We are very happy to be able to announce that Adil Meléndez has been granted a visa and will be our guest on the 2011 fall tour of the Colombia Human Rights Network. Adil currently lives in Cartagena and is originally from the municipality of San Onofre, in Sucre department. Adil is a full-time attorney and has been a political activist from an early age. He will be able to discuss the full range of social, political, and economic phenomena that make life on the central Caribbean coast of Colombia difficult and at times intolerable, especially for indigenous and Afro descended populations and for the poor in general, and all based on his own experiences. Adil was kidnapped for ransom at the age of 12 by common criminals and has been living in Cartagena since that time, while maintaining close contact with his home town and continuing to participate in social movements there and in the wider region. This has exposed him to threats and assassination attempts by paramilitary groups with ties to local politicians, to extortion by paramilitary and guerrilla groups, and to a way of life characterized by ongoing threats and harassment.

Adil has participated as an organizer in community organizations in San Onofre, campesino movements in the wider region, and the national Movement of Victims of State Crimes, known in Colombia as MOVICE, which has put him in contact with leaders from around Colombia and international guests including representatives of the Argentinean mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Thanks to the national work and international outreach of MOVICE, a significant amount of attention has been drawn to the reigning impunity with respect to violations of human rights and the humanitarian situation in the Caribbean department of Sucre and other parts of Colombia. For example, a public hearing in San Onofre was attended by a number of members of the Colombian Congress and documented more than 300 cases of paramilitary crimes. As a result, the local mayor, several council members, deputies, and members of Congress have been tried and sentenced to prison terms.

As the candidate of the Polo Democrático for mayor of San Onofre in 2007, and with his record of standing up to the participants in para-politics over previous years, Adil was the victim of two assassination attempts and was forced to withdraw from the race.

At this time, Adil is continuing his activity as an attorney for individuals and organizations victimized not only by the para-political nexus, but by the unjust and destructive social system that makes Colombia the most unequal country in the hemisphere. He is the coordinator in Cartagena for the National Movement for Human Rights in Afro-Colombian Communities– known as CIMMARON– as well the Center for Action and Justice against Racism, and he was a founder of the Corporation for the Reestablishment of Vulnerable Communities, known as RESTAURAR, which represents displaced and vulnerable populations in collaboration with the Movement of Victims in Sucre and Bolívar. In addition to direct work with these organizations he represents them in their relationships with international aid organizations, the Colombian government, and the United Nations Development Program – UNDP.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with Adil in and around Cartagena a few weeks ago and the overwhelming impression that I took away from the experience was the reality of the two Cartagenas: the beautiful tourist Cartagena comprising the walled city with its narrow cobblestone streets, horse-drawn carriages, the sea wall, the Castillo de San Felipe, and beautifully restored colonial architecture with its evocative balconies and the breathtaking Teatro Heredia. But the theater is named for Pedro de Heredia, the most prominent slave trader of the colonial city, and the Cartagena’s role in the colony was as its major port, dedicated to importing African slaves and exporting the gold and silver that was extracted further south.

Adil showed me contrasts that boggle the mind. The building boom of the last decade and more have made the modern city of Cartagena unrecognizable. A four lane highway is being extended northeast from Cartagena to Barranquilla and is being lined with gated communities, many of them complete with their own mini town centers, where new and modern but not very large houses are selling for over half a million dollars while black residents a couple of kilometers away are engaged in difficult and contentious negotiations to maintain road access to their communities, which lack paved streets and modern plumbing.

A few kilometers to the southwest of the central city we visited the barrio of Nelson Mandela, overlooking the industrial port and natural gas facilities, where the multiethnic population is universally poor, desperately poor. Nelson Mandela is a destination for new and historically displaced people from throughout the coastal region where raw sewage seeps down steep, rutted streets and a sense of hopelessness is pervasive. Our host was an activist member of the Zenú indigenous Cabildo who lives in the favela with his family, displaced for 17 years due to threats and massacres.

But one does not need to travel the few kilometers to Nelson Mandela to see neighborhoods where people live in desperate poverty. Just drive from the colonial city to somewhat newer sections on the bay, still out of sight of the highrises and condos advertised as bargains when compared to prices in Miami, to see the unpaved streets, flooded properties, and naked children in dangerously substandard housing as you approach the sweltering and teeming public market.

Finally, we visited San Basílico de Palenque, a town founded by escaped slaves and declared a world heritage site by UNESCO due to its unbroken African heritage over the course of centuries, but a sad example of massive unemployment, social neglect, and abandonment by the state. Cartagena is unique in Colombia in that within its few square kilometers it demonstrates particular symptoms of a society gone wrong, contrasting the kind of poverty endemic to the poorest countries in the hemisphere such as Haiti, Nicaragua, Honduras, or Bolivia with the opulent glitz of a new and incipient Miami at bargain prices for the elites but unimaginably out of reach for the vast majority. My sense that I was visiting an apartheid-like enclave was enhanced when Adil and his colleagues took advantage of my presence as a white foreigner to gain access to one of the new gated communities and be shown a house that I was ostensibly interested in buying. They had never before been inside the gates.

Adil will bring years of personal experience to Washington, New York, and Boston on the fall tour. He is uniquely qualified to educate US government officials, the Colombian diaspora, relevant NGOs, and community and university audiences about the present and longstanding contradictions plaguing the central Caribbean coast of Colombia in the departments of Sucre and Atlántico: racism, poverty, corruption, organized criminality to divert and monopolize state resources, forcible displacement, selective assassinations of social activists, paramilitary violence, and the state’s abdication of its responsibilities to the most vulnerable population sectors and the poor in general. In short, the outstanding obstacles to equitable and democratic development.