The president of the Junta de Acción Comunal de Socuavo Norte in the municipality of Tibú, Santander, Colombia, José Antonio Santiago Pérez, was murdered this Saturday, in the midst of the wave of violence against social leaders.
Santiago Perez was also the delegate of the federation of boards of the Department of Norte de Santander and had just come from a meeting with his community when he was intercepted by armed individuals who killed him in the village of La Serena, 5 minutes from the town of Tibú.
Three months ago his van had been stolen, leaving him vulnerable to the assassins, who finally took his life this Saturday.
José Antonio had previously suffered an attack and therefore had “a security scheme assigned by the UNP [National Protection Unit]”.
Several armed groups are present in the territory, led by the so-called Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia).
The Juntas de Acción Comunal in Colombia are civic, social, non-profit and solidarity-based organizations, formed by citizens belonging to a community, neighborhood, group, village or sector of each municipality, locality or district in the country, with legal status and their own assets. They are autonomously organized with the purpose of promoting an integral, sustainable and sustainable development built from the exercise of participatory democracy in the management of community development.
Juntas de Acción Comunal have been the targets of violent attacks by the Colombian military and allied, illegal right-wing paramilitary organizations at least since the early 1990s. The Colombian military adopts a broad definition of the enemy’ to include not only armed guerrillas, but also community activists and local leaders, particularly those elected to Community Action Councils (Juntas de Acción Comunal).
In the areas under FARC, there was a relationship between the JAC’s and the guerrillas. For example when it came to conflict resolution: each JAC (Junta de Acción Comunal) must create a conciliation committee, where the first cases of conflicts between neighbors arrive, if the committee cannot solve it, this case goes to a second instance, which is the JAC in full, if it is not solved there either, it goes to a Núcleo de Juntas, which is a grouping of JACs from different villages. And if it is not solved there either, it is passed on to the guerrilla group.
With the “surrendering of weapons” from the former FARC-EP guerilla, the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC) has undergone a consolidation process and control of “orphan” areas in dispute with other armed structures. This is the case in the Province of Chocó with the ELN, with different confrontations between groups and with a serious impact over civil communities and assassinations of social leaders and former FARC fighters in several regions of the Colombian Pacific coastal region and other neighboring regions.
According to the Foundation for Peace and Reconciliation (Pares, for its Spanish acronym), strengthening of the AGC has been a main determining factor for the increased massacres, civil population displacement, selective killings, and combats of the last months of this year, which has significantly hindered the implementation of the Final Peace Agreement signed in 2016, above all in regards to the reincorporation process of former FARC-EP members to civil, political and economic society by being targets of systematic killings.