34 Colombian Social Leaders Assassinated in the First Month of the Duque Government

By Himelda Ascanio on September 11, 2018

Murdered social leader Leidy Correa Valle, 25

Iván Duque, in his inauguration speech on August 7, spoke of protecting the lives of social leaders and human rights defenders; later, in public events, he again referred to stopping selective and coordinated assassinations, in which a community leader is killed every day. However, the death toll in August increased: 34 leaders were killed.

In rejection of this genocide of “political cleansing,” representatives of the House and Senate held a hearing in the Colombian Congress on September 5 to defend the lives of leaders of social movements. They denounced the different forms of persecution used by the regime against social protest and political opponents, such as how they are discredited by depicting them as part of networks of subversion, being harassed and threatened by para state agents, judicial persecution and illegal follow ups. Opposition members of the Congress demanded that the government show results in protecting the lives of human rights leaders and defenders.

In observing who the victims of the last few days, it is clear what part of social society they represent and how the state repeats the patterns of crime against them.

Who was Alirio Arenas?

Alirio Antonio Arenas Gómez, President of the Municipal Council Convention was elected by the Indigenous and Social Alternative Movement (MAIS). As part of the Popular Constituent Movement (MCP); he participated in the presidential campaign of Colombia Humana. He was recognized as a natural leader of the Province of Ocaña, North of Santander.

His work as a social leader was developed in the village of San Isidro, in the rural area of Convencion, where he was the President of the Communal Action Board, a region that for decades has maintained a social leadership that mobilizes and organizes the communities against conditions of poverty, state abandonment and violence.

Alirio had denounced death threats against him, but had not been designated a security team, even though it had already been approved by the National Protection Unit (UNP).

The hitmen took his life in the early hours of September 2, in the Belén neighborhood of Ocaña, an area that is highly militarized. Johnny García Guerrero was also injured in the attack.

Amparo Paola was an indigenous leader

Amparo Paola Rodríguez Muchavisoy was a leader of the Inga Kamentsá people, she worked as an indigenous teacher at the Alto Sardinas School, at the Atún Ñami Rural Educational Center, in Villagarzón, in the southern department of Putumayo. She was murdered along with her husband Alonso Taicus Guanga, a farmer from the Awa village. The hit men also left her daughter, a minor, injured.

On September 2 at 9:30 a.m., the three hired killers arrived at the Playa Larga indigenous reservation, located in the village of Florida Alto Sardinas, in the village of La Castellana, three hours from Villagarzón, Putumayo. It is striking how the hitmen moved by river through areas that were extensively monitored by technology to measure illicit crops and oil exploitation by Gran Tierra and Emeral Energy companies.

In the Putumayo 12 social leaders have been assassinated in 2018.

On September 3, several assassins murdered Norberto Jaramillo at his residence in Tarazá, Antioquia. He was President of the Community Action Board of the village of La Envidia, who promoted the substitution of illicit crops and participated in several mobilization processes with the Bajo Cauca Peasant Association.

With this assassination, 25 social leaders have been assassinated in that Department and more than 4,000 people have been displaced from the territory. In Tarazá, the leaders who work on the plans to substitute illicit crops are being exterminated by parastatal squads such as Los Caparrapos and the Urabeños.

Andrés Felipe was a union leader in the teachers’ union

Near the Olympic Village of Villavicencio, on the night of September 5, several hired assassins on motorcycles murdered Professor Gilberto Frade Puentes, Secretary of Union Affairs of the Association of Educators of Meta (ADEM), a teacher at the Manuela Beltrán School.

All this is a Political Genocide

It is called Genocide when a human group is systematically eliminated for a specific reason.

The targets are evident, cruel and ruthless: a social leader or political opponent is murdered every day. This is selected genocide more intense than that perpetrated by the regime 30 years ago, against the left-wing parties Patriotic Union and Popular Front.

The similarity is that the persecuted are the same: the popular leaders. And the murderers are always the same, hired paramilitary killers.

Behind each hitman there is always someone else who has paid for the murder. These are the leaders of the regime, high commanders of the Armed Forces, businessmen of the transnational corporations, landowners and big capitalists, who consider the social leaders as “the internal enemy”, who must be exterminated, because they constitute a threat against their profits.

It is a political genocide because what we are seeing is a massacre of leaders of the middle and lower layers of society, the excluded and impoverished; perpetrated by a violent right-wing elite. Super millionaire minorities that resist ceding privileges and any change that ends social inequality; for this reason they violently oppose the national majorities that fight for “peace with social justice”.

http://kaosenlared.net/colombia-34-lideres-sociales-asesinados-en-el-primer-mes-del-gobierno-de-duque/

Source: Kaos en la Red