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FINAL DECLARATION 

ASTURIAN HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE VISIT TO COLOMBIA: ELECTIONS AMID DETERIORATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND REACTIVATION OF THE ARMED CONFLICT. 

ONIC – Bogotá, March 15,  2022.

 

The Asturian Delegation for Human Rights and Peace has been traveling for 18 years -without interruption- from Asturias, in northern Spain, to various regions of Colombia, to establish the state of human rights in areas of social and armed conflict, and in the last five years, to accompany the legitimate yearnings for peace and social justice of a population tired of the inequity aggravated by the neoliberal economic model and the endless war.

We congratulate the Colombian people on the weekend’s elections, in which political options favorable to equity, social justice and peace were strongly expressed.

There are more and more certainties that indicate that the continuity of the armed conflict serves the purpose of displacing the indigenous, peasant and black population from their territories, to impose investment projects of multinationals -including drug trafficking-, mining, hydroelectric and agribusiness, and is useful to those who live off war, usurp land and eliminate economic, social, labor and cultural rights.

For 22 years, Asturias has been taking in people from the social leadership who have been threatened with death or who have survived attacks. This year we will take in five more people in temporary shelter and we will have reached 134, making the Asturian Program of Attention to Victims of Violence in Colombia the dean of protection programs in Spain, for the number of people taken in, for so many years of solidarity efforts, and for the annual visit that has systematically observed the state of human rights in the last two decades.

The 17th Asturian Reports on human rights in Colombia were delivered in a special act yesterday, Monday, to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, as a contribution of international solidarity to the search for truth and justice for the victims of crimes against humanity, and the documents of 21 years of exile were delivered to the Truth Commission, to become part of Colombian history.

We are proud of the road of solidarity we have traveled. The Colombian social leadership deserves it. We know the sacrifice and courage required to represent peoples, workers and communities when the government cannot – or does not want to – guarantee this legitimate work, or when justice is used to persecute them while impunity protects members of the security forces who cooperate with the perpetrators to exterminate the social leadership and put an end to social organizations and processes, These purposes also destroy the rule of law, since the world is realizing that the Attorney General’s Office does not investigate those who carry out individual or collective attacks, death threats, displacements and forced disappearances, or the selective assassination of hundreds of social leaders, crimes that have elements of systematicity.

From so many years of receiving Colombian people in Asturias and hearing the testimony of social leaders and victims during visits to Colombia, we have learned of their courage and tenacity.

We admire their dignity, their capacity to forgive and to continue to organize, often resolving through community self-management the absence of the State, which only makes its presence felt through the presence of the public forces, which are as contaminated as they are feared by the victims in the regions we visited and where modernity, understood as effective rights and liberties, has not yet arrived, much less peace or social justice.

One week before the elections, we have visited some of the Special Transitory Peace Circumscriptions to verify the human rights situation, the development of the Peace Agreement, the guarantees and freedoms necessary for the victims of the conflict to elect their representatives to the House of Representatives.

We note that there is a prevailing fear of paramilitarism, which has expanded, boosted by drug trafficking and with the responsibility of the public forces, which in many regions omit their duty to combat them.

There was no security for the victims’ candidacies or their voters. The government’s political campaign contributions did not arrive on time. Authentic victims’ candidacies were left at a clear disadvantage against well-funded traditional party candidates, such as that of the son of alias Jorge 40 in Cesar, which re-victimizes millions of people. Political freedoms in these regions are in the hands of paramilitaries, insurgencies and gangs exercising social and political control, however, in yet another test of courage, the population managed to express itself electorally enough to insist on the demands for peace, freedoms, respect for human rights, investment by the State.

Serious anomalies in the nomination for peace seats have been continuous in Chocó, Córdoba and Sucre, and according to Sunday’s results, certain. There were death threats and co-optation of candidates by perpetrators and traditional parties. The authorities of the Zenú indigenous people of Flor del Monte have been declared military targets for endorsing a candidacy.

