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href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombias-Largest-Right-Wing-Paramilitary-Group-Labels-Human-Rights-Defenders-Military-Targets-20170510-0018.html">http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombias-Largest-Right-Wing-Paramilitary-Group-Labels-Human-Rights-Defenders-Military-Targets-20170510-0018.html</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Colombia's Largest Right-Wing Paramilitary
Group Labels Human Rights Defenders 'Military Targets'</h1>
May 10, 2017<br>
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“The only way to finish off all these plagues and rats is to
exterminate them,” threatened a paramilitary pamphlet
distributed in Colombia, referring to anyone ranging from human
rights activists to land defenders to left-wing politicans.</div>
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<p>This is just the latest indication that <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Why-is-Colombian-Paramilitary-Violence-Up-After-Peace-Signed-20161120-0023.html">right-wing
political violence</a> isn’t only keeping pace with
war-time levels despite a historic peace agreement —
it’s actually surging.</p>
<p>The malicious one-page call to arms, signed by the
Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by its
Spanish acronym AGC — one of the offspring of the
notorious right-wing paramilitary group the <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombian-Victims-Take-on-Chiquita-for-Funding-Death-Squads--20161201-0019.html">United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia</a>, known as the AUC
— went on to “promise” a violent campaign of “torture
and death” in the name of showing “who rules this
country” and proving that the syndicate does indeed
continue to operate in full force.</p>
<p>“We declare as military targets all human rights
organizations, unions, land activists, defenders of FARC
and ELN prisoners, those who do reports on human rights,
members of political organizations of the FARC, the
congress of the people, Patriotic Union, Patriotic
March,” the pamphlet stated,<strong> </strong>including
at the end of the list an organization<strong> </strong>that
has already warned of a <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/FARC-Warns-New-Genocide-Targets-Colombias-Social-Movements-20161121-0010.html">new
“political genocide”</a> against its members.</p>
<p>“Death to all those gonorrhea-infected motherfucking
toads who are fomenting and supporting increased
violence,” the statement, dated May 2017, continued. “We
inform you that as of this date you are declared
military targets.”</p>
<p>The pamphlet — acquired by the Washington Office on
Latin America and distributed on social media by human
rights lawyer and social justice advocate Dan Kovalik —
comes amid distressing levels of violence against human
rights defenders in Colombia despite the signing of a
historic peace agreement last year between the
government and the country’s largest left-wing rebel
army, the FARC. According to the United Nations, at
least <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/41-Activists-Murdered-in-Colombia-in-4-Months-UN-Raises-Alarm-20170501-0011.html">41
social activists were killed</a> in the country in the
first four months of 2017 alone.</p>
<p>“I think it is very clear that they (paramilitaries)
are more emboldened both in terms of their threats and
actions,” Kovalik, who teaches international human
rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law,
told teleSUR Wednesday. “It definitely appears that as
the peace accords were advancing and were agreed to
there's actually been heightened killings by right-wing
paramilitaries of various social leaders.”</p>
<p>The “military targets” identified by the AGC
paramilitary group have already been victims of what
appears to be a targeted campaign of political violence.
According to official statistics, in the 14 months
between Jan. 1, 2016, and March 1, 2017, a staggering <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-156-Human-Rights-Activists-Killed-in-Last-14-Months-20170401-0019.html">156
social leaders were killed</a>, including rural
activists, Indigenous leaders and human rights
defenders. Recently, even two members of the FARC —
whose more than 7,000 troops are currently in the
process of laying down their arms at transition camps
across the country — <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-2-FARC-Members-Murdered-in-10-Days-Despite-New-Peace-20170427-0007.html">were
assassinated</a> while preparing to reintegrate into
civilian life.</p>
<p>Human rights organizations have pegged the blame for
the surge in violence that has claimed the lives of
dozens of social leaders in recent months on right-wing
paramilitary forces like the AGC, warning that the
resurgence of paramilitary activity poses the greatest
threat to upending the still-fragile new era of peace.</p>
<p>Kovalik argued that the paramilitary threat poses a
“fatal risk” to the country’s budding peace, adding that
during a recent visit to Colombia with a U.S.
