I would be happy to give you more information about this. It was a general sense that we're getting from partners on the ground, that often when peace accords are signed, the attention span of the international media disappears.
We think about the wars in Central America. At the height of the Cold War you had the United States, the Soviet Union, and there were so many interests in the region. The international press was there. Every day they were reporting on the war in El Salvador and in Guatemala. It was in the news every night. Then the peace accords were signed and they disappeared, because peace had arrived.
What we find from our work is that it has not. People are saying, “Peace? What peace? We're still living in the same conditions as before, with racism and exclusion as high as it is.” The statistics I gave about land ownership in Guatemala.... That hasn't changed very much through all this time.
Obviously the peace accords are important, and they represent the will of civil society to bring an end to the armed conflict, but when we see the statistics today in countries like El Salvador, the number of killings is the same as during the height of the war. That's why I'm saying that often the international attention disappears and people think, the peace accords have been signed; it's time to move on.
In a country such as Colombia, people have been speaking for years about a post-conflict scenario, almost as if they're already in a post-conflict situation, and it's not the fact on the ground. The war is raging in Colombia, despite the very positive signs that there might be a possibility of bringing an end to the armed conflict.
It wasn't directed just at Canada, but in general, that we seem to have a short attention span and tend to move on far too quickly.