Mr. Speaker, my colleague is right. The hon. member has said that paramilitary groups have been disbanded in Colombia and yet he seems to be one of maybe two in the House who believe that. The rest of us do not. President Uribe certainly believes it but provides no absolute proof of that.
The gentleman who actually wrote the letter said that he thinks perhaps it is an hallucination suffered in the House in the sense that these paramilitary groups have actually disappeared when all of the human rights groups across this world are saying that it is not true, that they still exist. We still hear of folks getting murdered.
When we look at 2008, the murders of trade unionists increased by 18% from 2007. We actually saw a blip back up in 2008 over 2007. It still continues to this day.
One wonders, if it is still happening, then how can one say that the paramilitary groups have gone away, that they are no longer in existence? Maybe they are just a little bit more clandestine than they used to be because they are still there today.