Colombia Fails to Protect Human Rights Defenders

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, over the past two decades, I have traveled to Colombia more than a dozen times. On each trip, I have had the privilege of meeting human rights defenders and social leaders.

In cities, towns, and remote rural areas, these brave men, women, and young people have confronted violence all their lives, and they and their communities are targeted by illegal armed groups--paramilitaries, guerrillas, and criminal organizations. They have been targets of the Colombian military and too often harassed and under illegal surveillance by the state. Simply for speaking on behalf of others, organizing to meet basic needs, or carrying out the duties of their profession--teacher, doctor, farmer, lawyer, journalist, and pastor-- they are threatened, assaulted, and murdered.

During my last trip to Colombia, I spent a few days in the mountains of northern Cauca. I met with indigenous leaders defending their right to ancestral lands. I met with Afro-Colombian leaders creating small enterprises to support their families and their children. I met with demobilized FARC soldiers hoping to build a new life and future. I met with campesino farmers determined to stop growing coca and move into the legal economy.

We sat together, and we ate together. They shared their plans and they shared their dreams with me. They dream of a Colombia at peace and a Colombia that values all of its people, including those who have struggled to survive in Colombia's most violent rural areas.

Brave, generous, intelligent, creative, vulnerable, and humble, these leaders literally have bet their lives on the peace accord being fully implemented. They are counting on the peace accord to deliver the protection, economic development, truth, and justice it promised.

But the Colombian state has abandoned them, just as it has throughout all Colombia's history. The state has failed to put in place the individual and community-based protections demanded by the peace accord. The state has failed to dismantle the criminal networks and armed actors who daily threaten the lives of social leaders. The state has failed to identify and prosecute those who finance, profit by, and order the murders and violence aimed at human rights defenders and social leaders. Even worse, the Colombian state has chosen to remain absent from large parts of the country, failing to establish state presence, basic services, and leaving local leaders defenseless.

Since the peace accord was signed, over 500 rights defenders have been murdered, according to the United Nations human rights representative. Colombia's own ombudsman reports even higher numbers, documenting more than 700 murders during that same period, and nongovernmental organizations place the total even higher.

Rather than seeing this grim reality as a call to action, the government of President Ivan Duque has tried to obscure the number of murder victims. His government defends all the promises it has made on paper without changing by one iota the reality on the ground. It acts as if these murders and threats were some kind of public relations crisis, a battle over statistics and optics.

But it is not a PR problem. It is lives on the line. Economists have written books on the importance of human capital in the development of a prosperous economy. Lack of political will to prevent these murders and protect these local leaders is literally bleeding Colombia of the very human capital it needs to consolidate peace and create a more prosperous and dynamic future.

Two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch issued a report on the murders of Colombia's social leaders and human rights defenders. It outlines practical actions and reforms the Colombian federal, state, and municipal governments could take to prevent, reduce, and even stop the murders and violence. Sadly, these recommendations were met with indifference, by hostility, or rejected out of hand. They were treated more like bad press than a serious attempt to offer help and provide a road map to interrupt the spiral of violence.

That is why I am calling on the Biden administration to make the protection of human rights defenders and social leaders one of America's highest priorities in its relationship with Colombia. The Biden administration and Congress should review the Human Rights Watch report and determine how U.S. policy and aid can advance the full implementation of the peace accord, support its protective and justice mechanisms, and help fulfill its promises of economic development in neglected areas.

I call upon my colleagues to stand up for peace, for human rights, and for an end to the violence against human rights defenders and social leaders in Colombia. These courageous social leaders deserve nothing less than America's full and unconditional support.

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