“2022 began with serious damage against social leaders throughout the country,” said the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation (Pares).
To the murder of nine social leaders at the beginning of the electoral year, a series of massacres has been added in Colombia that show a “degradation of violence”, according to various organizations warned this Sunday.
One of the victims is Breiner Cucuñame, who was 14 years old and wanted to be an indigenous guard; In fact, when he was not attending school, he patrolled with the older ones wearing his red and green scarf, the identifying colors of those who take care of the reservations.
Last January 14, members of the Jaime Martínez column, one of the many FARC dissident groups, shot him; Guillermo Chicame, another indigenous guard, also died during the attack, and the episode did not end in a massacre because members of the National Protection Unit (UNP) repelled the attack.
“The indigenous guard has been characterized as the organization that defends the territory against any interest that goes against the communities and is, in that sense, the first link found by an armed organization like Jaime Martínez that tries to impose its order and maintain the drug trafficking business”, the coordinator of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz), Leonardo González, explained to Efe.
To date, Indepaz has registered nine murders of social leaders in 2022, the same as the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation (Pares).
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Breiner and Guillermo were joined on January 17 by Luz Marina Arteaga, a peasant leader, doctor and land claimant who had disappeared five days earlier and whose body was found on the banks of the Meta River, and Mario Jonathan Palomino, a 35-year-old school teacher. years old, environmental defender, assassinated in Carmen de Viboral (Antioquia).
“2022 began with serious damage against social leaders throughout the country”, assured Pares in a report this Sunday: “The scenario shows a degradation of violence that should alert the entire international community early”.
A massacre every two days
The figures for 2021, although lower than those for 2020 in terms of murders of social leaders (171 according to Indepaz, 145 according to the Ombudsman’s Office and 78 according to the UN), continue to warn, especially in the case of massacres, that yes they were higher than those of 2020 and 96 were committed with 335 victims.
This year the same trend follows: in 20 days 10 massacres have been committed, according to Indepaz. These are members of a family who are killed in the middle of a road, as happened in Ocaña (Norte de Santander) on January 20, or who are taken from their home in the middle of the night to be killed, as happened in the rural area of El Paraíso (Putumayo, south).
In that case, one of the people, Wilson Costez, was president of a Community Action Board, a leader like Nilson Gil, who was killed in another massacre along with an 11-year-old girl and a young man on January 17 in the municipality from Medio San Juan (Chocó, northwest).
“The (communal) leaders or presidents of JAC are the ones who have mainly been the object of this political violence by these groups precisely because they are the first organizational links”, Diego Alejandro Restrepo, Peers analyst, stressed to Efe.
Just as these leaders are assassinated “to make it easier for the armed groups to exercise their control”, the massacres are committed as a type of “violence that has an impact on the symbolic and that frightens the enemy and the civilian population”Restrepo explained.
It is a way, not of establishing territorial control of the armed groups, but of “trying to impose rules, logic,” adds González from Indepaz. “What the practice of massacres wants is to leave a lesson,” he stressed.
fight for control
Since the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC in 2016, groups left out of that agreement as the ELN guerrilla or the Clan del Golfo (heir to the paramilitaries) they began a dispute over territory and control of activities such as illegal mining or drug trafficking to which have been added others who left the agreement.
This has led to this fatal start to the year, where “it is not that there is an order at the national level because no group has national dominance,” says González, but the ground is fertilized for the violence to continue multiplying.
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The government’s response is “an almost nonexistent, unstructured security policy that replicates the same militaristic logic that has not worked historically in Colombia.”, as defined by Restrepo.
2022 is also an electoral year in Colombia, with which it is expected that violence may increase in the coming weeks, since, as they assure from Pares, “violence continues to be a mechanism of political competition”.
“We have found that in many cases there are alliances between political clans, private security groups, armed groups that operate in the territories and public forces, which means that those who constitute a threat to their political privilege are considered military targets and are eliminated violent way”, pointed out the analyst of this organization.
Although these massacres and murders of the last two weeks do not seem to have anything to do with electoral violence, the Pares observatory has recorded 140 victims of electoral violence up to December 16, 16 of them murdered (I)
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