
An indigenous couple were abducted, tortured and murdered in yet another act of violence against social activists in Colombia. Pablo Dagua and Adriana Montero Parra, who lived on the Triunfo Cristal Páez reserve in Florida, department of Valle del Cauca, disappeared from their home on 27 May. The following day, neighbours found the couple’s 7-year-old daughter looking after her baby brother. At 3pm on 28 May, a local search party found Adriana’s body, before finding Pablo’s body an hour later.
Also on 28 May, indigenous guard and former governor Amilkar Yagari was murdered in El Dovio, Valle del Cauca. The killings followed a campaign of intimidation against local indigenous organisers through the distribution of paramilitary pamphlets threatening and naming specific people.
In a statement, the Valle del Cauca-based indigenous ORIVAC organisation said that ‘while our brothers and sisters are murdered, tortured, threatened and forcibly displaced, for the judicial organisms it is, as they usually say, simply down to inter-family feuds or crimes of passion, as until now there is no report into the results of the investigations’.
At least 40 social leaders have so far been killed in 2018.