As we approach the town of Manatí, in northern Colombia, I look eagerly out the window for signs of change. When I was here almost a year ago, makeshift shelters and tents lined the sides of the road. Random pieces of furniture were piled nearby: a refrigerator or a rocking chair – anything people could save from the floodwaters.

Today the tents are gone. But just outside of town, we turn off the road and into a lot, where temporary shelters made of fiberboard and corrugated metal have been constructed. I see Irida emerge from one of them. Smiling and laughing, we embrace each other.

Irida is one of approximately 225,000 people who were affected when unprecedented rains in the fall of 2010 caused the nearby Dique Canal to rupture. The break in the canal, which connects Colombia’s coastal city of Cartagena to the Magdalena River, submerged half of the northern state of Atlántico under 80 million cubic meters of water. When I first visited Manatí in March 2011, half of the town was still underwater, and Irida was living under plastic sheeting after being evicted from the local school. Irida’s house, which she showed me by canoe, had water up to the rooftop.

To some extent, Irida was lucky. Hers was one of the first families in the town able to move into these temporary shelters last April. In many of the nearby towns we have visited, they were not completed until three months ago.

But the shelter where Irida now lives was designed to last only three months. She has been there for almost a year. Worse than that, the floodwaters have still not dissipated, and her house is still flooded. According to the state governor’s office, 60 percent of the area that flooded when the Dique Canal burst in 2010 is still underwater today. Pumping has proven ineffective because much of this area was once wetland and is now returning to its natural state. So Irida and the roughly 600 other families in Manatí who’ve lost their homes are now being told they will have to relocate.

The day after our reunion with Irida, we join a town hall meeting where the governor tells a schoolyard full of flood-affected families that his priority is to find land and build homes for the thousands still displaced more than a year later. But Irida tells me that she doesn’t want to take the piece of land being offered. It is too far away from the center of town, she says. Before the floods, she ran a small grocery shop out of her house. If she relocates, she will be unable to restart her business and will be isolated from her community.

Like so many other Colombians we are meeting on this trip, Irida is quick to smile and laugh. But the pain and anxiety are nevertheless visible on her face. Beyond the relocation troubles, she has many more immediate worries. The toilets at her temporary shelter do not work, and two of the plastic water tanks have recently ruptured in the heat. The Colombian government discontinued food deliveries to the area in November. Her husband has been unable to find work. Without permanent homes or work, how can the process of recovery even begin?

I am at a loss for words as we say our goodbyes. I hope things will be better for Irida the next time we meet; I wish I could be more certain.

Chandler Burr and his adopted children

But in an interview with with the newspaper El Tiempo, Colombian bishop Juan Vicente Cordoba and the country’s Inspector General strongly criticized the decision, suggesting that “the new father may become attracted to his adopted children” given his “disorder of sexual identity“:

When asked about Mr Burr’s suitability as a father the bishop said, “I do not know him and I am not accusing him of anything, but one thing is clear and that is that he has homosexual tendencies and he is going to receive a boy of 10-years-old and an adolescent of 13, and between them there won’t be a father-son relationship.” He continued, “He will receive two children at an age when they may be attractive to him, which could be a temptation“.

Cordoba, who is also a graduated psychologist, insisted that homosexuality was universally considered by mental health professionals to be a “disorder of sexual identity”.

When asked whether the children were at risk, Cordoba suggested that it was not advisable to have allowed a homosexual man to adopt male children, given his tendencies, and that female children may have been safer in Mr Burr’s care. Alejandro Ordoñez, Colombia’s Inspector General and known for his conservative Catholic views, supported the bishop’s opposition to the adoption, given that “there are apparent contradictions regarding the validity of his intimate relationships with same sex individuals”.

A range of studies, including the the American Psychological Association, have concluded that beliefs that people of the same sex “are not fit parents have no empirical foundation.” Colombia is currently home to more than 8,800 children “who are deemed difficult to adopt because of their age.”

An iconic photograph of the funeral of an assassinated trade unionist in Colombia.

Across the nation’s capital, business lobbyists are working furiously to hash out the details of a new trade agreement with Colombia. Tentatively known as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the deal was approved by the Colombian Congress in 2007 and has awaited U.S. ratification since then.

While business groups have lobbied heavily in favor of the agreement, a number of human rights and labor groups have opposed it, saying that Colombia has failed to make needed progress on human and labor rights standards and that the agreement may further undermine these rules and regulations.

Over at ChamberPost, John Murphy, the Vice President of International Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, makes the argument that violence in Colombia has subsided and that it’s actually much more unsafe to be an American citizen than a Colombian union member:

Today, homicide rates are higher in the United States (5.0 per 100,000) than among Colombia’s labor union members (3.4 per 100,000). A resident of the District of Columbia is seven times more likely to be murdered than a Colombian labor union member. The allegation that labor union members are being targeted for assassination today comes from U.S. labor unions, not Colombians.

At the Huffington Post, Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, makes a similar argument, saying, “Colombian union leaders visiting Washington this week are in more danger here than in their home country.” Shapiro then went on to point out in the comments that Murphy wrote an additional post mocking the AFL-CIO labor union for using a 13-year-old picture of a union member’s assassination to talk about violence against labor — with the suggestion that declining violence means that such scenes are not nearly as pressing.

Shaprio and Murphy’s statistics are deceptive. Victims of homicide are largely victims who aren’t targeted specifically due to occupation, while union members are being targeted specifically for their labor activism. Furthermore, both men leave out a crucial fact: Colombia is still the most dangerous place in the world to be in a labor union.

