Colombia’s Civil War | Books | Sources
Colombia’s Civil War
BBC News: Country Profile: Colombia
Read this extensive guide to Colombia, including a timeline of key historical events, a guide to the issues and players in Colombia’s civil conflict, a profile of President Alvaro Uribe Velez and other important facts.
PBS.org: Online NewsHour: Colombia’s Civil War
Use an interactive map to view regions controlled by the various players in Colombia’s decades-old civil war. Locate drug plantations and oil pipelines, scroll through an interactive timeline of key historical events from 1819-2002 and read more about the U.S.’s involvement in Colombia.
PBS.org: Frontline World: Colombia: The Pipeline War
This feature-rich site reveals how oil has played into Colombia’s civil conflict. Watch video clips about the oil fields of Northern Colombia, the location of a pipeline that carries oil to the U.S.
PBS.org: Wide Angle: An Honest Citizen: Colombia’s Civil Warriors
Find out how Colombia's citizens manage in a country wracked by a half-century of civil war. This Web site includes an interactive map, a photo essay on the human costs of the civil war, a guide to paramilitary and guerrilla groups and fast facts on conflict.
Human Rights Watch: Human Rights Overview: Colombia
This independent, nongovernmental organization says Colombia is involved in “the most serious human rights and humanitarian situation” in Latin America. Read or download the organization's 2006 overview of human rights issues in Colombia.
Colombia Support Network
Visit the Web site of this nonprofit that supports grassroots civil associations in Colombia, including women's groups, teachers, cooperatives, unions, environmental groups, indigenous movements and others as a means of negotiating a peaceful end to the civil war. The site includes regularly updated postings on news of the conflict, as well as U.S. involvement.
NPR.org: Day To Day: Colombia, Guerilla Group In Peace Talks
Listen to this 2004 report from Bogota about the Colombian government’s negotiations with the country’s second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
New York Times: Where Violence Reigned, Camera Has Compassion
This 2005 story follows filmmakers Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez as they return to La Sierra to show their documentary about the community in a local church.
Books
More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia
by Robin Kirk
(PublicAffairs, 2004)
This narrative maps the destructive effects of Colombia's drug war from the ground up, blending interviews, personal experiences and observations about the violence that has defined and destroyed Colombia for decades.
America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia
by Noam Chomsky
(Zed Books, 2005)
Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this controversial book asserts that the U.S. policy on Colombia is less about the “war on drugs” and the War on Terror and more about maintaining a pro-U.S. Colombian state, protecting U.S. economic interests and preserving strategic access to oil regardless of the humanitarian cost.
The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia
by Alfredo Molano
(Haymarket Books, 2005)
Colombia’s desterrados, or "dispossessed"—the thousands of citizens displaced by years of war and state-backed terrorism—tell their own stories in this gripping account of the human face of Colombia’s civil conflict.
Sources
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