AMERICA/COLOMBIA - Two other social leaders killed in northern Colombia, while President Duque is visiting the country

Tuesday, 3 March 2020 human rights violence armed groups peace

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Antioquía (Agenzia Fides) - Once again the north of Colombia, in particular the department of Antioquia, was the scene of violence: last weekend, in the municipality of Campamento, the social leader Didian Arley Agudelo was found lifeless, he had been missing for a few days. Arley Agudelo was a former city councilor and at the head of farmers' organizations. On Saturday, February 29, social leader Amado Torres, Treasurer of the Community Action Committee of the village of La Miranda, was then killed in San José de Apartadó, in the same area, he was 49 years old. According to his relatives, in the early morning, heavily armed men in military clothes arrived at his house, took him by force and then killed him.
On the same weekend, the President of the Colombian Republic, Iván Duque, arrived in the region as part of his "Building the Country" program. Although the President's visit - whose security measures were tightened in December 2019 - should have doubled the protection of the district; and the high deployment of law enforcement officers in this area of the country should have provided additional support for the fight against violence, all this was not enough to prevent the assassination of social leaders.
The Bishops of Colombia already in January (see Fides, 17/1/2020) had asked the new municipal and regional administrators for protection and security for these lay people engaged in social issues: "We insist on the need to implement a national public policy to deal with this threat, which includes protection initiatives, timely responses to alarms and effective presence of state institutions in the most vulnerable communities".
According to INDEPAZ (Institute for Development and Peace Studies), 817 social leaders and human rights defenders were killed in Colombia since the peace agreement between the government and the FARC-EP until February 28, 2020 (21 in 2016 , 208 in 2017, 282 in 2018, 253 in 2019 and 53 in 2020). (CE) (Agenzia Fides, 3/3/2020)