Peacetime spells death for Colombia’s activists
Nicholas Casey JAMUNDI, COLOMBIA — First, he survived a machete attack. Months later, he begged a shadowy armed group to spare his life after hearing that his name appeared on its hit list.
Then, in late July, armed men followed Libardo Moreno, a 76-year-old farming activist, back to his ranch here in western Colombia. They came to the gate, asking for help with a flat tire. When Moreno brought over an air pump, they shot him in the neck and chest.
“He said, ‘They killed me, they killed me,’ ” recounted his wife, Margarita Fernández, who found him splayed on the concrete, blood pooling around him. “The motorcycles took off, and they just left him there.”
A chilling aspect of the bloodshed isn’t falling: Killings of the nation’s activists, including union organizers, local councilmen, indigenous leaders and environmentalists who are under vigorous attack across the country.
If anything, the killings appear to be on the rise in peacetime.
Moreno is one of at least 190 community leaders to be killed this year, which means the country will probably far exceed the number of activist murders recorded in all of 2017, according to Colombia’s Institute of Studies for Peace and Development, a research group.
Few of the cases have been solved by Colombia’s government, yet a pattern has emerged: Almost all the murders have taken place in regions that FARC guerrillas abandoned last year when they demobilized as part of the peace deal.
The departure of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, was at first a boon for activists and community organizers — a chance to push for infrastructure projects needed for decades, like roads, aqueducts and services in the countryside.
But the government has yet to take control of many of the areas the rebels left. In their place, a mix of drug traffickers, paramilitary groups and breakaway rebel factions that rejected the peace agreement have taken over.
These groups now see the activists’ development projects as a threat, bringing unwanted attention and potentially interfering with their illegal activities, residents say. And that has put activists at the mercy of criminal groups.
“In these areas the FARC left, the state never arrived,” said Carlos Guevara, of the Somos Defensores, a research group that monitors attacks against activists.
In just one bloody twoday period this summer, 10 activists were killed in eight provinces, including a leftwing political organizer, a village leader and two representatives of an indigenous group shot dead on a country road the night of July 6.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, said the killings of the social leaders could represent the beginning of a larger social breakdown in Colombia, despite the peace agreement with the FARC.
“There was a period of tranquility where people were holding their breath as town councils and social leaders were practicing politics freely for the first time,” he said. “But that is over now. There was a window which opened up, and the state did not jump through — but other armed groups did.”
The killings present a daunting challenge for Colombia’s new president, Iván Duque, who took charge Aug. 7 and has pledged to make changes to the peace deal, which he calls flawed and in need of vast corrections.
In a response to written questions from The New York Times, the government called the killings “a grave phenomenon which deeply worries the president.” It blamed the deaths on Colombia’s past years of violence and said the government was trying to find new ways of protecting community organizers and activists.
“Colombia is a democratic country that offers guarantees to practice politics,” the government statement said.
Other parts of the government have a different view. In July, the country’s inspector general, an independent office that oversees public officials, said in some cases criminal groups had worked with the police and military to organize the killings.
The killings also have the attention of the United States, which provided the country with roughly $900 million in assistance between 2017 and 2018, split between anti-narcotics aid and measures for development and enacting the peace deal.
“It’s something we’ve talked to the Colombian government about quite a bit,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters in Bogotá. “To have lives threatened is unacceptable. And the United States always feels like we need to have our say to remind governments that we’re watching.”
Yet the killings continue, including at least another 13 in August. Here in Valle de Cauca, the province where Moreno was shot dead, members of his town council have considered a mass resignation to avoid being killed.
Even in this province, where more than a dozen other social leaders had been killed this year, Moreno’s death came as a surprise. A former agricultural economist, he seemed to pose a threat to no one, especially given the projects he backed, like an aqueduct and a nursery school.
The area had once been ground zero in the conflict with rebels. In the 1990s, the FARC repeatedly robbed the only shopping mall in the area in deadly raids. But the war was winding down, and Moreno wanted to organize the area’s farmers.
“He immediately identified all the problems that had been years in the making,” recalled Andrés Moreno, his son.
Moreno joined the village council and started a program for farmers to pool resources to grow and sell plantains. He pushed local officials to begin building an aqueduct to reach farmers in the countryside, something they had long said was impossible because of the rebels.
Then, last June, the rebels disarmed — a moment many residents had waited a lifetime to see. For a while, people in the village, Las Pilas, thought the conflict was over. But the government sent no one to safeguard Moreno’s village: no police, no soldiers.
Drug traffickers had already taken notice of Las Pilas, villagers say. It sits at the foothills of steep mountains that cross to the country’s largest Pacific ports and have long hidden coca leaf farms and clandestine labs used to process cocaine. Moreno was concerned that his development proposals might be running afoul of the new drug traffickers entering the area, his family said.