Rosa Emilia Salamanca

Colombia

The conflict in Colombia is a complicated one; government, insurgent, and counter-insurgent armies—none strong enough to overcome the others—have clashed often in the past four decades. Rosa Emilia Salamanca is senior adviser to and former executive director of the Association of Interdisciplinary Work (Asociación de Trabajo Interdisciplinario), which strengthens civil society and builds peace through education, research, and community work. Consultant to the government’s Ombudsman Office (Defensoría del Pueblo), she conducts research on the situation of displaced persons. Ms. Salamanca is affiliated with several other organizations working for stability in Colombia, including the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy, and Development; the National Women’s Network; and the Permanent Assembly of Civil Society for Peace. These relationships allow her to build alliances and coalitions with regional, national, and international organizations. She specializes in conflict resolution, social development, human rights, and the democratization process. Her work fosters democratic political culture by recognizing the different perspectives of gender, identity, and culture, as well as the different concerns of marginalized groups. She is now part of the International Coordinating Committee for the Culture and Peace Forum, which will be held in Barcelona in 2004.

Ms. Salamanca’s peace-building activities include:

• creating innovative peace education curricula and training community members, teachers, and officials in nonviolent conflict resolution;
• working with the Forced Displacement and Human Rights Consultant Bureau (Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento Forzado) as part of a European Union project for the defense of civil, political, and human rights and the construction of good governance, democratic institutions, and public participation;
• facilitating meetings in which diverse groups of women from national organizations create agreements for joint action across political and ideological lines;
• addressing violence prevention, the development of codes of conduct for armed forces occupying the territory, and the implementation of these codes through public pressure with indigenous women in the Northern Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria region;
• developing the Women’s Agenda for Peace through the National Women’s Network, in order to prevent human rights violations against women, particularly those displaced;
• investigating the war and reporting human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law by all warring parties; and
• publishing works on gender and democracy construction, the need to observe human rights, and ethnic tensions in Colombia.

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