Colombian social leaders resist the violence of the conflict between ELN and FARC dissidents in the department of Arauca

On January 19, a car bomb exploded a few meters from a building in Saravena, in the Colombian department of Arauca, where around 60 social leaders were gathered who, despite this attack, remain determined to continue fighting for human rights in his territory.

The defenders were saved because hours before they put up makeshift barricades with plastic barrels that they filled with stones because the intention of the FARC dissidents, led by alias “Antonio Medina”, was to assassinate them..

The attack left one dead, Simeón Delgado, guard at the headquarters of the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA), in front of which the van that exploded and caused extensive damage to several buildings, including the Héctor Alirio Martínez, the one for social organizations, was parked. who was the target of the attack.

“These were times of great concern because there were around 60 social leaders and human rights defenders here. We really do not consider that they were capable of attacking a space where there are not only social organizations, but also institutions and community”, the president of the Joel Sierra Human Rights Foundation, Sonia López, tells Efe.

The attack occurred in a rather complicated context for Arauca, a department bordering Venezuela, in which, according to figures from the Ministry of Defense, between January 1 and February 21, there were 99 homicides, of which 45 occurred in Saravena.

There are also 1,781 victims of forced displacement as a result of the confrontations and threats, all of this fueled by a war to the death between the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents of the former FARC, which are the ones that have attacked the leaders.

Since the Colombian government and the FARC signed the peace agreement in November 2016, In Arauca, 21 human rights defenders have been murdered, according to the Somos Defensores programwith the fear that this new wave of violence will drastically increase this figure.

Many of these leaders, who live with fear of being attacked at any time, are accused, according to Efe, of being ELN militiamen by dissidencewhich they call paramilitary groups because they consider that they no longer have a political struggle and attack the civilian population.

chaos and resistance

Despite the fact that the attack occurred more than a month ago, the four-story building of the social organizations today has no windows and the only thing they have been able to repair are the exterior walls of the first floor, covered with bricks that have nothing to do with the concrete from the rest of the façade.

Inside, chaos reigns. Stacked mattresses in several rooms, disorganized or destroyed furniture and cracked walls in offices that have been days without anyone entering.

“Here we did not experience this type of situation for a long time,” says López, who lived through the attack and that when he goes up to the terrace of the Héctor Alirio Martínez, from where you can see the destruction in the surrounding buildings, you feel a kind of vertigo that you have never had.

Boost your region

Although violence has accompanied them almost all their lives, the Saravena leaders seek to boost their region. So strong is the social fabric of the area that the social organizations, in the absence of an aqueduct, decided to build one that provides water to more than 16,000 families in the municipality.

The Saravena Aqueduct, Sewerage and Toilet Company (Ecaaas), however, was also the victim on January 9 of an attack with explosives in which there were no deaths or injuries and which occurred a few meters from the center of the town, cordoned off and heavily guarded by the police.

“On January 9, a threat came through WhatsApp audios from ‘Antonio Medina’, who is commander of the dissident Front 28 (of the FARC) in which he threatened the presidents of boards, social leaders and projects, he threatened to kill them. That January 9, they threw a grenade at the Ecaaas community project,” laments the president of the Joel Sierra Human Rights Foundation..

Like her, there are dozens of leaders from Arauca who are under threat from armed groups and without any kind of protection from the state, not even after the attack.

However, his message is very clear: “our commitment is to stay in this territory, we are not going to leave here. Here we have experienced different actions with which they have wanted to remove us and we have a clear slogan, which is the defense of life and the defense of the territory”. (I)