About Social Leaders
753 Murders (and counting)
"In the sea of injustice where sins abound,
where crimes of greed have taken many lives,
neither in the press nor in the news nor in state records,
the crimes produce rebellion of the people”
- Free Soul
“There is more repression of individual freedom here than in any country we’ve been through. (…) The atmosphere is tense and it seems a revolution may be brewing. The countryside is in open revolt and the army is powerless to suppress it” (Guevara, 2003: 157).
The revolt Che Guevara refers to was called La Violencia. La Violencia gave rise to rebellious farmers, who not much later mobilised into several guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) (Leech, 2011: 15). The FARC came to be the largest and longest insurgency in Latin America, fighting for over half a century. It controlled large areas of Colombia, and “at its peak from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s the FARC numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 fighters” (Ibid: 99).
However, in 2016, president Santos signed a peace agreement with the FARC, ending the longest lasting insurgency in Latin America. Santos even received a Nobel prize for his efforts, and the country and its people were filled with hope that the violence would for once and for all be left in the past.
But what happens when to a peace agreement when the agreeing parties do not fulfill their promises? The answer to this question is obvious: the war continues and violence returns.
Since the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC, there have been weekly assassinations of leaders who were fighting for the protection of the environment and its resources, seeking land restitution, protecting of ancestral territories. People who were leading communities to protest against the violence, demanding justice in the face of crimes by both paramilitaries and the state, fighting for a just and inclusive society. Individuals that worked day in day out to end poverty and offer new opportunities to their people, so that their communities would not fall into the hands of criminals. They protected children from abuse, youth from gangs and guerrilas. And these are just a few of the things they did to create a compassionate, inclusive and peaceful Colombia.
Now the question is, why are these people being killed? Because protecting the environment, creating opportunities, weakening crime, putting an end to violence and asking for justice, benefits us all, doesn’t it? Who is threatened by an environmental, just, peaceful and inclusive Colombia?
Well, there are many possible answers and possibly some names come to your mind: maybe those who need the war to continue in order to keep accumulating wealth. Maybe multinational corporations that want to exploit resources at expense of human life. Or maybe some powerful people realise that when the people unite, they can fight against anything and anyone, and that is why they need the fear stay.
According to journalistic sources, NGOs and governmental institutions, there are many different actors responsible for these crimes, from gangs to companies, guerrillas, paramilitaries and even state entities:
"Until now there is no exact data on who is giving the orders to commit these crimes, what is certain is that the bullets are fired from weapons wielded by many hands" (La Republica, 2021)
"In most of the murders of social leaders the authorship is unknown. In those cases in which the perpetrator is presumed we find a varied set of victimizers: paramilitary groups, the ELN, the EPL, FARC-EP dissidents, private security groups and the public forces" (Maria Delgado Barón).
Whoever is responsible for these murders, the one thing we know for sure, is that they should stop. No amount of money is worth a human life and no dispute of ideologies is worth the killing of anyone.