congressional delegation in solidarity with local peace
activists, he observed a “unanimous feeling” among
social organizations that right-wing paramilitary groups
were “gaining strength.”</p>
<p>One danger, he pointed out, is the prospect of
emboldened paramilitaries going after demobilized FARC
members — a target the AGC clearly identified in their
pamphlet. The threat, combined with the trend of violent
attacks against peace activists and progressive leaders,
recalls the history of the violent <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Colombias-Patriotic-Union-A-Victim-of-Political-Genocide-20151023-0056.html">extermination
of the left-wing political party Patriotic Union</a> —
founded by members of the FARC and the Colombian
Communist Party — beginning in the 1980s during a
previous attempted peace process.</p>
<p>But despite the dark shadow of death squad violence,
the government has long refused to acknowledge the
paramilitary problem. Instead, both U.S. and Colombian
authorities <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dreams-and-Dignity-Confronting-Gendered-Violence-in-Colombia-20160307-0046.html">label
the paramilitaries as “criminal gangs,”</a>
effectively depoliticizing their violence and
downplaying their role in a spiral of targeted attacks
and violent harassment of mostly poor, rural
communities.</p>
<p>“The Colombian and U.S. governments are denying the
nature of (paramilitary) force, which obviously has
right-wing political goals and which targets particular
social leaders as opposed to being merely a criminal
organization,” Kovalik said, adding that by doing so
authorities offer their “tacit assent” to paramilitary
activities. “I think both the Colombian and U.S.
governments are happy for the paramilitaries to wipe out
the left in Colombia.”</p>
<p>In the early aftermath of the official end of the more
than half century-long civil war, tackling paramilitary
violence is more paramount than ever. After the FARC
left its jungle and mountain camps to demobilize once
and for all, large swathes of territories the rebel army
long controlled have been <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Exclusive-Life-in-a-Colombian-Town-Run-by-Paramilitaries-20160406-0037.html">transformed
into power vacuums</a> that threaten to give rise to a
new resurgence of paramilitary groups eager to gain
power in post-conflict Colombia.</p>
<p>Local communities have already noted an increase in
paramilitary activity, including a proliferation in
various parts of the country of graffiti and threatening
pamphlets imposing curfews and announcing plans to carry
out “social cleansing.” The AGC has previously
distributed hostile pamphlets heralding plans to <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-2-FARC-Members-Murdered-in-10-Days-Despite-New-Peace-20170427-0007.html">“control,
organize and recuperate territory”</a> from the FARC.</p>
<p>And the paramilitaries are no minor force, underlining
the urgent need to treat them as a major armed group in
the peace process and develop concrete strategies for
dealing with their violence. The AGC is the country’s
largest illegal armed force, with an estimated 3,000
members, according to the National Police. However, the
paramilitary force claims to boast a membership of
8,000, which would make it comparable in size to the
FARC at the end of its 52-year life as an armed
movement.</p>
<p>Refusal to recognize the AGC and similar syndicates as
paramilitaries with a political right-wing political
bent, Kovalik argued, allows the U.S. and Colombian
governments to “turn a blind eye” to the crisis,
allowing paramilitary incursions on civilian populations
— such as Afro-Colombian communities in the <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ELN-and-Paramilitary-Fighting-Displaces-Hundreds-of-Colombians-20170307-0005.html">poor
and deeply victimized department of Choco</a> — to go
ahead unchallenged despite the fact that they happen
under the nose of the Colombian military.</p>
<p>Colombia’s landmark peace agreement with the FARC was
widely heralded as bringing an end to the
longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere, but the
dark underbelly of the country’s incomplete and delicate
peace has gone comparably unnoticed, even as the bodies
of human rights defenders continue to pile up.</p>
<p>Kovalik argued that <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Make-No-Mistake-There-Is-a-Media-Blockade-Against-Venezuela-20170425-0007.html">international
mainstream media</a> has failed in its moral
responsibility to inform the world of Colombia’s crisis,
revealing a tendency to fixate day after day on the
political situation in Venezuela while scarcely covering
events next door in Colombia or speaking truth to power
in Bogota.</p>
<p>“What we are talking about in Colombia is many times
worse than what is happening in Venezuela. You don't
have the wholesale murder of human rights leaders in
Venezuela,” he said. “The disparate treatment of those
two countries … is stunning.”</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-Mulls-Peace-Pact-With-Escobar-Linked-Paramilitaries-20161114-0004.html">Paramilitary
groups</a> are said to be responsible for some 80
percent of civilian deaths in the country’s more than
half-century-long civil war that has claimed the lives
of some 260,000 people and victimized millions more.</p>
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