Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

National Police (and suspected military personnel as well) are waging armed violence against members of the Tolupán indigenous community of San Francisco de Locomapa in Yoro Department. On May 5, National Police fired on their encampment (Campamento Digno por la Defensa del Bosque y el Territorio Tolupán) that was set up to protect a pine forest against illegal logging. Norma Yackelin Ávila suffered a gunshot. We are unsure how many others might have been wounded.

A man was approached by unknown persons on the streets of the Garífuna community Nueva Armenia and threatened: “if you do not want to die, stop hanging around Mabel Robledo, because we have already been authorized them to kill her." A half-hour earlier, an unknown individual entered Mabel Robledo's place of business and threatened: “…we are going to kill you.” This occurred after Mabel Robledo denounced before local and national officials the appropriation of ancestral Garífuna territories by palm growers and the extraction of sand from the Papaloteca River by drug traffickers.

In Quiché Department, Indigenous journalist Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz faces up to 12 years in prison on trumped up charges following an arrest in August 2020 while reporting on an Indigenous-led protest against a local mayor’s alleged corruption in distribution of COVID-19 assistance. Her trial has been delayed multiple times. We believe that the judicial delays and continued obstacles to Anastasia Mejía’s reporting are attempts to silence the voices of Indigenous peoples, to conceal information on corruption and human rights abuses, and to generate fear among communities. This is the third letter we have written regarding the journalist’s false criminalization since September 2020.

To protect the autonomy and ancestral culture of the Nasa Indigenous Peoples, local governor Sandra Liliana Peña Chocué rejected pressures from illegal armed groups who promote the expansion of illicit crops, illegal mining, and drug trafficking. She reported to the authorities that she was receiving threats from illegal groups that exercise territorial control in Cauca Department. They didn't like that she was so outspoken against the increase in illicit crop cultivation in the La Laguna-Siberia Indigenous reserve. On April 20, four unidentified armed men violently abducted her from her home and shot her. She died on the way to the hospital.

Two unknown persons ambushed Wayuu Indigenous leader Aura Esther García Peñalver and shot her to death as she and her husband were riding into their community on a motorcycle. Since March 15 she had been receiving telephone and text message threats. Her requests for protection from authorities for herself and the women of the Wayúu community were not honored. For more than three decades, Wayúu communities in La Guajira have been harmed by operations at the El Cerrejón Coal Mine. In December 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia found that the mine had been damaging the health of area residents. The company’s response to a court order to improve air quality and reduce the mine’s harm to residents has been totally inadequate.