by James Patrick Jordan
Our partners in Cauca, Colombia desperately need your help. I have just received word that a young man, Jhon Jairo Noscue was killed by gunmen while observing a soccer game in his village. Jhon Jairo was a member of the Guardia Campesina, a form of self-defense committee organized by rural villages. These committees help guard against incursions and assaults by right wing death squads and other armed gangs. He was killed in the Mira Valle village of the municipality of Corinto. Over the past two weeks, we have received word of the killings of 13 people by death squads in the sister towns of Corinto and Miranda. These crimes are part of ongoing political violence by paramilitaries, narco-traffickers, and the armed forces.
I have visited Corinto and the north of Cauca several times since AfGJ's first delegation there in 2009, and we have maintained strong contacts in Cauca and the neighboring departments of Valle de Cauca, Nariño, Tolima, and Huila. This entire region has been heavily affected by social cleansing and by climbing murders of social movement leaders, human rights defenders, and disarmed ex-insurgents. This violence is at its highest in Cauca, and much of that has been concentrated in the north, in Corinto, Miranda, Caloto, Buenas Aires, the Naya region, and other nearby places. People are suffering there because of US policies, including funding, direction, and policies explicitly designed to undermine the peace accords. We owe a debt of solidarity, the need for which is desperate. Dreams of peace and justice are disappearing in a land where what peace there is seems to be that of the silence of the dead and of the houses abandoned by those no longer to stay. Last year there were 226 social movement leaders assassinated in Colombia, 48 in Cauca. There have been at least 423, some say as many as 500, since the beginning of 2016, when the peace accords were being finalized. Each year, the highest number of victims has been in Cauca. Cauca has Colombia's largest indigenous population.
Indigenous and other rural communities there have called a minga, a series of grass roots consultations regarding the violence and displacement in the region. They are calling for President Iván Duque to come and meet with them and for the state take action to stop the bloodshed and repression. Above all, they want respect their land rights. Three quarters of crimes of political violence have to do with land questions. So far, the president has refused to meet with the minga. Instead, the demands of the minga have been answered with state violence. In the municipality of Cajibío, minga participants have been subjected to repeated attacks with tear gas, resulting in several wounded. Following these attacks, the military raided and set fire to a minga encampment.
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