The President of the Government, Pere Aragonès, has started this Sunday the agenda of the trip to Latin America, together with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Meritxell Serret. The first stop is in Colombia, where they have met in Villavicencio with the Missing Persons Search Unit. In an act in memory of the victims, together with the mayor of the region, Juan Felipe Harman, Aragonés has intervened to highlight the admiration of Catalonia for the process of identification of victims disappeared by the armed conflict. In fact, the Government wants to redouble its commitment both to this process and to cooperation with Colombia. The president stressed that “peace cannot be built on oblivion, but on memory”.
Aragonès and Serret also met with the Orlando Fals Borda Socio-Legal Collective, a Colombian NGO with financial support from the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation, which has certified 86,000 people forcibly disappeared in the context of the armed conflict.
Orlando Fals Borda has held a memorial service for the victims in the Villavicencio cemetery, with the participation of Aragonès and the mayor of the city, Juan Felipe Harman.
Colombia will continue to be a “priority country” for Catalan cooperation in the next four years, as defended by the Government, which stresses that the peace process in Colombia has been “innovative and pioneering” at the international level, by consolidating the peace and social justice.
Thus, the Generalitat wants to redouble its commitment to Colombia, which has traditionally been a “priority” country for Catalan cooperation and the one that has received the most ODA from the Government: more than 14 million euros from 2017 to the present day.
To this end, within the framework of the feminist cooperation promoted by the new Master Plan, which the Government will approve in March, support will be broadened and qualitatively reinforced through two priority lines of work in the country.
On the one hand, the Missing Persons Search Unit defines the regional search pilot plan financed by the ACCD as a model of success and considers it necessary and strategic to replicate it in other territories. Aragonès and Serret precisely met this Sunday at noon (Catalan time) with the Unit.
In response to the request, the Government is preparing a new contribution of 295,000 euros to the UBPD, which will be managed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to deploy the model in the Pacific, specifically in Tumaco, in the department of Nariño.
On the other hand, violence persists in Colombia and the threat and persecution of people who defend Human Rights. For this reason, the Government will also expand the prevention and protection program for human rights defenders, adding more actors from the local Catalan world, such as the Lleida City Council.
