Colombia: Update – New death threat against human rights defender Ms Martha Díaz -

[Judi Lynn]

Posted 2015/2/11 Colombia: Update – New death threat against human rights defender Ms Martha Díaz



On 9 February 2015, human rights defender Ms Martha Díaz was informed that a funeral wreath bearing her name had been delivered to her home. Three weeks previously, her name had been included in a threatening pamphlet from a paramilitary group identifying itself as the Autodefensas Gaitanistas De Colombia AGC (Gaitan Self-Defense Groups of Colombia).

Martha Díaz is the director and legal representative of the Asociación de Familiares Unidas por un Solo Dolor (Association of Relatives United by a Single Sorrow – AFUSODO), an organisation for family members of victims of extrajudicial killings, particularly false positives. 'False positive' is used to describe extrajudicial killings of civilians carried out by the army and then falsely presented as members of armed insurgent groups. The vast majority of these cases remained unpunished. Martha Díaz is also the technical secretary of the Atlantic chapter of Movimiento Nacional de Víctimas de Estado – MOVICE (National Movement of Victims of the State). Martha Díaz attended Front Line Defender's Dublin Platform in 2013.

The human rights defender has been the victim of death threats over a period of many years, and this most recent threat comes in the context of long-term targeting of members of MOVICE, particularly in the Departments of Atlántico, Sucre and Magdalena Medio. More information on Martha Díaz is available on her page on the Front Line Defenders' website.

Front Line Defenders is gravely concerned for the physical and psychological integrity of Martha Díaz and other members of MOVICE. Moreover, given the fact that Colombia continues to record some of the highest levels of attacks on human rights defenders, including 47 killings in 2014, Front Line Defenders reiterates that the Government is responsible for ensuring immediate measures to protect those who have been threatened, regardless of budget issues within the National Protection Unit.

http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/28065#sthash.VQIUI76l.dpuf

[polly7]

1. I hope she's got a lot of protection around her.

How scary and disgusting. She's a very, very brave woman.

[forest444]

2. This country had, as late as 1980, one of the best democratic and human rights records in the region

But that all changed once the Reagan administration turned cocaine into a CIA cash cow.

Today the country has become one of the region's most repressive. However much some Colombians - understandably - and neocon trolls try to sugarcoat it or distract from it by spotlighting the crisis in neighboring Venezuela (hi, Bacchus and Colgate), Colombia has become one of the dangerous places on earth for a journalist (https://cpj.org/americas/colombia/); and for teachers and labor leaders it's become a veritable dirty war (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/colombia/120207/colombia-unions-teachers-violence).

Both crises then - Colombia's and Venezuela's - appear to have the same roots, at least in part: the misguided ambitions of entrenched extremists in Washington.