 

Visited regions

The regions we visited between March 4 and 12 were: in Bajo Atrato the Jagual community of the Emberá Dobida indigenous people of the Chintadó River; in Urabá the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó; in Córdoba, Tierralta and Montería; in Sucre, Sincelejo, Ovejas – finca La Europa and the communities of the Montes de María; in Norte de Santander, in the Catatumbo region, Tibú and the territory of the Barí indigenous people; in Cúcuta, the Francisco de Paula Santander University; in Arauca, its capital, the city of Arauca and Saravena; in Caquetá, Florencia; and in the Bota Caucana, Piamonte and Villa Garzón – Putumayo.

Every year Colombia’s setbacks in the area of human rights become more worrisome, due to the State’s abandonment of its erga omnes obligations to respect and guarantee them. It became evident that the national police did not respect them during the social unrest that began in April, and it is evident that the government is incapable of guaranteeing the right to life for the social leadership, for the signatories of the peace agreement and for a large part of the rural communities.

In the territories visited, the population is subjected to the growing and violent control of narco-paramilitary groups, guerrillas, criminal gangs and sometimes to the actions of members of the security forces that violate the fundamental rights that the State must guarantee, such as the right to life, personal liberty, freedom of thought, organization, assembly and mobilization, actions that violate the security of persons, or subject them to torture, punishment or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, actions of perverse use of justice to persecute social opponents violating the right not to be arbitrarily detained, imprisoned or exiled, and the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of their property.

Precisely bringing the Social State and the Rule of Law to the regions abandoned by the State is the core of the Peace Agreement that the government of President IVAN DUQUE is evading. While he travels around Europe with a rhetoric on democracy that does not convince at home, nor outside of it.

We have again noted that much of the violence that plagues the regions visited, defined as Special Transitory Peace Circumscriptions, originates in the non-compliance with the Peace Agreement that the State signed with the FARC, in the tolerated expansion of paramilitarism and drug trafficking that forces the peasantry, excluded from social investment, to plant coca, an imposition based on their political, military and corrupting power, in regions previously controlled by the FARC. 

Another part of the new cycle of violence originates in the government’s abandonment -by the government- of the Dialogue Table with the ELN in Havana.

We are concerned that the government’s bellicose will facilitates the continuation of the United States’ aggression against Venezuela’s sovereignty and security, which would turn Colombia’s internal conflict into an international conflict.

We consider the lack of guarantees to preserve the lives of peace signatories to be very serious. More than three hundred have been murdered since the signing of the Agreement and the Attorney General’s Office does not provide results in the investigations. Impunity is another source of violence as it encourages the continuity of the aggressions that have cost the lives of more than one thousand three hundred people of the social leadership since the signing of the Agreement, a fact that allows us to affirm that in Colombia there is structural violence and impunity.

The attacks against those who defend human rights are very serious and we do not hesitate to qualify them as systematic attacks, due to the high number and nature of the victims, the modus operandi, the evident purpose of putting an end to social organizations and the generalized impunity of the Attorney General’s Office.

One of the hardest hit social sectors continues to be the trade union movement. Its leadership, activists and members continue to be systematically persecuted, affecting trade union freedoms and social and labor rights.

Despite the danger and fear, in the regions visited, social and victims’ organizations met with the Asturian Delegation and expressed:

In Bajo Atrato, the Emberá Dobida indigenous people are trapped by the war between the ELN and the Clan del Golfo, a paramilitary group that wants to impose the cultivation of coca plants on them, which is alien to the Emberá culture that risks eradicating it with their own hands.

The Asturian delegation was intercepted on the way up and down the Chintadó river by AGC paramilitaries who maintain a permanent checkpoint at La Nueva, where the Chintadó and Truandó rivers meet.

The territory is surrounded by landmines and the Emberá communities are confined, subjected to paramilitary control and abandoned by the State. They have formed the environmental guard or Uramia -hormiga- to protect the jungle and refuse with courage and dignity to participate in the war, illicit crops and drug trafficking.

We denounce the forced recruitment of minors, the rape of Embera women and girls, and the siege by the Cobre SAS mining company, which seeks to impose large-scale mining projects using methods that violate dignity and the law.

In Urabá, the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó continues to be besieged by narco-paramilitary groups, whose existence is denied by the army’s XVII Brigade, with which they share control of the region, and it is public and notorious that they meet and coordinate.

The Peace Community reports paramilitary control of the region in places called “points”. Despite the fact that the area is militarized, the paramilitaries move freely and in all the villages they forcefully enter the meetings of the community action boards and rural assemblies, imposing their armed presence and their project, which is alien to the community’s life plans.

