On 21 April, armed men arrived at Narciso Beleño’s home in the town of Santa Rosa del Sur, in northern Colombia, and fatally shot him. The 62-year-old had dedicated his life to protecting land from large extractive mining projects that threaten the Serranía de San Lucas, a forested massif and one of the most biodiverse places in the country.
Beleño, of the northern department of Bolívar, is one of the latest victims of an increasingly complex conflict which has been spreading into several other regions of Colombia: one which sees local communities fighting against illegal economies, international mining projects and guerrilla groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents.
Various reports by the Truth Commission – established by the Juan Manuel Santos government (2010-2018) after the 2016 peace accords with FARC to investigate the origins and causes of the country’s long-running armed conflict – show how land defenders like Beleño have resisted the expansion of extractivist activities often driven and promoted by central government policies. But despite recent attempts of the government of Gustavo Petro to launch reforms to protect land defenders, their communities and NGOs say peace remains elusive, and their lives continue to be at risk.
Resistance in Serranía de San Lucas
A prominent example of community resistance can be seen in Fedeagromisbol, an organisation of peasants and small-scale miners that promotes sustainable practices in southern Bolívar, and which fights for peace, responsible mining and sustainable agriculture.
The organisation operates in the Serranía de San Lucas, an important gold reserve in Colombia that is being explored by multinational company AngloGold Ashanti. The South Africa-headquartered mining firm applied for permission to explore and exploit gold mining in the area in 2004, and its access to the area had been supported by a unit of the Colombian army. In 2006, the unit was accused of variously killing and capturing two Fedeagromisbol leaders who had been leading protests of the company’s presence in the region.
Serranía de San Lucas is “one of the great gold reserves in Latin America, and the people have not allowed it to be exploited; rather, it has been designated as a protected area,” explains Gladys Rojas, leader of the NGO Corporación Sembrar, which works with communities on social justice and peace issues. “At the moment, this is an important exercise in the context of environmental protection.”
The area has seen an increasing presence of armed groups such as the ELN and paramilitaries, attracted by the possibility of riches from such deposits. Research by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, a public body that preserves the memory of the Colombian conflict, shows that these groups have been fighting for territorial control for decades.
Fedeagromisbol’s resistance to extractive projects has for years been opposed by such armed groups. Its work focuses on political advocacy and bringing legal cases to international courts on issues related to southern Bolívar, including land and territory, dignified living, memory and human rights, mining and the environment.
Since 2009, a year after another former Fedeagromisbol leader, Edgar Martínez Ruiz, was murdered, the group has been granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The commission requested that the State of Colombia adopt measures to protect the lives of Fedeagromisbol leaders.
Since the murder of Beleño, observers describe an increasingly risky environment for inhabitants of the region. Rojas says that currently, a paramilitary encirclement exists at the economic and social level, “with very strong social control exercises”. Several paramilitary bases have reportedly been established in the mining area, where such camps would have previously been located far from population centres, she notes. “Today, these bases are inside the villages, which increases [the paramilitaries’] control over the population and organisations.”
A peace with nature that eludes Colombia
Astrid Torres is coordinator of the Somos Defensores programme, the leading NGO in Colombia monitoring the threats faced by social leaders. She is preparing a report on statistics related to dangers faced in the first half of the year, and notes that there has been “no improvement” over the previous year: Colombia continues to be the country where most land defenders are killed annually. According to Global Witness, which monitors violence against land defenders globally and which Somos Defensores contributes monitoring to, Colombia registered the highest number of defenders killed in 2023, at 79.
But beyond the murders, the situation of human rights defenders in Colombia “must be understood as a structural problem of historical persecution against the [human rights defender] movement,” says Torres. “This is due not only to legal armed actors or state structures that have often persecuted and stigmatised defenders, but also to illegal armed actors who, in the context of the political, social and armed conflict, have turned defenders into enemies.”
