Message from the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, February 19, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Once again, our Peace Community of San José de Apartadó turns to humanity and to history to make a record of the new attacks, which are specific in their repeated threats to exterminate our way of living in solidarity and determination that our destiny is to work for the construction of a peace that is just and fair.
For a very long time now, the institutions of the Colombian government, supported by the mass communications media, have been trying to convince Colombia and the world that there are no paramilitary groups here in Colombia.
These armed organizations are not recognized legally, even though they are secretly coordinated with all the government institutions and enjoy the most brazen impunity from the judicial agencies, and even though their objective is to perpetrate the crimes that humanity has detested with the greatest horror. In the past, they demonstrated publicly the way they were being accompanied and protected by the Armed Forces. They shamelessly dressed in the same uniforms, used the same areas, and took part in troop movements as if they were friends. They were tolerated by the business community and the mass communications media.
But because of the extent to which their crimes and their relationship with the government and the establishment is now impossible to hide, they have come up with another modus operandi based on camouflaging their relationship with government agencies, the business community, and the mass communications media: it’s the secret financing of their actors and their accomplices by supporting the drug trafficking mafias and using anonymity as a way to cover up their criminal activities.
Within these parameters it’s been possible for the Clan del Golfo, for example, which is a paramilitary organization native to Urabá and originating in the town (vereda) of Playa Larga in San José de Apartadó, now to be protected by the civilian population and by regional agencies. That allows it to adopt practices that are defined in the Criminal Code as serious offenses, but they’ve been able to accustom the people to tolerate them routinely as “normal practices” that now nobody questions, and that no agency of control, not the Attorney General’s Office, not the Police, not the Army, not the Inspector General, not even the Ombudsman dares to address, for fear of offending the real powers that rule there.
Thanks to becoming accustomed to crime, they see as NORMAL the daily exercise of criminal practices that are clearly defined as such in the Criminal Code. For someone familiar with the laws and with the structure of the regulations outlined in Colombia’s constitution, all of this is contrary to the constitution and the laws. Any civilian group, not chosen through constitutional procedures can’t just claim authority to govern any way they want to, make up laws, impose them, demand economic contributions, impose penalties, least of all penalties of confinement, of death, seize land and property, use weapons, patrol the countryside with weapons imposing their will, going as far as killing people who refuse to obey. They’re going around with all kinds of intimidations, all in the name of an ideology of the “elite” or of an “order” that is incompatible with the rights and guarantees that once were fixed in the constitution and the laws. They are allowed to do this in spite of the dozens of reforms desired by an economically privileged and corrupt “elite”, which still conserve some basic juridical principles.
When we’re constantly receiving testimonies from the residents, both campesinos and urban, who are describing the specific crimes that make up the permanent practices of the paramilitaries, anyone would be terrified to open the Criminal Code and discover that at least 35 of its articles describe the criminal conduct that constitutes the paramilitaries’ daily activities, and that the legal authorities don’t seem to care in the least to investigate, prosecute, and punish. Neither do the rest of the government agencies give any signal that they are doing anything to stop this tornado of criminality, leaving the multitude of victims completely helpless. And what’s even worse is that this degree of criminal activity is being protected by enormous sums of money. Right now the Community Action Boards are tempted by unbelievably huge bribes to keep them quiet and to make them support the schemes of the paramilitaries.
Of course calling them PARAMILITARIES preserves all their etymological legitimacy, as their decisive power is supported by power “militar”, although the legality of their resort to weapons is only “de facto” and not “de jure” or “by rights”, but the power comes from institutional tolerance of its illegality.
The events which we report today are as follows:
On Monday, January 6, 2025, we learned of new threats and a plan to kill some of the leaders of our Peace Community. The plan was supposed to be carried out and then made to look like an attempted robbery that had nothing to do with the local and regional context.
On Monday, January 13, 2025, our Community found out about a convocation of residents in the region for a meeting on January 15 in the town of La Esperanza in our District (corregimiento) of San José de Apartadó, and that a number of personages would be attending. The central theme once again would be the need to promote the construction of a highway through the town of La Esperanza that would do damage to our private property, Las Delicias. We have to remember that for a long time we have been opposing that construction for good and sufficient reasons. The people that are pushing for the highway have answered us with insults, attacks, robberies, and property destruction, promising bloodshed and taking part in the extrajudicial executions perpetrated in March of 2024. It appears that their desire to exterminate us will not cease.
