A black woman with her eyes clouded by tears and her face immersed in grief looks out at the coffin where the body of Elmer Abonía Rodríguez lies, the mayor of Guachené (Cauca), murdered nine days before the end of his term, on December 22. December 2023. Abonía was injured in a shootout, in the middle of an apparent robbery attempt on one of his bodyguards.
Hours later, he died at a nearby hospital where he had been taken in an attempt to save his life.
The image of that anonymous and desolate woman would soon be forgotten in a country where one act of violence easily displaces the previous one.
The murder of the mayor of Guachené, who had asked for help from the Government due to the overwhelming insecurity in the municipality of 20,000 inhabitants, was followed by a chain of crimes: the murder of the councilor of Tuluá (Valle), Eliecid Ávila, a few hours after taking office;
the kidnapping of the delegate of the Registry, Jefferson Murillo, and the official of the National Learning Service (SENA), Blyderson Arboleda, on the roads of Chocó;
and the attack against the recently inaugurated mayor of Tumaco (Nariño), Félix Henao.
None of the four departments of the Colombian Pacific was safe from violence at the turn of the year.
The reality of that area of the country, from where President Gustavo Petro will leave between January 22 and 27 and historically hit by actions of armed groups that dispute control of illegal businesses such as extortion and drug trafficking, remains anchored.
Cauca, for example, concentrated the highest number of murders of social leaders and human rights defenders in 2023. According to the Institute of Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), of the 188 cases nationwide, 38 were in that department. with the presence of dissidents from the extinct FARC and the ELN, the oldest active guerrilla in Colombia.
The first murder of a peace signer in 2024 occurred in the Cauca municipality of Sucre.
Cauca was also the department with the most ex-combatants murdered the previous year, with seven of 44 victims.
Eduin Capaz, indigenous leader of the region, explains that murder is used as a way to show territorial power.
“Added to this are recruitments and threats to leaders and spokespeople, which do not allow us to have peace of mind or a hopeful feeling,” he adds.
This feeling worsens in a context of negotiations with armed groups in which communities interpret the attacks as contradictory events with the ceasefire agreements.
The four departments of the Pacific were decisive in the election of President Gustavo Petro in 2022. The 80% of the votes in his favor in the second round was a reflection of the hope for change that he aroused during the campaign.
In an unusual gesture, the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), which has supported the Government, recently launched a public call to the president to take concrete measures to stop the escalation of the conflict.
Human Rights Watch, the international human rights NGO, also raised warnings in its recent 2024 world report. “In the department of Cauca, Nasa indigenous people who oppose abuses committed by armed groups have been threatened and killed.
Clashes between armed groups, mainly in the municipality of Algeria, have left more than 6,500 people displaced or confined,” the document states.
The arms of illegal armed organizations extend to the north, to Valle del Cauca, the department with the most massacres last year.
Of the 94 that Indepaz reported, 13 – totaling 41 victims – happened there.
Two of the four that are taking place in the first days of this year took place in Toro and Candelaria, also in the Valley.
Governor Dilian Francisca Toro cites as an example of the reach of these structures the Jaime Martínez column of the Central General Staff, which commits crimes in the north of Cauca and reaches municipalities in Valle del Cauca such as Jamundí, a neighbor of Cali.
“There has to be a more comprehensive solution from southwestern Colombia for the security of the Pacific.
That is the call that we have made to the national government, which has to be something very articulated between these departments,” Toro said in an interview with Caracol Radio.
Added to this panorama is the pressure from urban criminal gangs such as 'La Inmaculada', which is attributed with the murder of Eliecid Ávila, the councilor of Tuluá, and threats against the current mayor of the municipality, Gustavo Vélez.
“They are multi-crime common crime groups that commit crimes from prisons: they extort, manage micro-trafficking and have control of activities such as bars, restaurants and even the sale of onions,” Vélez denounces.
The port city of Buenaventura, which has suffered decades of poverty and abandonment, has also had to endure clashes between mafia groups such as the 'Shottas' and the 'Espartanos'.
Something similar happens in Quibdó, the capital of the department of Chocó, located at the northern end of the Colombian Pacific, on the border with Panama.
The Network of Mothers and Caregivers reported that 170 young people were murdered last year.
According to the newspaper El Espectador, the network attributes these deaths mainly to the crossing of invisible borders or the non-payment of extortions.
The Locos Yam, the Palmeños and the Mexicanos are some of the groups that operate in the municipality where six out of ten people live in poverty.
In addition to urban networks, violence takes root in the economic interests of the ELN, the FARC dissidents and the Clan del Golfo, considered the largest drug trafficking gang in the country, which dominates the trafficking of migrants through the thick jungle of Tapón. of Darién, where last year 520,000 people risked their lives, double the number in 2022.
Andrés Preciado, director of conflict dynamics at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, explains that the strategic location of the Colombian Pacific for illicit economies has prevented a break with violence.
“What we see is a dispute over the relevance that drug routes have taken.
In addition, illicit crops have grown.
“It is the perfect scenario for the consolidation of the criminal economy of drug trafficking,” he points out.
According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, by 2022 the four departments of the Colombian Pacific produced 41% of all coca in the country.
President Petro has promised in response a strategy of oxygen in favor of the peasants to reduce their dependence on the drug economy and of suffocation against the strongest links of the mafias.
According to the same UN study, Nariño, in the south of the region, has the largest area with coca crops of the 32 departments of Colombia, more than 25% of the total.
Bordering Ecuador, it is the department with the most forced displacements with 35,024 cases in 2023, followed by Valle del Cauca and Cauca with 25,731 and 16,390 events of this type, respectively.
Most of them affect the indigenous, black, Raizal and Palenquera populations in rural areas.
The situation shows no signs of improvement.
The Norwegian Refugee Council reported that in Olaya Herrera and Samaniego, precisely in Nariño, more than 3,000 people have been victims of forced displacement in the first days of January.
And in Chocó, more than 9,000 people have been confined since November due to armed clashes and death threats to civilians.
“The situation is also worrying in the municipality of Juradó (Chocó), where more than 1,000 people remain confined to their own territory,” the organization indicated.
Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, warns that
The Colombian Pacific continues to be a critical point for violence.
“It accounts for nearly 30 percent of the massacres and murders of social leaders in Colombia and an important part of the displacements and confinements.
Stopping violence there requires a solid territorial security policy and progress to guarantee state presence through the implementation of the PDET.
Without it, “total peace” will be just an aspiration,” he says.
The identity of the woman who expressed her pain hugging the coffin of the mayor of Guachené was not made public.
But her image embodies millions of victims and inhabitants of the Pacific – and the rest of Colombia – exhausted by a history of violence that does not heal and, on the contrary, is repeated;
of a country that continues to look in the mirror like that woman did at the murdered mayor.
“There is a dehumanization around everything we are experiencing,” laments Eduin Capaz, the indigenous leader of Cauca.
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