Just Cause – Quelling dissent in Colombia

"Just Cause," hosted by Colombian human rights advocate Piedad Córdoba, offers a series of documentaries on Latin American economic, political and social realities. Today our host takes us from the La Picota jail in Bogotá, where we meet political prisoners Huber Ballesteros and Francisco Tolosa, to communities struggling against energy and mining interests. We speak with poets, students, activists and political prisoners who have all faced government attempts to quell dissent. In a way our situation today is worse than it was in the dictatorships, says Aida Avella of the Patriotic Union movement. Now our struggle is against a false democracy where the government has hit lists of activists slated to be killed or imprisoned. And the forces behind it in the intelligence agencies went to the same school as they did during the dictatorships: The School of the Americas, although today it has another name. teleSUR