Opposing extractive economies, deforestation, extensive livestock farming or the exploitation of water resources in Colombia has cost the lives of 248 environmental defenders between 2016 and September 2024, as revealed on Thursday by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The alleged perpetrators would have been illegal armed groups in 66% of the cases, while in 8% it would have been a private person, in 4% an economic and political interest group and in 3% the public force. , according to the UN Human Rights.
The report indicates that the prosecution has obtained convictions in 30 of the murders of environmental defenders, 31 are on trial, 20 are under investigation, 34 have an arrest warrant and nine have been closed. However, nearly a hundred are in the investigation phase, the most initial stage.
“We are particularly concerned that within those 248 cases, a majority are people from indigenous peoples, 139 of them… and also people of African descent,” Juliette de Rivero, representative in Colombia of the UN High Commissioner, told The Associated Press. for Human Rights, who indicated that the number of murders is the “highest globally.”
In the case of Phanor Guazaquillo Peña, an authority in his Nasa Kwe’sx Kiwe indigenous community, he was attacked with firearms in December 2023 when he attended the funeral of another community leader in Putumayo, in the south of the country. The environmental defender had denounced the contamination in water sources resulting from the exploitation of hydrocarbons.
Guazaquillo would have been murdered by an armed group called Border Commandos, a dissident that did not accept the peace agreement signed in 2016 between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). For his murder, one of its alleged members was sent to prison in August of this year, accused of monitoring the indigenous leader, taking photographs of him and sending the information to the two hitmen who shot him in the cemetery, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The 2016 peace agreement did not mean the end of violence in Colombia. Other armed groups, including dissidents of that guerrilla, occupied the territories previously dominated by the FARC and began a bloody dispute for its control.
In fact, UN Human Rights observed an increase in homicides of environmental defenders since 2016, the year in which they verified 14, while in 2023 the figure reached the highest number of homicides with 44 cases. So far in 2024, 14 more defenders have been murdered.
The UN Human Rights warned that there is a risk of impunity in cases of violence against environmental defenders and the lack of implementation of judicial rulings that order to protect the environment, such as the one that recognizes the Atrato River, in northwest Colombia, as subject of rights and others that have to do with the exploitation of the territory for coal. “These sentences have had low implementation and that contributes to the feeling of a lack of rule of law and general impunity,” explained De Rivero.
Homicides are usually preceded by a series of threats, the report noted, which can include follow-ups, intimidating calls, pamphlets and messages on social networks, and in some cases the threats target the children and relatives of women defenders.
Environmental defenders are often uncomfortable, especially by groups outside the law, who perceive them as a challenge to their will to maintain social control in the communities in which they operate and the illicit profits from which they profit. .
“We really believe that the problem is the absence of an effective presence of the State to protect human rights and to protect the population… in the face of this violence and this seizure of territory by armed actors and seizure of resources. that belong to these towns,” said De Rivero.
The UN office received information that in some places illegals were defining conservation zones or giving “permits” to deforest, as well as extorting resources from environmental services projects financed by the State.
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