Colombia

Luis Alberto Matta
Mata is a freelancer and writer, who has spent much of his time documenting agrarian issues as well as the four-decade long civil war in his native Colombia. His central research was on agrarian reform and rural development as a perspective to peace building in Colombia. Mata has focused his career on topics related to human rights, and he has lectured on a range of issues - such as globalization, agrarian conflict and social-armed conflict in Colombia. Among his publications are Colombia and the FARC-EP, Agrarian Problems and the Origins of the Guerrilla Fight and "Capitalist Power & Political Violence in Colombia: Terrorism of the State and Genocide Against Patriotic Union."

Alvaro Gómez
Alvaro Gómez began his professional career in the cultural sphere, working for the communications department of a note theatre company in his native Colombia. Some years later, the state of civil unrest in Colombia compelled Gómez to begin work as a legal editor and, specifically, as a correspondent, reporting on events throughout the country. Throughout most of his career, until his departure from Colombia in the fall of 2005, Gómez had his free expression rights violated, underwent internal displacement and survived attempts on his life mainly because of his reporting on links between drug traffickers and government officials, police and the army. In 1997, Gómez founded Servicios Especializados de Información, Seinforma (Specialized Journalistic Services), an alternative news agency dedicated also, in part, to helping victims of Colombia’s civil war obtain reparations from the government. In later years, Seinforma offered counselling services for persecuted Colombians and information on migration, along with working alongside the country’s feminist movement. In October 2006, Gómez re-activated Seinforma in Canada, which currently serves as a Web-based entity that promotes and circulates news on human rights. The agency has correspondents in twelve Latin American countries.