Thank you very much for that question.
We take very seriously our obligations, whether in Colombia or in other parts of the region: the necessity to monitor, survey, report, and more importantly, I think, to build capacity within civil society to ensure that they're able to keep their countries fresh and very solidly democratic.
Our embassy in Colombia is a good-sized mission. The total Canadian staff is about 23. We have about 68 of what we call locally engaged staff. They're already extremely involved and busy with regard to monitoring the human rights situation.
I can show you this book, which is full, from just the past few months, of the reports that we receive.
They are very much engaged with non-governmental organizations, Canadian, international, and local. I asked the other day what the latest tally was. I have a very extensive list here of organizations that they meet with on a regular basis. In the last 13 months, they told me, they had 371 meetings with NGOs. That would be more than one a day, I would suspect. So they're extremely active.
We're also reorganizing within the department to be able to put even more emphasis on democratic reporting. We've established within the region what we call the Andean unit for democracy. It's located in Lima, but it's a regional resource. It's an ability to bring greater expertise to bear and to assist missions in their efforts to monitor human rights, and more importantly to look for niches in which Canada can be helpful. In my presentation I was pointing out some of the excellent programming that I think we're doing with the Colombian government.
I'm very confident in the ability of the embassy to continue to play a very active role in engagement in monitoring themselves personally, but also of course in collecting information from the various organizations, civil society as well as international.