At least 78 human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia in 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday, adding that dozens more such cases are still being verified.
Violence against human rights defenders, environmentalists, and people who have been advocating for communities – activists generally called social leaders in Colombia – has become a major challenge for Conservative President Ivan Duque’s government, which has been widely criticized. urges to do more to stop this murder epidemic.
Colombian authorities say the killings are being carried out by various armed groups operating in the country: the National Liberation Army (ELN), officially the last rebel group to continue the armed struggle; as well as gangs of thugs, which in many cases were formed by former members of far-right paramilitary organizations. These armed groups clash to control areas and drug trafficking networks, as well as illegal mines, especially gold, and oust anyone who gets in their way, Bogota said.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said it had received 202 reports of killings of human rights defenders in Colombia in 2021. It was able to verify 78, continue to try to confirm conclusion.
In a report released in March 2021, the UNHCR spoke of 53 killings of human or social rights defenders in 2020, adding that it was still in the process of verifying another 80. Of these, it was able to verify another 41, which means that the The number of murders of human rights defenders in Colombia in 2020 has risen to at least 94, a UNHCR spokesman told Reuters.
The Colombian INDEPAZ institute, for its part, counts 171 social leaders who were assassinated last year. The international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in its annual report released on Thursday that some 500 human rights defenders have been killed in Latin America since 2016.
Colombia is also notorious for the high risk to environmentalists or land workers’ rights advocates. For two years in a row, in 2019 and 2020, the Andean country was characterized as the most dangerous in the world for these activists by the non-governmental organization Global Witness.
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