By Rebecca Kirkpatrick (CS Intern)
More than 26 human rights defenders have been murdered in Cauca,
Colombia, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Reporters Without Borders, Colombia currently ranks 134 out of 180 countries on the 2021 World Press Freedom Index. Violence against Indigenous leaders
and activists in Latin America, as well as against the non-Indigenous
activists who work with them is, unfortunately, neither new nor unusual.
Cultural Survival’s Indigenous Rights Radio recently spoke with Vilma Rocío Almendra (Nasa and Misak), a member of the Pueblos en Camino
initiative, and Diana Puyazos, a newscaster with the Asociación de
Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca (Association of Indigenous
Councils of Northern Cauca), to discuss this ongoing violence and to
specifically address the murder of Beatriz Cano, a communicator with the
Asociación Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca.
On June 4, 2021, Cano, a fierce defender of the rights and territories
of the Nasa people, along with her five-year-old daughter, her partner,
César Galarza, and community member Floresmino Tróchez, who are also
members of the Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca, was
attacked in her car by a group of armed men at a routine checkpoint in
the town of Santander de Quilichao. The men opened fire first on police
officers who had just granted Cano and her companions passage through
the checkpoint. “When they were about to give us passage so that we
could continue in the car, the sound of gunshots began to ring out. At
first I thought it was gunpowder, until I felt that my feet were
wounded," said Galarza. Everyone in the car was seriously injured, and
Cano succumbed to her injuries in hospital three days later, on June 7,
2021. The two police officers, Carlos Delgado Jiménez and María Isabel
Angulo Rivera, as well as two other civilians and members of the
Asociación Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca, Aleida Perafán and
Juan David Guegue, were also killed in the attack.
“The war situation we are living in this territory called Colombia is
not new, is it?” Almendra said on the Indigenous Rights Radio Program.
“...This so-called Colombia was established with very serious forms of
domination that we are still experiencing, such as armies, right? How
armies defend power and what they do is they subjugate with force those
who oppose the interests of a so-called nation state.” The Nasa people
have experienced a great deal of violence at the hands of the State over
the years. Encounters with state aggressors have led to the deaths of
many Indigenous community members, including José Abelardo Liz—a Nasa
Indigenous communicator killed in a military attack on August 13, 2020—and Eider Campo Hurtado, a Nasa journalist who was killed by four heavily armed men in a raid on his house on March 4, 2018.
“And it is not only happening in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela,
but all over the world,” Almendra stated. “In other words, it is a new
world order that puts the States, public policies, territories and
everything that can dominate, usurp and commercialize in a position
where a few can accumulate profits, which are the transnational and
corporate elites.” According to the Human Rights Watch,
over 400 human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia since
2016, when the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC) signed a landmark Peace Agreement to demobilize the
country’s then-largest armed group and prevent the murder of human
rights defenders. Killings of human rights defenders in Colombia have
increased, however, as a result of paramilitary groups fighting for
control of territory for illegal activities such as coca production.
“Another thing that happened at the same time as the failure to comply
with everything that was proposed...was that the number of
assassinations of social leaders in this country increased,” stated
Almendra. “So here there has always been death, here there have always
been selective assassinations, but after the signing of the agreements
we have already had almost 300 signatories of peace assassinated.”
The work that the human rights defenders in Colombia do has made them
targets for violence and intimidation. Almendra explained, “Because the
majority of social leaders that have been killed in this country are
[killed] because they have opposed fracking, they have opposed oil
exploitation, they have imposed themselves, they have rejected
hydroelectric plants, they have rejected mining, they have rejected
monocultures.” Human rights defenders like Beatriz Cano put their lives
on the line on a daily basis, going up against big corporations and
government entities to ensure their land and their communities are
protected. “Over the course of almost five years, that is to say the
last five years, they have murdered around 67 communicators and all of
them have been fighting in defense or for control of territory,” Diana
Puyazos told Indigenous Rights Radio. “For example, in the case of what
happened with César Galarza,” she said, “who apart from leaving this
space as a communicator, is an artist, he is also a musician. So, since
through his lyrics he had been denouncing different situations that
occur within our territories and since, let us say, there is this
persecution, this persecution for those who raise their voice or for
those who denounce everything that is occurring within our territories,
then there is a total risk from the public forces, by, let’s say, the
legal and illegal armed groups that exist within the territories in
these scenarios.”
Oftentimes, no one is held accountable for the deaths of Indigenous
human rights defenders, Puyazos explained. “At the moment no one is
being held responsible for these deaths, nor are there any suspects, or
the murders are just attributed to armed groups or the state itself
ignores its own involvement in these events,” she stated. “Here in
Colombia, there is no access to justice.”
Puyazos’s respect for her late colleague, Cano, is clear. “So she kind
of embodied the whole issue of commitment. I believe that if there is
something she taught us, it was that, the issue of commitment, but also
the issue of the meetings. She made the communicators a family. I think
she was a woman with a lot of initiative, with strong opinions, with a
lot of dignity, with a lot of commitment even within our communication
spaces, because it was not only us here as a network, but also the
coordination of other communication collectives at a zonal and regional
level.”
The deaths of Beatriz Cano and César Galarza, as well as many other leaders and activists like them,
weigh heavy in the hearts of those who knew them and worked with them.
Puyazos told Indigenous Rights Radio, “...it has also cost us a lot to
recover from all that, precisely because of the type of woman she is.
The pain that all this has caused and also the pain of not knowing who
did it and not knowing exactly what happened. Why did it happen? It
hurts us and it tears us apart, no? But I think that also the legacy
that in some way she has left to us….is quite strong…we must also learn
not to be afraid and to have the hope intact that someday these things
will stop happening…I believe that this is the legacy that she leaves
us. To remain steadfast in our work, to commit ourselves more, because
if not, then everything would have been in vain.”
In Memoriam: Colombian Indigenous Rights Defenders
This digital report provides a brief overview of the devastating situation in Colombia, based on the names of Indigenous defenders included in Cultural Survival's widely read 2019 "In Memoriam" report profiling 28 Indigenous defenders. This addendum report provides an update to a section of that 2019 report on Colombian defenders, expanding on their important contributions for justice. We honor the legacies of these Colombian defenders and add our voice to the global calls to hold perpetrators accountable for their tragic deaths.
The report was compiled by The Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas is housed at the Research Center for the Americas (RCA) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The RCA co-published this report with Cultural Survival.
source ; .culturalsurvival.org
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