Kimberley Brown
Clemencia Carabali has received death threats for her activism working for women and Afro-Colombian rights in the north of the department of Cauca.
In June, Clemencia Carabali received her first death threat this year. She was in her office planning workshops for the local community, when an unknown man called her personal phone and told her she had until 5 p.m. that day to leave the territory, or be killed. Then he hung up.
The call might have been enough to make some people flee, but the sturdy Carabali stayed put. The human rights defender has long been working with Afro-descendent communities in the north of Cauca, a department along Colombia’s Pacific coast. She teaches them about their rights, and how to legally defend and reclaim territories that were violently taken from them during the country’s five-decade civil war.
“We’re trying to plant a small seed so that something changes,” Carabali tells me in an interview at her office in July. “If we don’t do it for ourselves, nobody will do it for us.”
But her decision to stay in Cauca doesn’t mean she’s not afraid. Her voice drops when she speaks about the phone call, and she is not allowed to tell details about two other death threats she has received since then, both of which are currently under police investigation.
“It’s really hard . . . because we know that this is a sign of the hard times that are coming,” she says, staring into the distance.
These kinds of threats are taken very seriously in Colombia, where it is becoming increasingly dangerous to be a human rights advocate. Since the government and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, signed a historic peace agreement in 2016, ending more than a half century of war, at least 340 social leaders have been assassinated. Among those killed are human rights advocates, indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders, local politicians, leftist professors, and journalists.
“It’s really hard . . . because we know that this is a sign of the hard times that are coming,”
One of the most recent documented cases is a leader among the indigenous Nasa people, Holmes Alberto Niscue, a longtime advocate for indigenous land rights. He was killed by three gunshot wounds to the head in front of his home in Tumaco, in the department of Nariño, only 200 meters from a local police station. Afro-Colombian leader and avid defender of natural resources Luis Alberto Rivas Gómez was also killed by hired gunmen near his home in the department of Antioquia in August.
The assassinations have caused alarm among the international community, with everyone from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations denouncing the killings and demanding that the Colombian government do more to protect human rights workers, including strengthening its justice system.
Even the United States, long a close ally of Colombia and its largest contributor of both humanitarian aid and military funding, has spoken out about the abuse. During the last session of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review, U.S. State Department official Huda Ibrahim told Colombian officials that the United States was “concerned” about these threats to human rights workers and the high rate of impunity for their murders. She also recommended that Colombia promptly hold guilty parties accountable and intensify their investigations around these cases.
Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the director for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit advocacy group, traces the problem to deeply rooted structural issues within Colombia, including a criminal justice system that is “just failing people, especially when it comes to arresting those who commit attacks against [human rights] defenders.”
The Colombian government has recognized and denounced these assassinations, while authorities claim they have made progress in nearly 50 percent of investigations, though it is unclear how many actual convictions this has led to.
The government denies there are any systemic problems behind the violence. It claims the assassinations can be explained by the rise of criminal organizations and narco-traffickers that have gained strength and territory since the FARC demobilized.
But the real explanation is likely much more complicated.
Colombia’s wave of assassinations, attacks, and threats against social leaders, observers say, are being carried out by paramilitary groups and hired gunmen.
“The fact that there are existent remnant paramilitary groups, something that Colombia has denied exists, is a problem,” says Sánchez-Garzoli, adding, “They’re a problem, and they’re a major threat because they are able to kill all of these people.”
Colombian paramilitary groups were created in waves in the 1980s and 1990s by companies and government agencies looking for extra security against leftwing guerrilla groups; over the years, they became more violent and committed thousands of human rights abuses. Officially, they demobilized between 2002 and 2006 after negotiations with the government, which is why the state refuses to acknowledge that they exist.
But according to international watch bodies and the communities that have lived through successive waves of violence, these groups simply came back under new names.
A joint report released in February by Colombian think tank Dejusticia, Oxford University, and other institutions found that more than 800 businesses hired paramilitary groups over the years since demobilization. In several cases, this involved paying these armed men to target social and union leaders who clashed with their business model, says the report. The service became instrumental for local businesses.
