Far right group vows to exterminate all Colombia's social leaders

[Judi Lynn]

by Adriaan Alsema July 16, 2018

Far-right group Aguilas Negras has vowed to “exterminate” all Colombia’s human rights defenders and social leaders, calling them “guerrillas in disguise.”

In a death threat sent to dozens of organizations and individuals over the weekend, the group said that social leaders seek to “destabilize” the country and “obtain power.”

Colombia’s Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas has denied the existence of the Aguilas Negras and has clashed with Inspector General Fernando Carrillo who claimed last week that members of the security forces are taking part in the mass killing of leaders.

More than 311 social leaders have been assassinated by death squads and assassins since 2016, the year a peace process began with demobilized guerrilla group FARC.

Among those considered “military objectives” by the Aguilas Negras are “each and every supposed Victims Table on Colombian territory,” journalist organizations, minority groups, think tanks, congressmen and dozens of social leaders.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/far-right-group-vows-to-exterminate-all-colombias-social-leaders/

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Earlier article:

Violence Continues in Colombia as the Peace Accords Advance
The country’s long civil war may soon end—but not without triggering a violent backlash from the narco-elite and the paramilitary groups they command.

By Greg Grandin Twitter SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

Before the United States elects a new president on November 8, a potentially more consequential vote will take place in the Americas. On October 2, Colombians will say yes or no to a peace agreement between the government and the FARC, an insurgent group whose roots stretch back decades, to the very beginning of the Cold War. It’s notoriously difficult to tally the number of the war’s victims, especially those who lived in the countryside, but this 2013 report by Colombia’s Historical Memory Group gives an idea of the scope of the brutality: hundreds of thousands dead, tens of thousands disappeared, serial massacres and systemic torture.

Perhaps the number that most challenges the imagination, especially when contrasted with the generally favorable coverage Colombia gets in the US press, relates to those driven from their homes and communities; 5.7 million people have been displaced over the last half-century, about 15 percent of Colombia’s total population. According to the report cited above, between 1985 and 2012—a period marked by increasing US involvement in the Colombian conflict, capped by Bill Clinton’s multibillion-dollar aid program, Plan Colombia—26 individuals every hour were displaced. Back in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez, in accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature, tried to convey the magnitude of “political disappearances” in Latin America to his Swedish hosts by invoking the Rapture: “Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala.”

. . .

Some of this displacement was directly related to war, and can be blamed on the military and the FARC. But much of it has to do with the fact that the US-bankrolled counterinsurgency was cover for a massive paramilitary land grab. As the anthropologist Winifred Tate put it:

The Colombian countryside has experienced what is called ‘the reverse agrarian reform.’ Beginning in the 1980s, drug traffickers, many of whom became paramilitary leaders, began buying up land and using violence and threats to push people off the land. Victims reported being told, I’ll buy from you or your widow. Land was used to launder money and to buy their way into the respect of the elite. Much of this land has been taken over, directly or through third-party sales, by regional elites, agribusiness involved in teak, oil palm, or banana production, or the growing extractive industries. According to one estimate, as many as 6 million hectares of land changed hands. Nobody really knows—in many places, paramilitary groups burned land registries, while in other regions these registries are inaccurate, or the files lost or not maintained. At present, USAID reports that “in rural areas, less than 1% of the population owns more than half Colombia’s best land.”

In other words, Colombia’s long, long civil war has functioned as something like a war for the frontier, with paramilitary “settlers,” bankrolled not just by Washington, US corporations, and narco profits but also by international development banks, dispossessing smallholders. Many of the victims of this land rush were Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, who make up a disproportionate percentage of the displaced. Mining, oil, and bio-fuel production have been the main drivers of much of the violent dispossession.

https://www.thenation.com/article/violence-continues-in-colombia-as-peace-accords-advance/