In fact, according to data from the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, Colombia had 49 assassinations of labor officials in 2010 — more than the entire rest of the world combined (41 deaths were recorded elsewhere in the world in 2010). ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph comparing killings of trade unionists in Colombia with several other developing countries:

As you can see, Colombia easily leads the world in killings of union members. It is simply disingenuous to factor in other forms of killings — like common homicide — to absurdly claim that Colombian trade unionists are safe. After all, if Shapiro and Murphy decided to compare the murders of trade unionists between Colombia and the United States, the numbers would look completely different, because there were no assassinations of trade unionists of the United States last year.

Now, Florida-based U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra — a George W. Bush appointee — has ruled that lawsuits by these families will be allowed to move forward, rejecting the banana company’s request that the suits be thrown out:

A federal judge in Florida said Friday that lawsuits against Chiquita Brands International, filed by family members of thousands of Colombians who were tortured or killed by paramilitaries, will be allowed to go forward. [...]

Chiquita, which has admitted to making payments to paramilitaries, had asked for the suits to be dismissed, arguing it was a victim of extortion and has no responsibility for any crimes armed groups committed. But U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra denied the company’s request, allowing plaintiffs to move forward with claims for damages against the company for torture, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He granted Chiquita’s motion to dismiss claims for damages related to terrorism.

Chiquita previously faced a $25 million fine from the U.S. after being found to be delivering payments to the Colombian United Self-Defence Forces, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department.

Unprecedented rain that has hammered Colombia over the past year has affected three million people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In March, I spent three weeks traveling across the Caribbean region visiting families displaced by the floods. The alarming conditions I encountered more than three months since President Santos declared a state of emergency are described in a new report by Refugees International entitled, “Surviving Alone: Improving Assistance to Colombia’s Flood Victims.”

In the town of Manatí in Atlántico Department I was greeted by the Iraida, an Afro-Colombian mother of four who leads a local women’s organization. “Today we don’t have a glass of water to drink,” Iraida tells me. “The water truck has not come to distribute water. It comes every eight days.” She explains that water rations are not sufficient to allow her to bathe her baby and provide enough water for the other four members of her family.

Watch a personal account from Iraida and her husband:

Iraida points to her house, which is submerged except for the tops of the windows and roof. “We had a store, a business. We took out a loan and now we are unable to pay the bank. We need food, water, clothes – yes, even clothes because we have lost everything.”

Tragically, her story was similar to dozens of others I heard in Atlántico, Córdoba, Bolívar, Sucre and Magdelana Departments. Flood victims received some basic aid during the height of the floods in December; many had been encouraged by news that the government had launched a multi-media campaign to raise flood aid. But more than three months later, what little assistance they had received was tapering off, leaving them to survive on their own. As described in the report, an uncoordinated, bureaucratic process set up by the Colombian government to distribute millions of dollars in flood relief was severely hindering the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance. According to a recent report by the Colombian General Accountability Office, only half of the flood aid has been distributed to date.

In 2010 alone, 300 million people across the globe were affected by natural disasters, the majority of which were climate-related, including 182 floods that affected 180 million people — almost double the annual average for the last decade.

As I write this blog two months after visiting Manatí, persistent rains and ongoing flooding in Colombia continue to displace hundreds of thousands of people, and record-breaking flooding along areas of the Mississippi River inundate vast swaths of land in the southeast United States. In all the debate over whether the increase in the frequency and force of climate-related disasters is a portent of things to come or evidence that climate change already is occurring, I am left wondering whether policy makers, in their quest for scientific certainty, have missed the point. I am left questioning the wisdom of continuing to view today’s extreme events as unforeseen occurrences for which no one is responsible, as acts of God or nature, as risks that cannot be managed.

It is starkly evident that neither national governments nor the humanitarian community are prepared to respond to the increasing pressure that climate variability is bringing to bear not only on some of the world’s poorest and most crisis-prone countries, but also on a humanitarian system that is already over-stressed and woefully underfunded. The discussion must therefore focus on prevention, protection, and the underlying factors that render people vulnerable to begin with like poverty, weak social protection networks, lack of preparedness and the weak capacity of local governments to respond quickly and in an accountable manner.

Read Alice’s original, extended post at Refugees International.

True, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was democratically elected. But you can discern his authoritarian tendencies in the fact that he had the constitution changed to allow him to run for a second term, and currently he’s working on changing the constitution again to allow for a third term.

Oh, no, wait . . . that’s not Chavez, that’s staunch American ally and brilliant democratic leader Alvaro Uribe in Colombia. The horror.

Which just goes to illustrate a longstanding and bothersome point. In the world you’ve got your countries that are clearly democracies—South Korea, Canada, Portugal. And you’ve also got your countries that are clearly despotic—Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Burma. But you’ve also got an extremely broad class of countries, typically “middle income” countries, where they have elections and competition between political parties but also have a lot of corruption, weak state institutions, and not much in the way of an entrenched tradition of liberalism.

But lacking a good umbrella term for states that fall into this middle ground, the tendency is for the American media and political establishment to arbitrarily assign such states to either the “promising new democracy” box or “threatening incipient authoritarianism” box based primarily on geopolitical considerations. So-called “pro-American” leaders are also “democrats” whereas those alleged to be “anti-American” are “authoritarian.”