The Peace Community, in accordance with the victims’ right to know the truth, asks that the ins and outs of the surrender of paramilitary leader alias Otoniel be made public.

Southern Córdoba is militarized, but its population remains under the control of the paramilitary group Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, which threatens, murders, displaces, and recruits minors, as in Tierralta, despite early warnings from the Ombudsman’s Office more than a year ago.

Alarm generated by the figures of violence in 2021 in Tierralta against the LGBT population, which suffered 15 cases of aggression and murders.

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Of particular concern is the increase in systematic gender violence in Córdoba, with 22 femicides in 2021.

In meetings with the Secretary of Government, the Police Captain and the Ombudsman of Córdoba, they have acknowledged the existence of paramilitaries, as well as the lack of compliance in terms of land restitution, compensation and substitution of illicit crops, alleging the lack of resources that must come from Bogotá.

In the department of Sucre, we received reports of the permissiveness of civilian and military authorities with the criminal actions of narco-paramilitary groups that exercise political and social control that is public knowledge. The authorities state that they “do not believe” in the existence of paramilitarism and attribute the armed control over the communities and the assassinations of social leaders to problems between drug trafficking gangs for the control of territories, micro-trafficking, extortion and prostitution. This explanation worries – because it is false – the social organizations, for whom it is an attempt to cover up crime from the institutions, a situation that has precedents and that does not excuse the authorities from their obligation to investigate, sanction and combat it.

The denunciations received indicate that the narco-paramilitary groups besiege the peasantry of the La Europa de Ovejas farm, control the agricultural trade in the La Mojana region and restrict political freedoms in large regions of the department where they impose their candidacies for elected office, organize and call assemblies of obligatory attendance for the peasant communities. They want to control the population, they prohibit the creation of social movements that are not under their control, they persecute to death the members of collectives that defend human rights. The claim that there are no paramilitaries conceals the permissiveness of the public forces, which omit to combat them and force citizens to file complaints with the Ombudsman’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Offices, and not with the Ministry of the Interior, the National Navy, the Marine Corps or the National Police.

The population rightly fears the return of massacres, as the paramilitary group moves freely and is threatening, murdering peasants, imposing 12-hour curfews in villages and hamlets in the region, all under military control, such as Salitral, Los Números, Chengue, Almagra, Don Gabriel, El Palmar, Pijiguay, San Rafael, Flor del Monte, Canutal and Canutalito, Damasco, Pedregal, Medellín, Villa Colombia, Las Babillas, Oso, San Francisco, Bajo Grande, Arena, El Tesoro, Buenos Aires and El Zapato.

We received complaints of abandonment by the government and the lack of reparations to the victims of the Chengue and Mojana massacres.

The paramilitaries have the peasant communities of Montes de María under siege, as expressed by the peasants of Finca La Europa, who have 20 people murdered in the struggle for land, 6 disappeared and 90 families displaced.

San Onofre: The paramilitary group Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, AGC, which is part of the criminal group Clan del Golfo, has achieved hegemony over social control and political processes in that region and controls the legal economy and drug trafficking, without the municipal mayor’s office, the national army – Marine Infantry – or the police preventing it.

 

Norte de Santander: Large areas of the department are literally overrun by 17 armed groups that control the economic and social activities of the population. Social organizations denounce the massive presence of U.S. military and military advisors in the border zone with Venezuela.

Defense expenditures do not yield results, but affect social investment, to the point that the region has only one first level hospital, which gives an idea of the neglect of the border zone.

In the Catatumbo region, citizens and in particular peasant communities and indigenous peoples are under siege by armed groups, including paramilitaries such as the AGC, Los Rastrojos, FARC dissidents, the ELN, the EPL, in a militarized zone where, nevertheless, threats, murders, extortion, confinement, recruitment and forced displacement occur on a daily basis.

The Barí indigenous people are not listened to by the government in their demand for sanitation and expansion of their territory occupied by settlers who cut down the jungle to grow coca, nor do they have a health post or adequate schools. They are suffering from diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia, abandoned and at the mercy of the armed groups that penetrate their ancestral territory. Their situation is more dramatic with the arrival of peasants and indigenous peoples from other regions of Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the forced recruitment of young people and the existence of minefields in their territory. We received reports of the existence of mass graves in the Barí territory. 

