Colombia death toll rises as gangs fill vacuum left by FARC rebels

[tenorly]

After a 64-year-old activist, Porofirio Jaramillo, was dragged from his home and murdered by four men on motorbikes, the head of the Colombian government’s victims unit did not mince his words. The country was facing a massacre in slow motion, he warned.

The attack on Jaramillo was the 17th murder of a community leader since Colombia signed a peace deal with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels last December. The agreement won President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Peace Prize, for offering a country racked by half a century of war the prospect of security again. But for many activists, politicians and campaigners seeking to shape the new Colombia, peace has proved more dangerous than war, as they have been picked off by assassinations.

The killings grew more frequent even as the government and guerrillas lurched slowly towards a deal, with about 100 murdered last year as the final negotiations were hammered out.

“We are extremely worried about these acts, because the truth is that social leaders are being massacred,” said Alan Jara, who heads the Victims Unit seeking reparations for the eight million people caught up in the war.

Violence is spreading particularly fast in areas abandoned by guerrillas under the peace deal because the promised state security forces have not arrived. There is little clarity about who is behind the killings; but areas once held by guerrillas are often places where illegal mining or farming of coca – the raw ingredient for cocaine – make a tempting target for armed gangs or dissident rebels who refused to hand in their guns.

And the pace of the killings is feeding fears here that a government which battled long and hard for a peace deal is being dangerously lax about making paper plans a reality.

“They are leaving a power vacuum, even though this was anticipated. The government said they were going to move the armed forces into these zones and they haven’t. And the people in these areas are very concerned,” said Marc Chernick, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

At: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/19/colombia-farc-activist-killings

[Judi Lynn]

1. Horror upon horror. The death squads have done this every time when the rebels tried to find peace

with the government.

Of course the government doesn't protect them, as the government has been controlled by the same right-wing oligarchs who created the death squads in the first place to look after their interests, one of them being murdering leftists.

This is so sad. These scummy monsters have murdered tens of thousands of leftists in exactly the same manner, slaughtering them whenever they attempted to work out peace with the government. They have assassinated so many liberal, progressive politicians, so many leaders, it's beyond all forgiveness.

Basically they intend to murder every last dissident in the country, and go hunting for dissidents in other countries, as well, just like their own Operation Condor. They have already been contracted to murder leftist politicians in other countries over the years. There is no end of the demand for their specialty as long as the Americas contain even one person who struggles to find peace for the poor over exploitation and unimaginable abuse.

Not good news, at all. The blood of patriots has most certainly been shed, by right-wing demons, public enemy #1 everywhere they infest this good earth.

Their time is coming. They are not going to be able to kill nearly enough people to prevent their own destruction.