Referring to a study, Colombia’s attorney general says that social leaders who are members of Communal Action Boards are targeted more frequently by paramilitary groups.
Colombian Attorney General Nestor Humberto Martinez says that the greatest number of Colombians murdered over the past two years since the peace agreement was signed are social leaders who serve on Communal Action Boards (JAC).
“The greatest number of (murders) are of members of Community Action Boards,” said Martinez in a statement.
JACs began in the 1950s and are local-level councils where citizens decide upon, plan and develop community projects based on their own needs. The majority of JACs are in rural areas and members include mainly low-income Campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Colombian members of society.
The information, based on a report from the Office of the Ombusdsman, says that 37 percent of the 431 assassinations between Jan. 1, 2016 and Dec. 31, 2018 were JAC members or leaders.
According to Martinez, the assassinations of JAC leaders is “passively systematic.” The attorney general says that those responsible are paramilitary groups “such as the ‘Gulf Clan’ that works on behalf of narco traffickers and ‘Los Caparrapos’ ” he added.
Other organized crime rings suspected of taking part in the slew of killings over the past two years include Los Pelusos and the Black Eagles. However, 35 percent were killed by individuals with no known links to a criminal ring.
Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutierrez says there has been inadequate protection for people who serve as JAC members because there are so many of them.
“There are more than 62,000 Communal Action Boards registered in the country with around four million members making their protection quite complex,” the official said in a statement.
The attorney general assured the public the murders would not go unpunished.
However, the vast majority of the 189 kidnappings over the same amount of time remain immune to justice.
Nearly all of the killings took place in rural areas in departments along the coast, such as Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Nariño that are rich in mineral deposits for mining and have fertile soil that criminal rings seek for growing cocaine, which Campesino and Indigenous people use for growing vegetable and corn crops. These were also the departments that voted against right-wing President Ivan Duque and for left-leaning Gustavo Petro in the country’s electoral run-off last June.
Indigenous people made up 13 percent of those killed and farmers 10 percent. Union leaders and social leaders, Afro-Colombians and LGBTI population were the other main murder victims.
So far this year at least six social leaders have been murdered.
Land rights activists and member of a Victim’s Roundtable Maritza Quiroz Leiva was gunned down on Jan. 6 by armed hitmen who entered her rural home in San Isidro in Colombia’s Caribbean region. Her husband had been killed over the plot of land on which she killed. Prior to his death Quiroz’s husband had recovered the land after having been forcibly displaced from his home by armed groups.
No one was guarding Quiroz’s home at the time of her murder even though she had requested this from authorities after being threatened several times. Duque has offered no solution yet to the systematic killings.
UN Condemns Colombia ‘False Positives’ Assassination Attempt
UN urges Colombian authorities to investigate the attempts made on the life of the mother seeking justice for the extrajudicial killing of her son.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) condemned the attempts against the life of Alfamir Castillo, the mother of Darbey Mosquera Castillo, who was killed in 2008, as part of the “false positives” extrajudicial killings which rocked Colombia during President Alvaro Uribe’s administration.
Alberto Brunori, a spokesperson for the OHCHR stated, “The protection of the life and integrity of the victims of crimes against humanity is an imperative of international law and we trust in the decisive action of the JEP [Special Jurisdiction for Peace] the UNP [Special Protection Unit] and the police to prevent these “threats” from materializing.”
In an incident which took place at a location between the municipalities of Palmira and Pradera, Valle del Cauca, three armed men riding motorbikes are reported to have shot three times at Alfamir Castillo who was riding in a truck together with her UNP bodyguards. Nobody was hurt by the attackers whose shots only impacted the car, according to La FM news agency.
Castillo is under precautionary measures allotted to her by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights due to several attempts made against her during 2018 for her participation in an audience against General Mario Montoya Uribe, which was held under the auspices of JEP.
The threats made against Castillo have been acknowledged by both the JEP and the United Nations Rapporteur of the situation of human rights defenders Michel Frost in his recent visit to Colombia.
As a response to the attempts on Castillo’s life, the U.N. urged the attorney general to conduct an urgent investigation on the perpetrators of the attack and to hold them responsible to their actions.
General Montoya is currently undergoing a judicial process due to the “false positives” case.
In context, at least 1,750 members of Colombia’s army were involved in creating “false positives,” the name given to the practice of killing civilians and disguising them as combatants. According to Colombia’s Office of the Attorney General, this phenomenon claimed the lives of at least 2,248 persons between 1988 and 2014.
The Colombian government provided an incentive for these extrajudicial killings by issuing a secret order, called “Directive 29,” that offered a financial reward to those who killed guerrillas or paramilitaries.
6 Days, 6 Deaths: More Murder of Social Leaders in Colombia
Murdered Jan. 6 by hitmen for fighting for land rights in northern Colombia, Maritza Quiroz Leiva becomes the country’s 6th murder within six days of the new year.
Another Colombian rights activist was gunned down in her home for helping Afro-Colombian victims in the country’s long civil conflict.
Mother of four Maritza Quiroz Leiva was gunned down by armed hitmen in her rural home in San Isidro in Colombia’s Caribbean region.
Quiroz was an Afro-Colombian representative on the Santa Marta Victim’s Roundtable working on reparations for the torture, kidnapping, displacement, and sexual violence that vulnerable victims in the region experienced during the country’s 50 year conflict.
In late December, Quiroz had taken part in a government land redistribution ceremony in the Santa Marta region, part of the 2016 peace accords between the government and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). Colombia has one of Latin America’s biggest land access disparities where “0.1 percent of farms are … over 2,000 hectares in size and control 60 percent of land, while 81 percent of farms cover an area of only two hectares and occupy less than 5 percent of (arable) land” in Colombia, according to a 2014 Oxfam report.
Her death was lamented by those who worked with her to achieve land justice:
In the early morning today land rights leader of Santa Marta, Maritza Quiroz Leiva was murdered. We continue to count the deaths while the state and institutions ignore in the most cold way the massacre that the entire country is victim.
Quiroz and some 7.7 million people in Colombia have been internally displaced because of the armed conflict that supposedly ended with the peace agreement. However, over 400 land and human rights activists in rural and Caribbean regions have been gunned down by paramilitary groups hired mainly by drug traffickers since the accord went into effect in November 2016.
The hitmen broke into her rural home and shot her as her 22-year-old son hid. He later found his mom badly injured just outside their farm as Quiroz had tried to flee danger. She later died from the bullet wounds in a Santa Marta hospital, according to local media.
“We regret and strongly reject the murder of Maritza Quiroz Leiva, leader of victims in Santa Marta. No reason justifies the actions of this violence. (Colombia) is veering from peace,” said the mayor of Santa Marta, Rafael Alejandro Martinez, through his social networks.
Quiroz’s life had been threatened several times and her husband had been assassinated under the same circumstances which led her to flee to San Isidro.
She was the mother of four children and the sixth social leader to be killed so far in 2019, after 34-year-old Wilson Perez Ascanio was gunned down in the early morning of Jan. 5. He was a member of a Popular Constituent Assembly (MCP).
So far, 90 Campesino social leaders have been killed since President Ivan Duque took office in August 2018. The right-wing head of state has been criticized by locals for his indifference to the slew of murders and for not structurally addressing the situation that has only worsened since his inauguration.
