Colombia’s inspector general said Wednesday that criminal organizations are working with the police and the military to assassinate community leaders and human rights defenders.
According to Inspector General Fernando Carrillo, “state agents are co-opted by criminal organizations that are eliminating social leaders.”
The Inspector General’s Office is one of the state entities investigating the violence that has killed at least 311 leaders since 2016, the year that a peace process began with leftist FARC guerrillas.
Our call is primarily to mayors and governors to assume responsibility for the defense of the life and integrity of social leaders, and secondly to citizens to help us investigate, to denounce whether state officials at any territorial level and law enforcement agents are involved in the murders of social leaders.
Inspector General Fernando Carrillo
Carrillo’s comments spurred a fierce rejection from the country’s defense minister, Luis Carlos Villegas, who has consistently tried to downplay the wholesale killing and last week went as far as to accuse one of the victims of having possible ties to paramilitary group AGC.
“The Colombian Armed Forces have left behind any behavior that would betray their good relationship with the Colombian people,” the defense minister said.
According to Indepaz, an NGO that monitors political violence in Colombia, the security forces assassinated at least 10 social leaders this year alone.
According to Carrillo, the state officials could be working together with land thieves to prevent the restitution of land that was stolen from displaced farmers during the war.
What we have here is land thieves who are killing land rights leaders, to speak of another systematic approach is difficult, but I could tell you that according to the report of the Inspector General’s Office there is a systematic approach in the case of the murders of land leaders.
Inspector General Fernando Carrillo
Colombia’s security forces have a decades-long history of working together with death squads and regional economic elites. The government, however, claimed that this practice ended with the demobilization of paramilitary umbrella organization AUC between 2003 and 2006.
Since then, however, hundreds of security officials, including two former presidential security chiefs of former President Alvaro Uribe, were arrested for their ties to far-right groups and drug trafficking organizations.
Uribe — whose protege Ivan Duque will be sworn in as president on August 7 — is investigated for his alleged role in three massacres in 1996 and 1997, and the killing of a human rights attorney in 1998.
The mass killing of social leaders has become one of the main threats to an ongoing peace process in Colombia that began with the demobilization and disarmament of the FARC guerrilla group, but involves multiple other actors, including the security forces and the country’s business elite.
