Buenaventura, Colombia: Where Free Trade Meets Mass Graves  http://prensarural.org/spip/spip.php?article6694   The large-scale economic projects designed to expand the port and modernize Buenaventura in order to accommodate increased trade that do not economically benefit the majority of the municipality’s Afro-descendent residents are marching forward without consideration for these people’s rights. If these projects have failed to improve living conditions for residents until now, there is no guarantee that their expansion will do so. Meanwhile, the internal armed conflict, drug battles, and widespread violence that cause human rights abuses continue at an alarming rate. Increased military presence has not only failed to address the situation, it has served to change the modalities of crime, from outright homicides to forced disappearances where bodies simply disappear, either into mass graves or into the river system that twists around the municipality. National and international authorities continue to ignore serious allegations of collaboration between members of the armed forces and the newly armed paramilitary groups. As Danelly Estupiñan, an Afro-Colombian activist in Buenaventura, put it: “The FTA would deepen the crisis that we are living here because the FTA is synonymous with privatization and privatization is synonymous with unemployment, unemployment is synonymous with poverty and misery and misery is synonymous with loss of autonomy and sovereignty for our people and as a country.”14