UN General Assembly
2013

I should like to depart slightly from protocol and start my statement by speaking about a humble woman, a Colombian named María Zabala, who has to bear the burden of immense pain in her heart day in and day out. Two decades ago, armed members of illegal groups arrived outside her house located on the Colombian Caribbean coast, determined to impose their rule of terror. In front of her and her small children, they murdered her husband and two other relatives. They forced her to leave her house and then they burned everything down. She barely managed to remove the corpses from the ashes. She buried them right there and fled from her parcel of land with her children and without any belongings. All she carried was the immense weight of her tragedy. Today, María Zabala is a courageous and inspiring leader, a leader of victims, who is working for peace in my country. In Colombia, sadly, there are many thousands of cases like María Zabala’s. It is estimated that over the past 50 years, over 220,000 people died