A daughter's quest for justice in Colombia.

• Author: Franklin, Stephen
• Position: Yessika Hoyos

THE DAY AFTER KILLERS SHOT her father, a trade unionist, at point blank range, seventeen-year-old Yessika Hoyos vowed that his murder would not be forgotten.

She kept the promise. Yessika became a lawyer and met face-to-face with one of her father's killers in prison in her unending search for higher-ups who allegedly ordered his death.

The journey has mostly been a painful one for her and many of the families of the more than 2,900 union members killed in Colombia since 1986.

Jorge Dario Hoyos's murder in 2001 was part of a spree that marked Colombia as the world's most dangerous place for unionists. The open season on labor activists was the major reason why the free trade agreement between the United States and Colombia was held up in Washington, D.C., for five years. Congress approved it only after the Obama Administration promoted a deal it had reached with Colombia to institute rights and protections for workers and unions.

But two years after the agreement went into effect, violence against union members lingers on. Murders are down, but threats and attacks on union members jumped by about 50 percent in the last year, especially for those trying to assert the trade agreement's promises for workers, say officials with the National Labor School in Medellin, a respected source on labor data.

"The threats have an impact on people. You don't need to kill that many people for others to know that there is danger," says Todd Howland, the Representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia.

Yessika Hoyos, for example, fled for her safety to the United States last year for several months after an underground group targeted her.

Hoyos belongs to a law firm that represents union members, human rights activists, and others caught up in Colombia's long civil war. It has joined an appeal to the International Criminal Court to intervene in Colombia because of what it describes as the government's failure to investigate officials' roles in union members' deaths.

Despite an increased effort to protect union officials and to prosecute the crimes against them, the government has failed to halt the threats, union officials say. Indeed, Colombias attorney general's office could point to only two convictions for threats against union members. And the vast majority of the murders have gone unsolved.

"The problem is that the government's response is haphazard and only in response to pressure," said Rhett Doumitt, who leads...