CPTnet
20 August 2012
COLOMBIA: Peasants gather to defend rights amid ongoing persecution

by Alix Lozano

The first Miguel Angel Gonzalez Gutierrez peasant training institute, held from 29 June to 2 July in Medellin, was dedicated to strengthening human rights protection, work that CAHUCOPANA has been advancing in northeast Antioquia over the last eight years. In attendance were regional coordinators, youth and women’s organizers and regional communicators. Teams from Bogota and Medellin developed the event’s processes and methodologies.

Participants deepened their understanding and analysis in four areas: Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law; Victims’ Rights to Truth, Justice and Reparations; Historical Memory; and Land and Territorial Rights. CPT, invited to address “The Rights to Land and Territory: Agrarian Conflict and the Structures of Agriculture,” clarified the role of foreign interventions and transnational business interests in dispossessing peasants, indigenous communities and Afro-Colombians of land and territory.

Medellin, Antioquia’s capital and administrative center, made for an ideal location for the event. The institute offered northeastern Antioquia’s farming communities a view into the region’s political realities and opportunities to form new alliances and relationships with other organizations working toward common goals. For example, participants connected with LATEPAZ, an organization led mostly by female heads of household displaced by violence from the Urabá region and now residing in Medellin’s La Cruz barrio.

Neighborhoods of Medellin came under paramilitary control starting in 2002. This process – which occurred with collusion from Colombian military and police as a response to the presence of FARC and ELN guerrilla groups – has led to the violent deaths of an untold number of women and men who have defended their right to a dignified life on their land.

On 7 June 2012, Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader and founder of LATEPAZ, was murdered on a bus. Her assassin fled after shooting her in the head using a silenced gun.

The assassinations of Cordoba and other women give evidence of the constant persecution and aggression directed at community leaders throughout the country. In spite of all the reports and denouncements, official negligence in protecting people’s lives remains a plain reality.

Between July 2010 and April 2011, 206 individual acts of aggression were registered against human rights defenders, including 34 assassinations. During the same period, 127 social or human rights organizations were victims of some type of aggression that put their members’ lives and safety at risk and prevented them from carrying out their legal and legitimate work of defending human rights. This does not take into account the violent deaths of women in Northeastern Antioquia, whose life stories rip the hearts of those who hear them.

That this scenario is playing out in a capital city like Medellin shows the level of degradation a country can come to when humans are treated as objects and certain people consider themselves lords over others’ lives and destinies.

This is why more institutes for community leaders are needed in order to raise consciousness and sensitivity that life must be held as sacred, freedom of expression protected as a right of all people who live in transparent democracies, and the lives of all men and women must be defended.