Reports

Left Undefended

Killings of Rights Defenders in Colombia’s Remote Communities

The 127-page report, “Left Undefended: Killings of Rights Defenders in Colombia’s Remote Communities,” documents killings of human rights defenders in the country in the last five years, as well as serious shortcomings in government efforts to prevent them, protect defenders, and hold those responsible to account. Over 400 human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia since 2016, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

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  • Attorney General Reno In Colombia

    Human Rights Watch Backgrounder

    U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno's March 3 to March 4 visit comes at a moment of crisis for the rule of law and human rights in Colombia. Human rights defenders are under intense and violent attack.

  • War Without Quarter

    Colombia and International Humanitarian Law

    Violations of international humanitarian law -- the laws of war -- are not abstract concepts in Colombia, but the grim material of everyday life. War bursts into the daily activities of a farm, a village, a public bus, or a school with the speed of armed fighters arriving down a path or in four-wheel drive vehicles.

  • Background Briefing: Colombia

    Even as the administration of President Ernesto Samper has taken limited steps to curb violence and address impunity, the human rights situation in Colombia has deteriorated sharply.

  • Colombia’s Killer Networks

    The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States

    The junior and mid-level officers who tolerated, planned, directed, and even took part in paramilitary violence in Colombia in the 1980s now occupy senior positions in the Colombian military.

  • Generation Under Fire

    Children and Violence in Colombia

    To be a poor child, a runaway, a child prostitute, or a child in a war zone in Colombia is to live with the threat of murder in daily intimacy. At an average of six per day, 2,190 children were murdered in 1993 according to Colombia's national statistical bureau (DANE).

  • State of War

    Political Violence and Counterinsurgency in Colombia

    On November 8, 1992, Colombian President César Gaviria Trujillo adopted a series of emergency decrees restricting civil liberties, granting additional powers to the military, and punishing contact or dialogue with insurgent groups.

  • Political Murder and Reform in Colombia

    The Violence Continues

    Despite a series of promising political reforms in 1990 and 1991, the government of President César Gaviria Trujillo has been unable to stem the violence that accounts for more political murders in Colombia than any country in the hemisphere, with the possible exception of Peru.

  • THE “DRUG WAR” IN COLOMBIA

    For the past decade, Colombia has been rocked by political violence that claims thousands of lives every year.