“For Afro-Colombians, the 2016 Peace Treaty Brought No Peace”, 23^rd May 2019

…November 2016 should have marked a watershed moment in Colombia’s bloody history, as it is the date when the Colombian government signed a final peace accord with the FARC…after more than half a century of war. And yet, since that date Colombia has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a human-rights worker. Between November 2016 and April 2019, 566 community leaders and human-rights defenders were murdered…[T]he Colombian government insists that violence has abated by pointing to reductions in the homicide and kidnapping rates…But many Afro-Colombian activists differ. For them, the targeted killings of men and women working to protect their communities from the entry and expansion of illicit activities, extractive industries, and new armed groups in their territories is unquestionably systematic. Francia Márquez…recipient of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize…knows this systematic violence intimately. Faced with state abandonment and political marginalization, rural Afro-descendant communities in her region of northern Cauca have been practicing subsistence agriculture and artisanal gold mining for centuries. While economically precarious, this livelihood allowed local communities to maintain autonomous ways of life…For Francia, this changed abruptly…when the Colombian government granted outside individuals and multinational corporations titles to undertake large-scale gold mining on her community’s territories…