The first murder of a social leader in Colombia occurred at noon on January 1, 2021

As reported by the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz) Around noon on the first day of 2021, the social leader and human rights defender Gerardo León was assassinated. in the municipality of Puerto Gaitán in the department of Meta, in eastern Colombia.

León would be the first social leader killed in 2021 in Colombia, according to Indepaz, and his crime occurred in the El Tigre reservation in the municipality where a group of men arrived who attacked him with a knife until causing death.

The social leader was a teacher who worked in ethnoeducation work in Meta and was also part of the Colombian Federation of Educators (Fecode) in that department.

This homicide adds to that of the 25-year-old FARC ex-combatant Yolanda Zabala Mazo, who was also murdered on the first day of 2021, along with her 17-year-old sister Reina Zabala Mazo. during the New Years celebrations.

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Indepaz pointed out that the crime of the signer of the peace agreement occurred at around 4 in the morning, when armed men arrived at her home in the Travesías village from the municipality of Briceño (Antioquia), in western Colombia.

Yolanda Zabala Mazo, 22, was known as ‘Liliana Estrada’ during her time in the armed group, as part of the reintegration process that is being carried out in the Territorial Training and Reincorporation Area (Etcr) of La Plancha, in the municipality de Anorí (Antioquia) and, according to the newspaper El Espectador, had been pardoned in 2017, thanks to Decree 1096.

In the preliminary information, released by the same Indepaz publication, This was not the first time that the former combatant had been the victim of an attack. He had already suffered another attack in August 2019, together with his sentimental partner, in the middle of an armed confrontation between dissidents of the Farc and members of the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia o Clan del Golfo, in the department of Cauca, also in western Colombia.

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In this attack, which left two people dead, Zabala was injured with shrapnel from an explosive device, forcing her to go to a medical center to receive care, reported the Colombia 2020 unit of the newspaper El Espectador.

The representative to the Chamber for the Farc Party, and former commander of the 36th Front of the extinct guerrilla, Omar de Jesús Restrepo Correa, described the murder of the Zabala as a painful way to start the year.

In the records kept by Indepaz, it is indicated that 310 social leaders and human rights defenders were assassinated in the country in 2020. In that same year, 64 former FARC combatants were also murdered.

The institute’s figures also indicate that since the peace agreement with the former subversive group was signed in 2016, 972 social leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated. And since that time, together with the murder of Yolanda Zabala, there has been a record of 250 murdered ex-combatants.

However, These indicators contradict the official data of the government of Iván Duque, which in a report presented in November 2020, reported that in that year only 51 social leaders were killed.

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