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CARTAGENA, Colombia — For a champion of peace, Leyner Palacios faces loads loss of life threats.
The newest menacing message got here in February, when Mr. Palacios, 47, was warned he had 12 hours to depart the area the place he was born on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, and to “by no means come again.”
The final time he had obtained an analogous warning, in March 2020, one in every of his bodyguards was killed.
So Mr. Palacios, who served on Colombia’s Reality Fee, introduced on Twitter he was going into hiding for some time.
“I don’t want them to see my coffin stuffed with my unjustly murdered physique,” he wrote. “I’ve understood that the risk is the door to the cemetery.”
The 11-member fee spent 4 years investigating each facet of Colombia’s battle, which was fought between authorities forces, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary teams from 1958 to 2016.
The fee’s remaining report, issued final June, decided that 450,000 folks had died within the combating — twice earlier estimates — and issued a stinging critique of the way in which many Colombians had been handled as inside enemies by safety forces. The report beneficial sweeping adjustments within the nation’s police and army forces, together with ending the relative impunity with which that they had grown accustomed to appearing.
Whereas Mr. Palacios stated he wished the fee to disclose what had occurred to all victims, his position was to give attention to the warfare’s influence on the nation’s Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations.
Afro-Colombian himself, Mr. Palacios was one in every of 24 youngsters of a small farmer. He grew up in Pogue, one in every of many tiny hamlets on the fringe of the jungle throughout the borders of the Bojayá area.
“Catching fish with my arms, deer searching with Dad, dancing to our drums,” Mr. Palacios recalled of his boyhood throughout an interview he gave final yr, shortly earlier than the fee launched its findings — with two government-provided bodyguards standing close by.
His father made his sons choose cacao beans and chop wooden. “That’s how I used to be capable of purchase my first pair of sneakers,” Mr. Palacios stated.
The best way issues have been solved in his impoverished however close-knit group alongside the Atrato River would inform his perception into maturity that dialogue and negotiation have been the most effective methods to settle disputes.
There was in the future a yr when all of Pogue, whose residents have been principally Black but additionally included the Indigenous Emberá folks, took to the streets in costumes to play pranks and throw mud at one another, “particularly at these with whom you had issues.”
On the finish of the day, everybody would eat, dance and speak.
“All the things was resolved with dialog,” he stated. “By no means with weapons.”
That’s to not say that armed males have been absent from Bojayá.
Guerrillas belonging to the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, patrolled the encompassing rivers in canoes, and Mr. Palacios would generally hitch a trip with them for his three-hour journey to high school. “They’d weapons,” he stated, “however I used to be by no means scared.”
Proper-wing paramilitary teams additionally have been current, however till his late teenage years, there was a tacit truce, and Mr. Palacios stated he principally felt protected so long as he was cautious the place he went.
In 2016, the FARC fighters signed a peace take care of the federal government, a situation of which was the formation of the fee.
His most influential instructor rising up was a Catholic priest, the Rev. Jorge Luis Mazo.
“I listened to books on his tape recorder till the batteries died,” Mr. Palacios stated.
Father Mazo launched him to the church’s missionary work within the communities alongside the realm’s rivers, and he met nuns dwelling in a convent in Bellavista, a much bigger village alongside the Atrato.
In what turned out to be an ideal match for his abilities, the nuns employed the newly married Mr. Palacios at 21 to pilot their canoe. He knew the rivers nicely — and how you can speak to the communities the sisters wished to go to.
Church figures within the space quickly realized this shy younger man had a particular expertise. “If I wanted to go speak to the guerrillas, I introduced Leyner. And if I wanted to go speak to the paramilitary, I’d present up with him as nicely,” stated the Rev. Jesús Albeiro, a Catholic priest who has labored within the area for many years. “He may clarify what the group wanted higher than me.”
That capability to speak with all sides is one motive Mr. Palacios was chosen to serve on the fee, which he joined in September 2020.
“Loads of it’s the manner I used to be raised,” Mr. Palacios stated of all of the completely different cultures and viewpoints he needed to straddle to navigate life in Bojayá. “A precarious life makes you perceive all of the dynamics of the battle, and while you’ve lived it, you simply need it to finish.”
That repute for with the ability to interpret for all sides put his life at risk whilst a younger man.
When the FARC began recruiting minors from the area, native church leaders in 1997 requested the guerrillas to listen to a public request to not contain civilians within the battle. Mr. Palacios was chosen to deal with them in Bellavista. “I spoke and once I completed I closed my eyes, anticipating a bullet,” he stated. “However then everybody applauded. Even them.”
By that point, the native truce had faltered, and the FARC was dropping management to the United Self-Defenses of Colombia, or A.U.C., a right-wing paramilitary group. And to the A.U.C., anybody not with them was an enemy, and so they started focusing on civilians.
In 1999, Father Mazo was killed when his riverboat was deliberately rammed, and a “devastated” Mr. Palacios named his new child daughter Luisa, in his honor.
In 2002, FARC guerrillas attacked paramilitaries in Bellavista in a three-day battle. On the ultimate day, a FARC gas-cylinder bomb was fired by way of the church’s roof, killing 119 folks, together with 28 members of Mr. Palacios’s prolonged household.
In 2014, when the federal government and the FARC have been discussing peace in Havana, Cuba, Mr. Palacios was requested to inform the story of the bloodbath, and its aftermath.
“They assume that when their lightning strike arrives and burns all the things, that’s all that occurs,” he stated. “I instructed them that after they strike, they’ve remodeled life for a really very long time. The implications are large and long-lasting.”
A public apology from the FARC was a part of the peace deal, and Mr. Palacios’s testimony helped persuade the group to decide on Bojayá as the suitable place to provide it. Mr. Palacios stated he made certain the ceremony, held on the steps of the burned-out church, was organized solely by the group, not the guerrillas.
“This time we instructed them what to do, not the opposite manner round,” he stated.
His position within the apology catapulted Mr. Palacios onto the nationwide stage, turning him into the face and voice of these Colombians who had suffered the battle’s atrocities however believed in reconciliation.
Within the years earlier than he joined the fee, Mr. Palacios served because the native chief for a community of nonprofits working to enhance life in Chocó, the state-level division alongside Colombia’s northern Pacific Coast, which incorporates Bojayá.
In that position, in 2016, he denounced collusion between safety forces and the newly fashioned paramilitary group that had gained management of the realm. Inside hours, he obtained his first loss of life risk.
After the fee’s report got here out, he returned to Bojayá and continued talking out, lamenting that FARC guerrillas and A.U.C. paramilitaries had merely been changed by different armed teams.
“Chocó is paralyzed with delinquency,” he stated. “Solely the letters on the insignias have modified.”
As he publicly deplored the state of affairs, and the extortion and displacement nonetheless plaguing the area’s residents, the loss of life threats returned. “They will need to have stated, right here comes Leyner with the identical speech once more,” stated Mr. Palacios, nonetheless protected by authorities safety.
Mr. Palacios estimates he heard about 900 testimonies on the fee, together with from a former president, senators, landowners, small farmers, drug traffickers and ex-members of the FARC and the A.U.C.
One assembly was with a self-described hit man, who instructed Mr. Palacios he had been a goal on his lengthy listing. “Of all of the names,” Mr. Palacios stated he was instructed, “I used to be the one one alive.”
The onetime murderer then requested for forgiveness. Mr. Palacios’s response?
“We hugged,” he stated, including he was grateful that the hit man “taught me some good survival ideas.”
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