Colombia: The Traffic of Terror, and related articles, August 2001

Ana Carrigan, a Colombian-Irish writer and filmmaker, is the author of the acclaimed The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy (1993)and the Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan, which was nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Award in 1985. Her films include Roses in December, which was chosen by Time magazine for its Ten Best List in 1982 and was nominated for an Emmy. Carrigan has also received the Academy Awards Certificate of Special Merit and the George Foster Peabody Award. From 1971 to 1976, she was associate producer and assistant director to Marcel Ophuls. She has reported extensively from Latin America and Eastern Europe for a consortium of European television stations. She is currently working on an exploration of aspects of Colombia history between 1880 and 1860, based on the lives and correspondence of two generations of her Colombian family.

Arturo Carrillo is Lecturer in Law and Associate Director of the Transitional Justice Program of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School. Before joining Columbia Law School in 1999 as a senior fellow, he was Executive Director and founder of the Colombian Institute of International Law, a non-profit organization based in Bogota, Colombia, that specialized in human rights and humanitarian law research. He has published several works on international law and human rights, including Hors de Logique: Contemporary Issues in International Humanitarian Law as Applied to Internal Armed Conflict, American University International Law Review, Vol. 15, No.1 (1999).

Donna DeCesare is an award-winning freelance photographer and writer based in New York. Her photographs have appeared in many news and arts publications including The New York Times magazine, Life, Harper's, DoubleTake and Aperture. Among her awards and grants for photographic projects are the Dorothea Lange Prize,1993, a New York Foundation for the Arts Photography grant,1996, the Alicia Patterson Photographic Journalism Fellowship,1997, and the Mother Jones International Photo Fund Award, 1999. Her photographs have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Latin America. Her most recent project-- a ten-year exploration of Latin American street gangs that originate in Los Angeles- was exhibited in 2000 at the Visa Pour L'Image Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France and won a 2000 Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Magazine Photography and recognition in the 2000 Canon Photo Essay Awards. Ms. DeCesare is currently documenting youth violence and community violence prevention programs in the American hemisphere with support from the Open Society Institute. In January 2002 she will begin teaching documentary photography and video in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin where she plans to collaborate on a number of projects with the Center for Latin American Studies. Her work as Roving Correpsondent for Pixelpress can be seen at www.pixelpress.org/travelogue/ and at her own website www.donnadecesare.com.

Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, a 1998 New York Times Notable Book and a Finalist for the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize. Her numerous awards include two Fulbrights to Argentina, a Harvard Faculty Research Grant, a Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship in Nonfiction, and a Marion and Jasper Whiting Award. From 1993-1999, she taught writing and literary translation at Harvard University; she was a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University in May 1994. Her writings on art, literature, and human rights have appeared internationally. Among the books she has edited and translated are Information for Foreigners: Three Plays by Griselda Gambaro and Theatre Pieces: An Anthology by Liliane Atlan. Her theatre translations have been produced in London and New York, as well as in regional theatres. She is the Web Editor of Crimes of War.

Daniel García-Peña Jaramillo served as High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia from 1995 to 1998 and currently heads Planeta Paz, an organization in Bogotá dedicated to fomenting grass-roots participation in the peace process.

Robert Kogod Goldman is a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law, American University, and first vice-president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Karl Penhaul covers all aspects of the war in Colombia for The Boston Globe, CNN International, The San Francisco Chronicle, and U.S. News & World Report. From 1996 to 2000, he was the Reuters International Correspondent in Bogotá, where he is still based. From 1995-1996, he was National News Editor of The Mexico City Times. He holds an MA from the London School of Economics in Latin American Politics and Policymaking, and a BA with Honors in Interpreting and Translating in French and Spanish. Aged 35, he was born in Hunstanton, Norfolk, England.

Hiram Ruiz is in his thirteenth year with the U.S Committee for Refugees (USCR), where he is Senior Policy Analyst covering Asia and Latin America. He has worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Somalia and Sudan, with Refugee Action in the United Kingdom, and with District of Columbia’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. He also spent eight years as a social worker among immigrant communities in London, UK. For USCR, Ruiz has carried out on-site documentation of the situation for refugees, returnees, and internally displaced populations in some 35 countries in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. He has testified before Congressional committees and written articles and opinion pieces for a host of publications, including UNHCR’s The State of the World’s Refugees 2000 and Refugees magazine, The Forsaken People: Case Studies of the Internally Displaced, and the International Journal of Refugee Law. Ruiz’s photographs have been widely published and exhibited. He writes for USCR’s Refugee Reports and World Refugee Survey and is the author of a number of USCR publications, including Colombia’s Silent Crisis; Conflict and Displacement in Sri Lanka; Go Home, Stay Put: Tough New Choices for Peru’s Displaced; Burundi’s Uprooted People: Caught in the Spiral of Violence; `People Want Peace’: Repatriation and Reintegration in War-Torn Sri Lanka; Left Out in the Cold: The Perilous Homecoming of Afghan Refugees. Born in Cuba, raised in Miami, he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Florida State University.

Michael Shifter is Vice President for Policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based forum on Western Hemisphere affairs. In 2000, Mr. Shifter directed an independent task force on U.S. policy toward Colombia, organized by the Dialogue and the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-chaired by Senator Bob Graham (D-Fl) and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. Since 1993, Mr. Shifter has been adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches Latin American politics. His recent articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Current History, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Journal of Democracy, Harvard International Review, and many other publications. Mr. Shifter is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, serves on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs en Español, and is a contributor editor to Current History.

Teun Voeten studied Cultural Anthropology in the Netherlands before becoming a photojournalist covering the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and Colombia. In 1996, Atlas – a publishing house based in Amsterdam – brought out his Tunnelmensen, a journalistic/anthropological work about a homeless community living in the train tunnels of Manhattan. Voeten’s latest book, How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone, will be published by St. Martins Press in Spring 2002. His photographs on Sierra Leone will be exhibited at the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation from June 6, 2001 until February 2002. Currently based in New York, Voeten publishes in Vanity Fair, National Geographic Magazine, El País (magazine section), Granta, and other international venues. His photos are used by such organizations as Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, UNHCR, and the International Red Cross. Voeten’s website is www.teunvoeten.com.

Victoria Wigodzky is Program Assistant to the Inter-American Dialogue’s Colombia and Democracy Programs. A native of Argentina, Ms. Wigodzky graduated from Duke University with a degree in Comparative Area Studies and French.