Looking ahead: church groups seek new models of solidarity

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 26, 2004 by Barbara Fraser, Paul Jeffrey

The process is labor-intensive, but the groups involved aim for financial independence. Transfair's clients pay a certification fee of about 10 cents per pound of coffee. Half of that goes to FLO and the rest is used for Transfair's marketing activities. Bourque said the organization, which also receives funding from foundations and church groups, including the Dominican sisters in Adrian, Mich., is aiming for financial independence in 2006.

Although its profits are modest, Equal Exchange has operated in the black for 14 of the last 15 years, according to North, with $13 million in sales last year.

Continued growth, he said, "is a challenge that we've made harder because of the model that we use. We're paying two to three times more than our competitors. We're offering investors the worst possible terms for ,their investment. We have a flat pay structure. We encourage our competitors to copy us. It makes it hard--but it's obviously working."

Human rights still in spotlight

The expanded focus on economic solidarity in, the region does not mean that traditional human rights issues ,have fallen by the wayside.

"When a grass-roots community in a given country is confronting whatever form of violence or repression, they often call for international solidarity and get it very quickly," Dennis said.

Perhaps the best example of that today is Colombia, which has slipped out of headlines in the United States even though it is still one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid, particularly military funds. Although the war in Iraq has pushed Colombia virtually out of the public eye, it remains a primary concern for the Latin America Working Group.

"That [importance] was really confirmed by the enormous aid packages that are going to Colombia," Haugaard said. "It's a major foreign policy debate mainly because churches, unions and activists have made it so."

The United States has provided huge amounts of military aid to Colombian security forces, ostensibly for anti-drug efforts. But the battle raging among government forces, leftist rebels and rightwing paramilitaries invites comparison with Central America--or Vietnam.

Since 2000, when the controversial Plan Colombia went into effect, the United States has allocated $2.44 billion to that country, of which most--$1.97 billion--has been military aid. Another $688 million is in the 2004 budget, including $553 million for the military and police.

Scores of labor union leaders and human rights activists have been killed in Colombia in the past decade, and Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people--most of them women and children--in the world, about 2.5 million.

Opponents of U.S. anti-drug support for Colombia point out that stepped-up efforts since 2000, including the spraying of the herbicide Roundup Ultra on crops of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine, have done nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. While the Bush administration is claiming victory, experts in the Andean countries say the spraying appears to have simply pushed the coca crops back over the border into Peru.