In early February, the Colombian human rights lawyers’ collective “Yira Castro Legal Consortium,” a group that often works closely with IPO, found yet another unwelcome email in their inbox:

“Members of the Yira Castro Consortium Irene Lopez and Claudia H, in 2008 we were following you and watching what you do every day, and we have found that you still support the National Coordination of Internally Displaced People, and specifically the FARC guerrilla Rigoberto Jimenez… We have express orders from the Capital Block of the Aguilas Negras to kill him as soon as possible… and if Yira Castro keeps supporting that Guerrilla we won’t be responsible [for what could happen]. Sincerely,
Aguilas Negras AUC Capital Block” [1]

When four young lawyers got together in 2001 to form the Yira Castro Legal Consortium, named after the late Colombian Communist Party leader Yira Castro, they knew that their work might put them in danger. Thousands of human rights lawyers and others who have struggled for social justice have been killed in Colombia’s US-financed dirty war. But in the past two years, persecution by the state and by pro-government paramilitary groups has become an inescapable daily reality for the lawyers of Yira Castro, as well as for social leader Rigoberto Jimenez.

In June 2007, the Yira Castro offices were broken into, and their computers and information about legal cases were robbed. Later that year, a few months before Christmas, Yira Castro lawyer Irene Lopez found a note at her house reading, “you’re going to die on December 24th…” [2] Yira Castro lawyers have also been followed by people believed to be state intelligence agents. Since the office break-in, they have received eight threatening emails, all with similar messages. The most recent email threat was accompanied by a highly sophisticated hacker attack that took out their web site for almost a week. [3]

The threatening emails have been signed by the paramilitary group Aguilas Negras, or Black Eagles. Most of Colombia’s right-wing AUC paramilitaries “negotiated” a cushy demobilization deal in 2005. Not only was the deal scandalously generous to some of the hemisphere’s worse war criminals, it left untouched the landlords, army officers, and political elites who had pushed the paramilitary strategy. Within months of the demobilization, “new” paramilitaries like the Aguilas Negras popped up across the country. Although the Colombian media and government insist on calling these groups “emerging gangs”, they use the same methods of terror, against the same social movement targets, as the old paramilitaries that they replaced. The strategy remains unchanged: state security forces either “contract out” their dirty work to allied groups, or they carry out undercover attacks on civilians themselves and then blame criminal gangs.

When case files and computers were robbed from Yira Castro’s office, the Colombian police chalked the robbery up to common crime, despite the fact that they were one of three human rights organizations to be broken into in as many weeks. Only a few months after the break-in, the police intelligence agency SIJIN requested email intercepts for dozens of Colombian human rights groups, including two of the groups that had suffered break-ins, Yira Castro and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Even if the state didn’t carry out these robberies directly, it certainly was interested in information about Yira Castro and FOR’s work—and willing to pay. The Defense Ministry has offered to pay a bounty for “information of interest to state intelligence” agencies. Defense Ministry Directive 29/2005, secretly emitted in November of 2005, sets a price of 1.5 million pesos (600 USD) for each hard drive or computer. [4]

The perfunctory police investigations into the robbery, like the investigations into dozens of similar break-ins at NGO offices in recent years, have failed to bring results. Investigations into the email threats have been equally ineffective. The Yira Castro Legal Consortium has denounced that “state bodies could be responsible for the illegal raid on our office.” [5] They are demanding that the Colombian government recognize the legitimacy of their work and condemn the attacks, purge intelligence archives that mention human rights defenders, and give real protection to the Yira Castro lawyers. But in the meantime, they keep doing the same work that has brought them into the line of fire: supporting groups struggling to regain or to defend their land.

Farmers and land: resisting forced displacement

“It was a disaster when they came, they deforested the whole area… then they started to kill farmers… They killed two of my sons and… told me to leave if I didn’t want the same thing that happened to my sons to happen to me.
I went to another village near there, but they came there too. They made me sign documents giving my farm to a well-known family in the area. Then they said that if I told anyone what had happened I would die, that I should be grateful they let me live. I had to leave the same day…” [6]
a farmer’s testimony from “The Truth Behind Forced Displacement,” a recent report by Yira Castro

More than four million people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia in the past twenty years. Paramilitaries and the army force small farmers out of their homes for military control of territory, but the main force driving displacement is land theft. Once the people living there have been cleared out, the stolen land is used for extensive cattle ranches, vast plantations of export-oriented food crops like African palm and sugar cane, or the extraction of natural resources. While multinational corporations busily transform what was once a productive small-scale farm into a coal mine or an oil field, the displaced farmers do their best to survive in Colombia’s cities.

Rigoberto Jimenez, threatened with death in several emails to Yira Castro, made his way to Bogotá after paramilitaries forced him to leave his home in north-western Colombia. With the National Coordination of Internally Displaced People (CND), Rigoberto began to work for the prevention of forced displacement and for the right of displaced people to return to their land. Because of his efforts, the threats and attacks that chased him away from his home in the 1990s have followed him to his new home.

Yira Castro’s team of lawyers supports the CND and other displaced groups with legal actions to regain land and to force the government to meet its obligations to displaced people. The members of Yira Castro also work to raise public awareness about displacement, and give human rights workshops to help displaced groups organize for their rights.

Cahucopana is another group supported by Yira Castro. But while Yira Castro’s lawyers take the bus to get to their meetings with the CND, they ride mules or pickup trucks to their workshops with Cahucopana. Cahucopana brings together small farmers in rural northeast Antioquia department who are facing the same kind of threats and violence that displaced members of the CND. The Colombian government has promised to give away 21,000 hectares of land in Northeast Antioquia, now inhabited by small farmers, to the multinational Anglo Gold Ashanti. [7] In territory that Anglo Gold Ashanti is vying to convert into a large-scale gold mine, local farmers use the land to grow their food, to make money to survive through small-scale lumber extraction, and as a center of their culture and communities. With Yira Castro’s support, Cahucopana helps farmers resist forced displacement and denounces human rights abuses by the army that aim to clear the way for Anglo Gold Ashanti.

For one of the Yira Castro lawyers, their work has brought down the wrath of Colombian economic elites and the Colombian state because, “We don’t just have a charity focus, but a focus on rights. We want displaced people to be recognized as victims of state crimes, and demand their rights to truth, justice, comprehensive reparations, and non-repetition of these crimes. When you start to talk about what’s behind all of this, who has benefited from displacement, then you touch certain interests and generate certain reactions.”

 

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