The government fails to comply with Ruling T-052 of 2017 in which the Constitutional Court imposes the duty to guarantee them the right to exist, to ethnic and cultural identity, to prior, free and informed consultation, and to collective land ownership. Nor does it comply with the stipulations of the Peace Agreement regarding indigenous peoples.

In Tibú, the armed conflict is ongoing and is expressed in attacks, assassinations, and harassment of social organizations. The coca growers feel deceived by the government in the absence of productive projects and the possibility of forced eradication that would leave them without a livelihood, so they announce that they will resist in order to prevent their families from starving. The complaints against the oil and mining companies refer to the destruction of the environment, the plundering of natural resources and the low social investment.

Very serious are the attacks against women in all areas, the trafficking networks of Venezuelan women for sexual exploitation and exploitation in cocaine processing laboratories, subjected to conditions of servitude or semi-slavery, without the authorities intervening to prevent it.

There are accusations against the “Sustainable Catatumbo Plan” that the government created to evade compliance with the Peace Accord.

In Arauca, the armed conflict is acute. The absence of dialogue with the ELN and the confrontation between insurgent organizations generates fear in the civilian population. Serious violations of human rights and IHL, forced recruitments and disappearances, confinement of peasant communities and signatories of the Peace Accord are occurring. 

In Arauca, stigmatization of its inhabitants and attacks against social leaders increased. The prosecutor’s office does not carry out body searches in rural areas, nor does it investigate aggressions against the civilian population. The public forces are designed to protect the infrastructure of multinational companies and not the civilian population.

Such serious events as the car bomb attack against the headquarters of the social organizations in Saravena show the level of risk faced by the social leadership; in the same sense, the attacks against the aqueduct, sewage, garbage collection and household gas companies are equally serious. These attacks against civil and community facilities are evidence of the purpose of annihilating the social leadership of Saravena and destroying the infrastructure created half a century ago by the communities through self-management.

In Caquetá, the government is not complying with the Peace Accord. The geographic information on the location of coca crops collected for the productive substitution projects is being used by the Prosecutor’s Office to detain the peasants and by the security forces to burn their homes and displace the communities.

It is serious that the government has not guaranteed the security of the Peace signatories in the ETCR Urías Rondón, who had to be relocated in the face of paramilitary harassment, which gives an idea of the control of these groups and the lack of political will to combat them.

Operation Artemis aimed at halting deforestation is at odds with oil projects that put ecosystems at risk. The settlers are being persecuted but not the large deforesters. No relocation alternatives are being offered to families forced to live outside the agricultural frontier and settler communities are being displaced or imprisoned.

The government has become an agent of forced displacement, denounce the organizations. This is aggravated by the government’s unwillingness to advance land titling for peasant families with dozens of years of occupation. Deforestation is growing at the same pace as murders against the peasantry.

Indigenous peoples of the Amazon are abandoned by the State and besieged by armed groups and investors who take their territories and by armed groups that recruit and displace them. The indigenous peoples denounce that the mining-energy matrix has been placed above nature and the rights of indigenous peoples.

There are complaints about the lack of auditing of European and U.S. funds destined to finance reinsertion projects for peace signatories. There are also no guarantees to preserve the lives of these people, 31 of whom have been killed with impunity in Caquetá.

 

Bota Caucana, Piamonte y Putumayo.

The peasant families feel cheated by the government. They uprooted coca and only received emergency aid, but not productive projects. The territory is under the control of narco-paramilitary groups that impose the planting of coca crops and intend to replace the grassroots peasant organization with one under their control. Neither the police nor the Piamonte mayor’s office are fulfilling their duty to protect the social leaders who have received death threats and have been forced to move.

In Putumayo, the communities are under paramilitary control and subdued by fear of mining and drug trafficking projects. Curiously, there are more deaths of peasants where there are more public forces. Human rights defenders have no guarantees and are being persecuted to death. Because it is a border zone, with coca and oil, its communities are highly vulnerable.

