COLOMBIA NEWS — More than 150 human-rights defenders, journalists and politicians have been threatened in Colombia in less than 30 days, in the most massive intimidation campaign since peace talks began between the government and the FARC.
The wave of threats began Sept. 8 with a list of 91 people to whom the paramilitary group Aguilas Negras gave 15 days to leave the country for “messing with the peace.”
That was the beginning of a list that was completed by the paramilitary offshoot Los Rastrojos, a criminal gang that in succeeding days increased the number with the names of journalists, politicians and more activists.
The list now targets a total of 150 people and the month hasn’t ended yet.
“This is a black September because we have not seen a massive threat of this size since 2009,” the coordinator of the NGO Somos Defensores who looks out for the security of human-rights activists in Colombia, Carlos Guevara, told Efe.
Guevara states categorically that this is a critical moment in terms of threats, now on a scale previously unknown during the peace process between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which began in Havana in November 2012.
“The question we’re trying to answer is, who benefits from an atmosphere of panic? Because we believe they’re using the names of the Aguilas Negras and Los Rastrojos but that there are other people behind the threats,” Guevara said.
Of the more than 150 people threatened, none has been killed, though one person was assaulted: Alberto Yepes, coordinator of the human rights observatory of the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination, made up of 240 NGOs.
Days after being included on the threat list, armed men cornered Yepes on the street and seized his computer and two mobile phones that contained a year’s worth of investigations into the role of the military in massacres.
He has now been given additional government protection.
“The only solution in Colombia is to provide bodyguards for everyone,” Ariel Avila, analyst for the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, said. “The investigations are going nowhere, so people threaten and murder and nobody knows who did it.”
Source: Laht.com
