This week, Amazon Watch and allies accompanied Colombian grassroots Indigenous and campesino spokespeople to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. A critical part of our work has always been to amplify the messages of Amazonian partners and stand with them to demand respect for their rights. This is not only a part of our role as a human rights organization, but also the most effective way to protect the rainforest from the many forces bent on its destruction. The human rights situation in Colombia has been dire for decades, and Indigenous communities continue to live with the threat of violence from actors on all sides.
When you hear the term “false positive,” you might think of an inaccurate COVID test result.
But in the context of Colombia’s 50-year civil war, the term garners a much more macabre connotation.
To show quantitative results in their war on left-wing guerrilla groups in the early 2000’s, Colombian soldiers killed thousands of innocent people and passed them off as dead insurgents.
This became an enormous human rights scandal, among others, that garnered international headlines.
Though the Colombian government signed a 2016 peace accord with the country’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Colombian Amazon continues to be an epicenter of violence, combining the characteristics of a decades-old armed conflict, illicit economies, and extractive industries such as oil drilling and mining.
One manifestation of these “low-intensity” conflicts is the alarming number of environmental defenders and community leaders threatened and killed across the Amazon each year. According to Global Witness’ 2023 report, “One in five murders of defenders worldwide took place in the Amazon Rainforest last year, with violence, torture and threats a shared reality for communities across the region.”
Armed actors – including Colombia’s military forces and illegal armed groups like the Carolina Ramirez Front and the Comandos de la Frontera – fight for territorial, financial, and social control of areas that are actually the ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous peoples and others are struggling to protect their ancestral lands, livelihoods, and lives. In doing so, they run afoul of the men with guns who don’t hesitate to threaten and kill.
Emblematic case: Massacre in Remanso
On the morning of March 28, 2022, ostensibly acting to capture a “finance lieutenant” of the Comandos de la Frontera in the community of Upper Remanso, a U.S.-backed counter-narcotics unit of the Colombian military killed 11 people.
Government officials, including then-President Ivan Duque, immediately claimed that eleven victims were armed members of “dissident” guerrilla groups that had failed to demobilize in the 2016 peace process.
Testimonies gathered by human rights groups and Colombian journalists would quickly call into question the official version.
According to press accounts and eyewitnesses, the soldiers moved several victims’ bodies before criminal investigators could arrive, placing military vests and rifles on top of their lifeless corpses. These nefarious actions could be an implicit admission that they knew some of those killed were actually civilians.
One of these attempted “false positives” in Remanso was Pablo Panduro, the Kichwa Indigenous governor of the neighboring community of Lower Remanso.
In a testimony prepared for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the current governor Yarley Ramirez, stated, “The governor was a traditional healer, a professor of our native language, and a leader of the organizational process of our Indigenous government. With him, we have lost an irreplaceable legacy of knowledge about how to care for the Amazon.”
Alongside Panduro’s corpse, the Colombian military also manipulated and dressed up the body of a 16-year-old student, Brayan Pama. His family insists that he was not a member of any armed group, but instead a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Colombian military opened fire.
The Washington connection
Shockingly, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, the implicated military unit has connections to United States military training.
Colombian press accounts indicate that the Remanso operation was executed by the 3rd Counternarcotics Battalion, which is part of the U.S.-backed Command Against Narcotrafficking and Transnational Threats.
Congressman Andy Levin raised concerns about the massacre within a month during a hearing featuring U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
On the first anniversary of the killings, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter, asking a series of questions of Secretary Blinken, including whether or not the Leahy Law – the U.S. law prohibiting weapons transfers to human rights violators – had been applied in this specific case.
Though the State Department replied two months later with a general response, they left unanswered the pointed question about whether or not the Leahy Law has been applied in the Remanso case.
Internationalizing the cry for justice
Since the massacre, community members and families of the civilian victims have been pressing for truth, justice, and reparations in this case. As recently detailed by Human Rights Watch, progress in the legal process has been agonizingly slow.
More than a year and a half later, a group of grassroots spokespeople and their supporters have come to Washington, D.C. to internationalize their call.
On Monday, November 6 they confronted officials from different agencies of the Colombian government at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a regional human rights body covering the Western Hemisphere.
Among the delegation members was Rodolfo Pama, father of Brayan Pama. He stated, ”the legal process has brought constant suffering given the procedural delays from the Colombian government. This is especially true as there are elements of key evidence to define the responsibility of the perpetrators. Access to justice in Colombia is always challenging, but the fact that this is a case of ‘false positives’ makes it even harder given the obstacles presented.”
The plaintiffs hope this international spotlight on the Remanso case will help create the political will within Colombia to move toward justice. They have also demanded greater transparency in the case, that the higher-level military officers who planned and authorized the operation be charged, and a series of important restorative measures such as the issuing of a collective land title for Lower Remanso, which has been held up in bureaucratic hurdles for years.
Accompanying Amazonian defenders
Amazon Watch is honored to have supported this delegation, in close collaboration with a number of Colombian and international allies. It represents an important expansion of our evolving work in the Colombian Amazon, supporting both Indigenous and campesino social processes in defense of the Amazon rainforest.
Given her prior experience in the Inter-American Commission, Amazon Watch Advocacy Manager (and human rights lawyer) Gisela Hurtado provided crucial legal guidance and served as the facilitator during the hearing itself.
Taking advantage of the group’s presence in Washington, D.C., we also arranged meetings with policymakers who have deep expertise in Colombia, both in the U.S. House of Representatives and with the U.S. State Department.
Ultimately, the entire initiative would not have been possible without the presence and passion of the grassroots spokespeople from Putumayo. We are humbled by their powerful words and recommit ourselves to the ongoing support of their communities.
