Struggling for Rights is not a crime!
Teófilo and Jorge, peasant leaders of the National Agrarian Coordinator (CNA), a member organization of LVC in Colombia, were assassinated on February 22 by men who arrived at the house where they were staying and shot them both. Two more dead in Colombia, a country that is murdering its leaders, believing that killing them would end their struggle.
TEÓFILO ACUÑA WAS MURDERED. He was president of the Federación Agrominera del Sur de Bolívar (Federation of Agricultural Producers of Southern Bolivar), spokesman of the Congress of the Peoples and a prominent peasant leader. He was being persecuted and prosecuted by the State Attorney General’s Office, and is currently facing trial for the crime of rebellion.
JORGE TAFUR WAS MURDERED. He was a trade unionist, peasant leader and vociferous, representative of his region and current member of the leadership of the CNA.
Recently they had denounced that the police and the mayor of San Martin (Cesar department) were threatening and harassing the communities’ victims of violence and acting together with the farmer Wilmer Diaz.
We express our international solidarity, from the 82 countries where La Via Campesina is organized, and we direct it towards LVC Colombia and the CNA, an organization that constitutes an important movement of struggle for land, territory and Food Sovereignty in Colombia.
We denounce and alert that the Colombian State continues killing and allowing the assassination of leaders, increasing the intensity of the war, and maintaining its strategy of destruction and extermination of social movements and social rights.
We urge national and international social organizations to remain alert to the struggles and united.
We show our concern and call upon the international community about the level of impunity that exists in relation to the violation of human rights, harassment, and criminalization of the peasant movement at a global level. Painful examples are what is happening in Colombia, Honduras, Palestine, Kenya and many other territories today.
Globalize the struggle, globalize hope!
Note: We invite you to add your solidarity and demands for justice to the Colombian Ombudsman’s Office Defensoriapublica@defensoria.gov.co
