colombia

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Colombia (/kəˈlʌmbiə/ kə-lum-biə or /kəˈlɒmbiə/ kə-lom-biə; Spanish: [koˈlombja], officially the Republic of Colombia (Spanish: República de Colombia (help·info)), is a transcontinental country largely situated in the northwest of South America, with territories in Central America. Colombia shares a border to the northwest with Panama, to the east with Venezuela and Brazil, to the south with Ecuador and Peru. It shares its maritime limits with Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. It is a unitary, constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The territory of what is now Colombia was originally inhabited by indigenous peoples including the Muisca, Quimbaya, and Tairona.

The Spanish arrived in 1499 and initiated a period of conquest and colonization ultimately creating theViceroyalty of New Granada, with its capital at Bogotá. Independence from Spain was won in 1819, but by 1830 the “Gran Colombia” Federation was dissolved. What is now Colombia and Panama emerged as the Republic of New Granada. The new nation experimented with federalism as the Granadine Confederation (1858), and then the United States of Colombia (1863), before the Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903. Since the 1960s, the country has suffered from an asymmetric low-intensity armed conflict, which escalated in the 1990s, but then decreased from 2005 onward. Colombia is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse countries in the world giving rise to a rich cultural heritage. This has also been influenced by Colombia’s varied geography, and the imposing landscape of the country has resulted in the development of very strong regional identities. The urban centres are mostly located in the highlands of theAndes mountains.

Colombian territory also encompasses Amazon rainforest, tropical grassland and both Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. Ecologically, it is one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries, and the most densely biodiverse of these per square kilometer. Colombia is a middle power and a regional actor with the fourth largest economy in Latin America, is part of the CIVETS group of six leading emerging markets and is an accessing member to the OECD. Colombia has a diversified economy with macroeconomic stability and favorable growth prospects in the long run.

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adding page this day

Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) tweeted at 5:56 AM – 4 Oct 2016 :

The role played in Colombia by @hrw in trying to undermine the peace agreement is strange and troublinghttps://t.co/cPjVmp6SIL (http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/783274708317966336?s=17)

Like the country’s far right, HRW wanted to send human-rights violators to prison more than it wanted to end the war.

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It’s a heartbreaking disaster for the long, intricate peace process, which sought to put an end to Colombia’s more than five-decade-long civil war. That war has claimed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives and has displaced millions upon millions of people.

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Polls show that a majority of Colombians favor peace. But Uribe and his allies in the media and congress lied, obfuscated, and scared. They managed to convince a small minority (the 54,000-vote victory margin for “no” is about a quarter of the number of civilians killed or disappeared by the state since the start of the civil war) that the agreement was a giveaway to the FARC and that Santos was “delivering the country to terrorism.”

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The campaign to keep Colombia’s war going had an unlikely ally: Human Rights Watch.