By Laura Bonilla, EL ESPECTADOR, May 8, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
What will the world say to a country that has allowed the systematic murders of 1,200 social leaders in barely a decade? What name would international agencies give if these murders had taken place in any other democracy on the planet? In other contexts, this would be a sign of institutional collapse, of a government incapable of keeping its people alive, of a democracy that had turned into an empty showplace. Honestly, I don’t know why they don’t say that now.
A comparable experience demonstrates that: in Mexico the cartels murder mayors and candidates to impose their territorial power. In Guatemala, in the ‘80’s, the military laid waste to indigenous leadership in order to put down the resistance. In Colombia, the armed groups don’t need to overturn the government, it’s enough for them just to kill leadership. It’s enough for them to impose fear, and that’s more than enough to let them to do whatever they happen to feel like doing.
In order to install a government within the government, they even dispute the government’s monopoly of weapons, they build infrastructure, they establish rules of conduct, and they kill anyone that opposes them, and with total impunity. To protect leaders, nobody responds. Not today, not four years ago, not even eight years ago, when the problem was already a threat.
Up to now, we have lost 1,200 leaders. The majority in Cauca, Antioquia, Nariño, and Valle del Cauca. 345 communal leaders, 236 Indigenous, 170 communitarian leaders, 148 campesino leaders. The worst years, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Nor was it just setting off fireworks in 2024. It’s a war declared by armed men against civilians until there is nobody left in the countryside to question the violence and to refuse to respond with submission and obedience.
Beyond the tragedy, this killing is the basis for armed and criminal governance. It’s not just that there is crime; it’s that this crime is governing, so that in many territories, it’s not the government that makes the rules, but rather the illegal armed organizations that are substituting for civil governance with a dialectic of control, punishment, and private benefit. This criminal governance, which has been demonstrated by academic studies throughout Latin America, is sustained by a mixture of coercion and functionality. It provides security, it imposes justice, resolves conflict, and regulates illegal economies—all of that, obviously, under the logic of fear and silence.
Lots of words, without any evidence, and zero results—the equilibrium after ten years of governmental indolence
In recent months I have had the opportunity to participate at several places where people were talking about saying yes to peace, or saying no to peace, yes to negotiations, or no to negotiations. Whether they were politicians or not, there was definitely ideology, more or less, but very little effort put toward measuring the results on the issue of protecting the people.
Very little interest in saying that those more than a thousand killings meant the victory of criminal governance in a system of incentives that always produce the same result: the violent win, there is no justice, and much less, prevention. Stupidly, we’ve gone several years thinking that the situation will be resolved with one of the two favorite strategies: shoot as many criminals as possible so they won’t be doing any more killing, or, on the contrary, negotiate and thus domesticate them. That has a lot of problems.
In general, indiscriminate shooting creates more problems and human rights violations than it resolves. And it creates retaliations like the recent “Plan Pistola”, or like the massive killing of leaders in Cauca. It doesn’t work in the medium or the long run, it doesn’t provide access to justice, and neither does it prevent this from continuing to happen.
Killing an individual is cheap, and it has less and less social or political cost. On the other hand, what they thought would work in the Total Peace, and which was its biggest failure, was thinking that if the government offers to negotiate, the groups that exercise armed governance would stop killing people. They didn’t. They stopped their occasional combats with the government, they temporarily stopped the forced displacements, they even helped with demining. But the selective killings were maintained, and I can tell you why: those killings are not a consequence, but rather the basis of their control. They are fundamental for the criminal governance.
Strategic murder of social leaders is a functional, efficient, and repeatable tool of criminal governance for the armed groups. It produces fear, it can be used whenever they feel like it; its political cost is low, and it restricts the democratic spectrum to those who are disposed to be co-governed.
The message is clear: whoever leads, whoever questions, whoever organizes, will be eliminated. In Mexico, for example, it’s documented how the cartels have left off buying the politicians in order just to kill them directly. In Colombia, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, the killing of leaders exploded—more than 1,200 killed in less than eight years. The logic is simple: without social leadership, without organized voices, they can impose criminal governance without any resistance.
Along with the institutional results, the analysis is terrifying. The Minister of Interior heads a protection system that doesn’t work. The National Protection Unit (UNP in Spanish) which prioritizes teams of bodyguards, is useless for the protection of local community leaders. But it does provide the luxury of spending thousands of millions for high profile individuals, even covering up scandals and mafias.
The only tool available for the communities is the decree. A piece of paper. A document that talks about collective protection, with recommendations that are impossible to implement. And that’s all. As a former Director of Human Rights at the Interior Ministry once suggested to me: if we were to implement Decree 660 just like that, there would be more meetings than days in the year and every one of them coming from Bogotá. It’s impossible, but don’t let anybody tell that to the Human Rights platforms, because they think it’s their only hope.