Diana Martínez Ríos, 38, was born into a humble peasant family in Tolima, Colombia. When she was very young, her parents, who have five other children (four boys and one girl), moved to a rural area in the department of Meta, which might be paradise on earth for its extraordinary natural riches and exceptional biodiversity. But life there is very hard for people like Diana.
Despite the peace agreements, the flame of violence does not go out. A community leader or activist is assassinated in Colombia every three days. Each three days! Diana temporarily lives in Catalonia thanks to the association’s protection program for human rights defenders International Peace Action (IAP). The day before the interview with The vanguard José Pascual Quevedo Velásquez was assassinated.
© LV
Jose Pascual Quevedo Velasquez
Three days, four crimes
Community leader Quevedo Velásquez was assassinated on Sunday, the 50th victim so far this year and the fourth in 72 hours.
One more link in a long chain. José Pascual Quevedo Velásquez, farmer and leader of the Ascatragua and Coagro Guaviare associations in Puerto Concordia, in southern Meta, I was traveling in the same car as Diana, aboard a metaphorical train called human rights and social justice. In order not to derail, this brave woman now lives in Barcelona, although on a date that we cannot specify she will return to her house.
To his house and his fight, because that is considered above anything else. A fighter. She grew up happy, surrounded by a bubble of love and unaware of the many problems surrounding her family. The horizon of her childhood was the edge of a small farm in La Vereda, where her parents had a few animals and planted enough to survive from sunrise to sunset. One day, suddenly, she had to change schools.
In La Vereda there was a school, but they closed it and that turned his world upside down. She now had to get up at three in the morning to go to a main road two hours away on an unpaved road and take a bus that would take her to Vista Hermosa. If she didn’t show up on time or if she missed the bus, goodbye to classes. She later found out that her old school closed due to lack of students. Many families left for fear of violence.
La Vereda was in what Colombians call the territories. the territories They are those areas in no man’s land, where the State is a fiction and where there are or were many hammers (the military, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the drug traffickers), but only one type of nail (the poor). “We are always at the mercy of the violence of one or the other,” explains Diana, who has seen many of her friends die.
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His house was so far from La Vereda that at times it seemed like a trench in the middle of the front. “At night, during the shootings, my parents told us to get under the bed.” It was a dangerous time, with a de facto curfew from 6pm. “Nobody left the house from then on, because if they caught you (let the reader choose the name of the hammer they want here) they said you were one of their enemies.”
Men were killed and women, the main victims of all wars, were killed following being raped. “It is difficult to survive in a state that does not give opportunities to the poor, in a country where the rich can get richer at the cost of the poor getting poorer,” says Diana, who grew up with the example of her mother, María Doris, who was and is president of a community action board.
© Ana Jiménez
Diana Martínez, at the headquarters of CC.OO.
He would have liked to continue training, but had to abandon his studies at the age of 16. To lend a hand to his family, he learned the meaning of the verb camel (equivalent to our work like a mule). He cleaned toilets in other people’s houses and sold empanadas, among other subsistence tasks that he combined with the countryside and his growing social activism, spurred by the disappointment of the peace accords.
It is part of associations with acronyms that in Spain say little, but that in Colombia are synonymous with the defense of justice, such as Agrocafre, Anzorc or DHOC. One front has not been closed and another has already opened. The last one, the expulsion of peasants from protected areas (“who better protects the land than those who have been there for decades?”) so that the big companies plunder the natural wealth without uncomfortable witnesses.