In December 2023, the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the country, legally recognised the graveness of the situation faced by human rights defenders. Through its SU-546 ruling, it declared an “unconstitutional state of affairs”, requiring that the state provide effective responses to ensure the security of, and justice for such defenders.
Torres notes that the current situation of defenders is critical due to delays in the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC guerrillas, especially due to failures in the dismantling of paramilitarism and the impunity with which guerrilla groups operate. “In the 20-year history of [Somos Defensores], there have been only 179 sentences [for the] killings of defenders,” she notes.
There is no clear policy, no concrete action today from the state on how to stop the risk situation for defendersAstrid Torres, coordinator of the NGO Somos Defensores
This was compounded by the lack of coordination of actions by the state, which was unable to protect leaders like Beleño, Torres says: “There is no clear policy at this time to react to the situation… no concrete action today from the state [on]… how to stop the risk situation for defenders.” She also highlights flaws in the strategy of the Petro administration, which, although said to have been created with good intentions, has achieved few results in the territories. This policy, known as Total Peace, has opened negotiations with the main illegal armed groups operating in Colombia, with the goal of ending or reducing violence in different regions. But she notes that none of the negotiations have agreed on concrete actions to protect defenders.
Torres adds that despite such groups being in dialogue with the government, the NGO has recorded cases of aggression instigated by them against land defenders, with the FARC dissidents and the Clan del Golfo committing the highest number of incidents against defenders in the first half of 2024.
Escazú and COP16
On 28 September, President Petro announced that the National Police had captured the members of the Clan del Golfo who were allegedly responsible for the murder of Beleño. The paramilitary group, also known as the Autodefensas Unidas Gaitanistas, has been increasingly prominent and expanding in the region.
The three members were arrested as part of Operation Themis, an initiative by the Ministry of Defence aimed at identifying those responsible for the murders of social leaders and signatories of the peace agreement. Independent media outlet Voragine produced a report with testimony from Clan del Golfo members alleging that former members of Colombian security forces, now working with the illegal armed group, were behind Beleño’s murder. Although this is a positive development, in a country marked by lack of protection, environmental leaders are not at ease.
The Petro government has tried to position the fight against climate change as one of its priorities, promoting spaces and actions to achieve this goal. These have been met with a mixture of scepticism and hope.
One of these spaces was COP16, the United Nations biodiversity summit recently hosted in the Colombian city of Cali. Tatiana Roa, vice-minister of Environmental Management at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, said before the conference that this year’s aim was to send out a key message: “‘Peace with nature’, understood as a call to act urgently given the magnitude of the civilisational crisis we face and the need to take immediate action. Peace with nature forces us to rethink what we mean by development and progress.”
Nelsón Orrego, a human rights defender of Serranía de San Lucas, says that at COP16, a meeting took place between leaders of different social organisations of the forested region and the national government. A document of commitments was agreed on, which included a point on the protection of social leaders and the communities that inhabit the territory.
Another tool promoted by the government is the implementation of the Escazú Agreement, ratified in August by the Constitutional Court. This regional treaty could be key to improving leaders’ safety by providing tools for access to information, public participation and environmental justice. Orrego notes that, combined with the COP16 document, the Escazú Agreement marks “an important step forward, as existing legislative tools will be used, and others will be created to protect these leaders”.
Torres adds: “The Escazú Agreement obliges us to act more quickly on certain issues, especially in relation to environmental defenders. It offers us the opportunity to build tools that really guarantee citizen participation, transparency of information and respect for the rights of defenders.”
Environmentalists such as Gabriel Tobón, a professor at Javeriana University, view the tools of the Escazú Agreement with optimism. He believes that although results should not be automatically expected, the agreement “establishes better conditions to protect those who oppose projects that threaten the territory”.
Torres says the main guarantee for defenders will be to advance the current government’s ambitious suite of social reforms, which ranges from labour protection to widening democratic participation and improving justice, but notes that these have moved slowly in congress due to the opposition’s majority. “The land issue is central to the conflict, as is the possibility of building livelihood economies that can compete with illicit economies, providing people with real alternatives,” she says.