On Sunday, January 19, 2025, a resident of the area stopped by and told us that in some of the towns in the District they were circulating on social networks a demand and an invitation to the civilian population to take part in an invasion of our farm, Las Delicias, the private property of our Peace Community. They were saying that they were tired of having to walk places and they were in a hurry to get going with the road to La Esperanza. After that incitement, they tried to break down our fences and just build a road over anybody that was opposed to it.
On Friday, January 24, 2025, the paramilitaries who control the area called several people who live in the Mulatos Canyon to a meeting. At the meeting the paramilitaries announced a prohibition of planting subsistence crops in extensions of parcels greater than one hectare. They also announced the taxes or amounts of money that every town would have to contribute toward funding the construction of roads for the towns. Those taxes, imposed by the paramilitaries, range between 10 and 30 million pesos (roughly between USD $2,500 and USD $7,400 at current exchange rates) and the towns would be obliged to pay the amount required for the road. According to the paramilitaries, they would furnish the construction equipment and the operators, and the civilian population would have to furnish the fuel for the machinery. The paramilitaries announced to some of the civilians that, in the case of the Peace Community, the order was, “no civilian is to get mixed up with that sonofabitching community because it’s all set up for them to get exterminated and erased from the planet”.
On Thursday, January 30, 2025, our Community learned of a plan by the paramilitaries to burn down our settlement at San Josecito and make it look as if the fire was set by invaders from some unidentified armed group.
On Wednesday, February 5, 2025, it became widely and sufficiently known, through a communication, that a well-known paramilitary was getting information from a third party who was keeping him informed of the movements of Germán Graciano, the Legal Representative of our Peace Community.
On Saturday, February 8, 2025, we learned that some people close to the paramilitaries were arguing that the Peace Community had threatened them, so that they were deserving of protection by the UNP (National Protection Unit). Their story was that armed groups are coming from Peace Community settlements, such as San Josecito, and those armed groups carry out operations in in the urban part of San José and then travel by river to hide in San Josecito. Such an infamy couldn’t be more stupid and malicious, as many of our principles are carefully adhered to; those who transgress them are penalized. This would be absolutely contrary to our practices and is a dishonorable defamation.
On Friday, February 14, 2025, at the place known as Chontalito in San José de Apartadó, the paramilitaries had a meeting with people connected to the Community Action Boards in order to get their needed economic collaboration for the construction of roads in the different towns in the District. Once again one of the roads would cross the Las Delicias farm, the private property of our Peace Community, in the town of La Esperanza. The paramilitaries have already cost human lives for opposing the construction of illegal roads, which destroy the environment, are planned to serve extractivist multinationals, are built with extortionate and illegal taxes, are built with military equipment, and closely collaborate with plans made by people submissive to the paramilitaries without any democratic participation. While the paramilitaries are trying to convince the Boards to collaborate with their illegal plan, for several days now at La Batea in the town of La Balsa they have been forcing every vehicle or motorbike that travels between Apartadó and San José to pay extortionate tolls because of a supposed agreement on a road abandoned by the Mayor’s Office, an agreement that has never been verified. Faced with these demands to pay exorbitant amounts of money, many of the humble campesinos of San José de Apartadó feel anguish and fear because they see themselves forced to obey the order or be expelled from the region, according to the paramilitaries.
On Sunday, February 16, 2025, just at the moment when an international delegation was entering our Community’s settlement at San Josecito, three people traveling on a motorcycle stopped in front of our settlement and claimed, “they’re all guerrillas that are arriving here!”
We are sharing this report with those who have been in solidarity with us as we complete 11 months after the latest massacre suffered by our Community in the town of La Esperanza. We are indignant about the impunity that remains concerning this most recent crime against humanity, because it’s part of the systematic macro-crime that has now achieved 28 years of impunity. We are absolutely unconvinced about the path traveled by the Attorney General’s Office to investigate it, based on the classic methods that have produced nothing but impunity for several decades: interrogating and being merciless to the victims, but not the killers, relying on the testimony that’s easiest to manipulate, whether by bribes or by threats, and carrying out tests that are supposedly technical but are extemporaneous and contaminated, and not providing even minimal conditions for our collaboration. We are still less convinced, knowing that there are hundreds and hundreds of horrendous crimes without any investigation or justice at all.
They might put an end to our lives, but never to our voices that are calling out for truth in the midst of an ocean of impunity.
Peace Community of San José de Apartadó February 19, 2025