Bogota, Colombia – She was a plainspoken but determined woman, those who knew her said, seeking justice for hundreds of fellow peasants whose lands were stolen by right-wing militias during a more than decade-long reign of terror.
But the contract-style slaying of Yolanda Izquierdo, 43, this week outside her home in Monteria, capital of the northwestern state of Cordoba, raises doubts about whether the government can meet its promises to restore pilfered land to Colombia’s tens of thousands of dispossessed.
Izquierdo was just one of a dozen people seeking compensation for paramilitary crimes who have been murdered in the past month in the state, said Rodrigo Ogaza, head of the Committee of Relatives of Victims of Violence in Cordoba.
The fear is palpable, but those seeking reparations won’t be intimidated, he said.
“We’re pressing on with our heads high because what we’re doing is legal – and ought to be protected by the state,” Ogaza said.
Under the pact that disbanded Colombia’s brutal right-wing militias, paramilitary leaders were supposed to confess to their crimes, which include scores of massacres, and surrender vast tracts of land they stole in return for relatively lenient prison sentences.
One prominent militia leader, Salvatore Mancuso, began his confession in December in a courtroom in the western city of Medellin. But neither he nor his fellow paramilitary bosses have begun to return the millions of acres of prime real estate they seized at gunpoint or forced people to sell cheap.
This week, the prospect for such reparations – indeed, the viability of the entire peace process – was thrown into doubt with the murder of Izquierdo.
Two gunmen surprised her after dark on Wednesday with her husband. She was shot twice in the head; her husband was gravely wounded by two gunshots to the chest, police said.
The mother of five was buried the next day.
Izquierdo was one of some 3 million people forcibly displaced since the 1980s in Colombia’s conflict – which, although fought by illegal armies of the left and the right and fueled by cocaine profits – is in essence about land.
In December, Izquierdo filed a complaint with the Federal Ombudsman’s Office in Monteria on behalf of 416 families who said they were intimidated in the early 2000s into forfeiting tracts that had, ironically, been granted them a decade earlier by a paramilitary chief, Fidel Castano.
On the day she was killed, Izquierdo had visited the office and received instructions on how to file formal complaints with the federal land agency, a lawyer in the Ombudsman’s Office, Alvaro Sanchez, told The Associated Press.
She had received death threats and complained about them to the chief prosecutor’s office in mid-January, according to a federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to divulge the information.
On Monday, the official said, Izquierdo asked authorities to give her bodyguards, but none were assigned.
Her sister, Targidia Izquierdo, said Friday that the family was alone and defenseless and hadn’t received a visit from so much as a social worker, despite President Alvaro Uribe’s promise after the murder to better protect victims’ rights advocates.
“They didn’t give her the protection she needed,” she said.
On Thursday, Uribe ordered the seizure of assets belonging to demobilized paramilitary leaders to ensure that their massive holdings – by one government estimate encompassing 16.8 million acres, an area larger than West Virginia – are available as reparations for their victims.
The private right-wing armies methodically and brutally seized the land over more than a decade beginning in the early 1990s under the guise of a counterinsurgency campaign, massacring thousands in the process.
The top paramilitary bosses, now in jail, are eligible for prison terms of no more than eight years if they confess to crimes including drug trafficking and murder. They have hidden the stolen lands behind front men and benefited from widespread chaos in rural land registration.
The situation is especially dire in Cordoba state, a militia stronghold where Izquierdo fought to win back a 12-acre farm. She presented her group’s demands to Mancuso, the paramilitary leader, in December.
Izquierdo’s murder “places at risk the guarantee that victims can participate” in efforts to dismantle the militias, said Carlos Rodriguez, deputy director of the human rights group Colombian Commission of Jurists. “If there is no guarantee, we’re not going to make any progress.” The wealthy ranchers who dominate Cordoba – and their political leaders – have made no secret of their sympathies with the paramilitaries, first formed in the early 1980s with backing of landowners as a buffer against kidnapping and extortion by leftist rebels.
Izquierdo wasn’t the only victims’ rights leader murdered in Cordoba last week. Freddy Abel Espitia, the 40-year-old president of the Committee of Displaced in the community of Cotorra, 15 miles outside of Monteria, was gunned down Sunday night.
As in Izquierdo’s killing, no arrests have been made.
Espitia was scheduled to participate Monday in a public forum for victims of paramilitary abuses, sponsored by Ogaza’s committee of victims’ relatives.
Ogaza said the group has given authorities some 1,600 complaints – 80 percent of which stem from abuses by paramilitaries. Those complaints describe the alleged forced sale or theft of some 450 properties – amounting to roughly 12,360 acres – along with 400 murders and 150 forced disappearances, he said.