 

WOMEN’S SITUATION

There are very serious reports of a significant increase in violence against women in these regions. The dynamics of poverty and inequality, exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic, which undermined the already fragile family economies sustained informally, the increase in the migratory crisis in recent years, mostly in border territories, and the increased presence and reconfiguration of armed groups in these regions, with an increase in the escalation of violence, are seriously affecting the population and, specifically, women. The machista and patriarchal culture is denounced by organizations reporting femicides, disappearances and sexual aggressions against women, some reported to public forces, others silenced by stigma and/or distrust towards institutions.

All the organizations report an absolute absence of public institutions in the follow-up, accompaniment and investigation of reports of cases of male violence, as well as the lack of resources for the victims. Here they also mention the invisibility of violence and sexual aggression against girls and young women in the family and close environment, socializing cases of sexual aggression against minors carried out by men from their own family or environment. In no case do institutional tools exist to accompany women victims of this type of violence.

On the other hand, strong harassment and violence against the LGTBIQ+ collective and trans women are also reported, with no legislation or institutional support for the visibility and protection of people from these groups.

Regarding the specific situation of women in the context of the armed conflict, with all the complexity and specificity of each region, the organizations highlight the following points: -Women’s bodies as a battlefield: women are sexually assaulted as a way to intimidate or demoralize the adversary. – Social control and stigmatization: there is a reported increase in the use of women as “informants”, through deceit and ignorance, which ends up provoking the rejection of the rest of the community to a situation that was not voluntarily generated. Women are questioned about the relationships they initiate, especially if they are with men in the security forces, and they are also isolated by their surroundings.

In some cases, there is strong social control, which seeks to impose on women the exclusive performance of tasks assigned to them based on their gender. – Serious increase in trafficking networks of women for sexual exploitation at borders and increase in forced recruitment of children and adolescents, either for inclusion in illegal armed groups (boys) or for forced labor in illicit crops (boys and increase in the recruitment of girls). It is the women, mostly mothers, who put up the greatest resistance, with complaints to institutions and also by their own means, to these recruitments, with the consequent accusations and threats to their integrity. -Threats, persecution, disappearances and assassinations of women social leaders. Women’s leadership is being strongly repressed. In a context of armed violence, many of these women, widowed or alone due to the exile of their partners, exercise their leadership and, at the same time, support their families without any support. Women do not usually leave their families alone, as most of them are economically dependent on them, so they become an easy target because they do not go into exile, in most cases.organized women and leaders are being harassed, threatened and killed because they are weaving networks of mutual support to make up for the shortcomings of a State that does not offer them guarantees for a dignified life or security and protection, when it is the case.

As a Delegation for the verification of human rights, we are urged to denounce the absence of institutions in the attention to the problems that arise in the territories due to violence against women and the risks they face when exercising a social and political leadership that presents other economic and social alternatives.

 

XVIII ASTURIAN DELEGATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE.

Members:

1–. ANTONIO GOMEZ–REINO VARELA, Member of the Spanish Congress for Coruña. Confederal Group of Unidas Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea. First Vice-President of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

2–. RAFAEL ABELARDO PALACIOS GARCÍA,Deputy and spokesman of the Political Group Podemos in the General Assembly of the Principality of Asturias.

3–. ESTHER MIRANDA ZAPATA, Assistant at the Spanish Congress of Deputies of Congressman Antón Gomez Reino

4–. EVELIA OLGA MUÑIZ MENÉNDEZ, Workers’ Commissions of Asturias.

5–. LUCIA NOSTI SIERRA, Spanish passport PAN041542. NGDO Coordinator of the Principality of Asturias.

6–. LUCIA GARCÍA JIMÉNEZ, Assembly Moza of Asturies, AMA.

7–. SOFIA MURIAS VARELA, Asturian Movement for Peace

8–. MARIA ANGELES FERNANDEZ MARTIN, Refugee Reception Network of Leganés/Madrid.9-. MARIA JESUS RAMOS ALVAREZ, NGDO Coordinator of the Principality of Asturias.

10–. SUSANA CLAVIJO NUÑEZ, Engineering Without Frontiers.

11–. CARLOS MARIA MEANA SUÁREZ, Soldepaz Pachakuti.

12–. FRANCISCO JAVIER ARJONA MUÑOZ, Soldepaz Pachakuti.

13–. JAVIER OROZCO PEÑARANDA,  Director of the Asturian Program of Attention to Victims of Violence in Colombia.