Amnesty International presented a report on Wednesday in which it pointed to Colombia as the deadliest country for human rights defenders, with 13 murders. Just a day later the figure had increased to 17 social leaders riddled so far in 2022. More than one every two days.
Herman Naranjo Quintero was one of the last. The country learned of his kidnapping and murder in real time through social networks. Minutes after being taken from his house in Arauca by armed men, his wife posted a video asking for his life to be spared. The Senate Peace Commission traveled to the area to request his release, the Prosecutor’s Office did the same, but on Tuesday he was found dead. He was a social leader affiliated with the Community Action Board of Corocito in Tame, where the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the FARC dissidents wage a war that has generated displacement and murders. “We ask that you please respect his life, we have nothing to do with this war, we are just workers,” his wife begged minutes after the kidnapping, along with her two children and the animals in the background.
A few hours apart, they killed Julio César Bravo. The image of him with the traditional hat is seen on the social networks of Indepaz, the NGO that religiously counts the murders of these defenders every day. With a sad number 15 appears Bravo, who was the president of the Council of Córdoba, in the department of Nariño, in the south of the country, and leader of the Males Indigenous Reservation. The councilman was assassinated on February 1 in the Guitungal village, in his town, when a man shot him without saying a word. In the area, as in many corners of Colombia, dissident groups, drug gangs and the ELN guerrillas dispute the territories and assassinate these leaders.
“It is very difficult to know in detail what is happening, to identify the perpetrators, the circumstances in which the murders take place because there is a pattern of impunity,” says Rodrigo Sales, researcher for the situation of human rights defenders in the Americas, at Amnesty International.
Another of the patterns that have been identified in the country, explains the researcher, is the lack of protection or, in many cases, the inadequate measures for the type of risk faced by human rights defenders. “In the case of Colombia and in countries like Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, the protection schemes were designed with the idea of granting material measures, that is, vests, armored cars. These measures would work in an urban context, but in a peasant and indigenous context they are not adequate”.
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The case of Luz Marina Arteaga, a human rights defender from peasant communities in Meta, murdered on January 17 after five days of being disappeared, is an example of this risk. The leader had protection measures from the National Protection Unit since April 2019. However, “the measures granted, mostly of a material nature, did not mitigate the risk she faced” and in 2020 she had informed the National Protection Unit that “ one of the measures was not culturally appropriate to the region in which she lived”.
Sales affirms that another error of these measures is that they have an individual and not a collective approach. “Colombia has not yet understood or implemented measures with this collective dimension, so what happens is that a social leader is assassinated and the community chooses another leader and it happens again. This implies that people who do not have protection, because at that time they do not have the main leadership, although they are human rights defenders, are exposed to death.”
The leaders assassinated in Colombia have a common struggle: they are dedicated to the defense of the land, the territory and the environment. Afro-descendants, women and indigenous people are the most vulnerable. “The government does not see social leaders as a strength for peace, but instead stigmatizes them and that means that social leadership is viewed with reserve, qualified as a possible accomplice,” explains Camilo González Posso, president of the Institute of Development Studies and peace (Indepaz).
The escalation of violence is concentrated on the borders, both with Venezuela, and with Peru and Ecuador, but it also affects the Cauca region, in the southeast of the country. In the latter region, on January 24, Albeiro Camayo Güetio, leader of the indigenous guard in the Las Delicias reservation, municipality of Buenos Aires, was assassinated. According to information from the Fabric for the Defense of Life and Human Rights (TDVD), Albeiro Camayo died when alleged members of a paramilitary group fired on the community after the indigenous guard expelled them from the territory. Breiner David Cucuñame, a 14-year-old environmentalist boy, was also killed in this area in an attack on the indigenous guard.
“There is an exacerbation of violence and several dynamics: on the one hand, the disputes between dissidents and residual groups in the border areas; In the case of Arauca, the ELN sees a strategic territory in dispute both in Colombia and in Venezuela and reacts with a campaign of attacks. This added to the fact that the Public Force is deploying a strong military initiative in the border territories”, explains Posso, for whom the breach of the peace agreement by the Government of Iván Duque is at the center of the humanitarian crisis. “That of this Government is security for war,” he adds.
In the midst of this atmosphere of intimidation, there is concern about the escalation of violence that may occur in the upcoming electoral season in Colombia and that the assassination of social leaders continues. Like the one that just happened while we’re writing this article. The new victim is Juan Carlos Nieto Calvario, leader of Cabuyaro, in the Meta region. “With Juan Carlos there would be 17 human rights leaders and defenders assassinated in 2022 and 1,303 since the signing of the peace agreement,” reports Indepaz on his Twitter account, which has become a counter of incessant deaths in the country.
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