“Stigmatization is a State Policy”: Cinep

The Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), through the magazine Noche y Niebla No. 64, has recorded information on the permanent political violence in force in the national territory, which account for systematic violations of human rights in the context of stigmatization of social leadership, defense of the territory, mobilizations and social protests, through the implementation of repressive acts that are shielded within the framework of legality.

The report notes that as of April 28, 2021, a major social mobilization began, called by the workers' federations, social and student organizations against the economic, social and political measures of the government of President Iván Duque.

The report assured that in the face of these actions, “the national government implemented a deeply anti-democratic repressive system that treated citizens as criminals or enemies of state security.”

The main finding of this report shows that, “stigmatization became a State policy, which allowed the multiplication of prosecutions and arrests against those mobilizing against the mandate of the current government”.

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Regarding social political violence, Cauca (with 331 events) remains the department with the highest levels of victimization, followed by Norte de Santander (116), Valle de Cauca (75), Huila (58), Nariño (57) and Antioquia (48). In this category, the victimizing events that most occurred were murders, threats and physical injuries.

For his part, Alcibiades Rodríguez, an indigenous authority who traveled from Vichada to Bogotá to share his testimony, said that “the lack of government commitment ignores the constitutional rights of peasant and indigenous communities. The concentration of land is assigned to the country's big businessmen. Declaring the indigenous and peasant authorities as invaders of their own territories”.

Rodríguez emphasized that ignorance of property causes the dispossession of their own territories. “Reclaiming our rights, protecting nature and defending our people will blow us enemies of the State. We are 102 indigenous peoples in the Colombian Orinoquia, many of them on the verge of extinction. And the government is unaware of its existence regardless of its fundamental rights.”

According to the Cinep bulletin, indigenous peoples and peasant communities, ancestral inhabitants of these territories, “are living today the tragedy caused by the failed implementation of the Peace Accords signed between the FARC guerrillas and the national government. To that would be added the presence and actions of the paramilitary groups and the dissidents of the FARC.”

Another point pointed out in the report is that both the Armed Forces, the National Police and the Attorney General's Office “have been registered in the policy of territorial consolidation, marked by stabilization and mega operations against the territories”.

Specifically, the operation called “Artemis” is pointed out “has caused greater impoverishment of communities, their expulsion and the displacement of people from those territories that are part of the special management areas, National Natural Parks and other protected areas”, as described by the Cinep Data Bank.

“The most worrying of 2021 is the great advance and development of paramilitarism throughout the country and the persecution of social protest, a persecution that has been ruining the credibility of justice in Colombia,” explained Father Javier Giraldo, founder of the Cinep Human Rights Data Bank.

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