The government’s failure to acknowledge the existence of remnant paramilitary forces is making the problem harder to address.
These groups were also politically and financially backed by major politicians including former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who is also the mentor and close ally of the new President Iván Duque, who took office in August. Many of these politicians, including Uribe, are under investigation for these alleged connections.
According to Sánchez-Garzoli, the government’s failure to acknowledge that these paramilitary forces exist is making the problem harder to address. “Just seeing them as criminal bands or criminals linked to narco-trafficking is really simplifying who they are,” she says.
“They are obviously targeting people who are seen as a threat politically, or a threat economically, because [the victims] are trade unionists or they’re fighting against a dam or . . . they’re Afro-descendent or indigenous and don’t want to give up their land.”
Between the years 2007 and 2009, after the demobilization, human rights defenders, union leaders, community leaders, and journalists were widely targeted by paramilitary forces. High-ranking government officials accused these leaders of collaborating with FARC guerrillas, thus discrediting their work and making them vulnerable to arrests and attacks.
Today, the targets of these attacks are not just people who espouse a leftist ideology but also those trying to defend their territory or make land claims—which is encouraged by the rural reforms laid out in the final peace deal.
Approximately eight million hectares of land were stolen during Colombia’s civil war. Researchers say the vast majority of this area was taken by paramilitary groups (with the FARC responsible for only 6.25 percent of all stolen property), who then sold it to ranchers, miners, large landowners, or multinationals, leaving millions of small farmers homeless. The peace process aims to rectify this by redistributing land to farmers and communities whose territory was stolen.
But Ariel Ávila, a journalist and investigator with the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation in Bogotá, says this is a problem for those who don’t want to give up their acquired territory.
“Much of this [stolen] land now rests in the hands of business owners and politicians.”
“Much of this [stolen] land now rests in the hands of business owners and politicians,” Ávila says. “These people are scared of truth and do not want to give back the land they stole.” He believes these are the people behind the mass killings of social leaders.
The violence against social leaders, Ávila says, is being carried out in areas where the fighting during the war was strongest. This is where more people had been dispossessed from their land, and where the illicit economy—such as illegal mining and coca farming—is still strong.
The north of Cauca is among the most deadly regions for human rights defenders. Carabali says several of her colleagues have been killed over the last couple of years, including Afro-descendent and indigenous leaders fighting against both illegal mining and large scale mining companies in their territory.
Under former President Juan Manuel Santos, various mechanisms were created to address this rise in violence against human rights defenders. These included a special investigation unit with the national police and another unit with the district attorney’s office to follow up on these crimes.
While these are positive changes, officials must make more of an effort to target the “intellectual authors” behind the assassinations, rather than those who carry out the crime, Ávila says.
Earlier this year, seventy-three members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging the U.S. government to put more pressure on Colombia. This included urging the South American country to intensify its investigations and prosecution efforts, “to swiftly bring to justice those who plan and orchestrate these murders, and not just the ‘triggermen’ who execute the killings.”
President Duque has also vowed to take the issue seriously and take concrete steps to address it. But many Colombians are skeptical, considering his close ties with Uribe and the landowning class.
Carabali, for her part, is not optimistic that changes will come with this new government, saying her memories of terror during the Uribe era are still too present.
Indeed, many people in Duque’s government have criticized human rights defenders. Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal called them “lazy,” and Senators Carlos Felipe Mejía and María del Rosario Guerra publicly criticized a march held on August 8 to denounce the mass killings.
Carabali, for her part, is not optimistic that changes will come with this new government, saying her memories of terror during the Uribe era are still too present.
But she does plan on continuing her work in the north of Cauca. She feels that the United Nations, the national police force, and her colleagues are all looking out for her, waiting to report on anything suspicious. This is all she can do until the government actually creates the conditions for peace, by following through on the provisions in the peace plan to redistribute land and increase real equality and opportunities for people in rural areas.
“We have been trying to build peace, the others have brought us war,” Carabali says. “That’s what we live in Colombia, a war that isn’t ours.”