What’s killing them: Violence beyond COVID-19 in Colombia

Abstract

‘I heard what happened. Are you all right?’ I texted an acquaintance of mine the morning of the 27th of April, almost a month after the Colombian government announced the beginning of the national quarantine on March 24th. ‘We could hear shooting. There was an explosion. People say they threw a grenade. We are staying at home’. On the evening of the 26th of April three men were killed in the rural Afro-Colombian community of Munchique, in the municipality of Buenos Aires in the mountains of the north of the department of Cauca. Armando Montaño, Weimar Arará and Humberto Solís were hanging out in the park with other people when unidentified men attacked the group. This gathering was against strict government lockdown regulations, according to which people were required to stay at home and were only allowed out under very few exceptions. This gathering was also against a curfew imposed by dissidents of the demobilised FARC guerrilla organisation. The attack, people assumed, was committed by this armed group. In the weeks before the attack people had received Whatsapp messages and printed pamphlets that, under the name of this armed group, warned people to follow government orders of lockdown or otherwise become a target. Such pamphlets are nothing new; during 2019, for instance, 114 circulated with threats to social leaders (Verdad Abierta, 2020).

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020946379

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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/a1cbfbf4-79f6-4378-88c2-84ed5a22db1d