Colombia’s peace whisperer makes enough enemies

CARTAGENA, Colombia – For a champion of peace, Leyner Palacios receives many death threats.

The latest threatening message came in February when Mr Palacios, 47, was warned he had 12 hours to leave the region where he was born on Colombia’s Pacific coast and “never come back”.

The last time he received a similar warning, in March 2020, one of his bodyguards was killed.

So mr. Palacios, who served on Colombia’s Truth Commission, announced on Twitter that he would go into hiding for a while.

“I don’t want them to see my coffin full of my wrongfully murdered body,” he wrote. “It is my understanding that the threat is the door to the cemetery.”

The 11-member commission has spent four years investigating every aspect of the conflict in Colombia, which was fought between government forces, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups from 1958 to 2016.

The commission’s final report, released last June, found 450,000 people had been killed in the fighting – twice previously estimated – and sharply criticized the way many Colombians had been treated as internal enemies by security forces. The report recommended sweeping changes to the country’s police and armed forces, including ending the relative impunity with which they had become accustomed to acting.

While Mr Palacios said he wanted the commission to reveal what happened to all the victims, his role was to focus on the impact of the war on the country’s indigenous and Afro-Colombian population.

Afro-Colombian himself, Mr. Palacios was one of 24 children of a small farmer. He grew up in Pogue, one of many small hamlets on the edge of the jungle within the boundaries of the Bojayá region.

“Catch fish with my hands, hunt deer with daddy, dance to our drums,” recalled Mr. Palacios recalled his childhood during an interview he gave last year shortly before the commission announced its findings — with two government-supplied bodyguards nearby.

His father let his sons pick cocoa beans and chop wood. “That’s how I was able to buy my first pair of shoes,” said Mr. Palacios.

The way problems were solved in his impoverished but tight-knit community along the Atrato River would lead him to believe into adulthood that dialogue and negotiation were the best ways to resolve disputes.

There was one day a year when all of Pogue, whose inhabitants were mostly black but included the indigenous Emberá people, would take to the streets in costumes to play pranks and throw mud at each other, “especially at those you had problems. ”

At the end of the day everyone went to eat, dance and talk.

“Everything was solved with a conversation,” he said. “Never with guns.”

That is not to say that armed men were absent in Bojayá.

Guerrillas from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, patrolled the surrounding rivers in canoes, and Mr. Palacios sometimes hitched a ride with them on his three-hour journey to school. “They had guns,” he said, “but I was never afraid.”

Right-wing paramilitary groups were also present, but there was a silent truce until his late teens, and Mr. Palacios said he felt safe most of the time as long as he was careful where he went.

In 2016, the FARC fighters signed a peace agreement with the government, of which the formation of the commission was a condition.

His most influential teacher growing up was a Catholic priest, the Reverend Jorge Luis Mazo.

“I listened to books on his tape recorder until the batteries died,” Mr. Palacios said.

Father Mazo introduced him to the missionary work of the Church in the riverine communities of the area, and he met nuns who lived in a convent in Bellavista, a larger village along the Atrato.

In what turned out to be a perfect match for his skills, the nuns hired the newly married Mr. Palacios at age 21 to pilot their canoe. He knew the rivers well and knew how to talk to the communities the sisters wanted to visit.

Church figures in the area soon realized that this shy young man had a special talent. “If I had to go talk to the guerrillas, I brought Leyner. And if I had to go talk to the paramilitary, I would also appear to him,” said Reverend Jesús Albeiro, a Catholic priest who has worked in the region for decades. “He was better at explaining what the community needed than I was.”

That ability to communicate with all parties is one of the reasons why Mr. Palacios was chosen to serve on the committee, which he joined in September 2020.

“A lot of it is the way I was raised,” said Mr. Palacios on all the different cultures and viewpoints he faced in navigating life in Bojayá. “An uncertain life makes you understand all the dynamics of the conflict, and having lived it, you just want it to end.”

That reputation for being able to interpret for all parties endangered his life even as a young man.

When the FARC began recruiting minors from the region in 1997, local church leaders asked the guerrillas to comply with a public demand not to involve civilians in the conflict. Mr. Palacios was chosen to address them in Bellavista. “I spoke and when I finished I closed my eyes, waiting for a bullet,” he said. “But then everyone applauded. Even them.”

By then, the local ceasefire had failed and the FARC lost control to the United Self-Defenses of Colombia, or AUC, a right-wing paramilitary group. And to the AUC, anyone who wasn’t with them was an enemy, and they started targeting civilians.

In 1999, Father Mazo was murdered when his riverboat was deliberately rammed, and a “devastated” Mr. Palacios named his newborn daughter Luisa, in his honor.

In 2002, FARC guerrillas attacked paramilitaries in Bellavista in a three-day battle. On the last day, a FARC gas cylinder bomb was fired through the roof of the church, killing 119 people, including 28 members of Mr. Palacios’ extended family.

In 2014, when the government and the FARC were discussing peace in Havana, Cuba, Mr. Palacios was asked to tell the story of the massacre and its aftermath.

“They think when their lightning strike arrives and burns everything up, that’s all that happens,” he said. “I told them that after they struck, they changed lives for a very long time. The consequences are huge and long-lasting.”

A public apology from the FARC was part of the peace deal, and Mr Palacios’ testimony helped convince the group to choose Bojayá as the right place to give it. Mr Palacios said he made sure the ceremony, held on the steps of the burnt-out church, was organized entirely by the community, not the guerrillas.

“This time we told them what to do, not the other way around,” he said.

His role in the apology catapulted Mr. Palacios to the national scene, becoming the face and voice of the Colombians who had endured the atrocities of the conflict but believed in reconciliation.

In the years before joining the commission, Mr. Palacios was the local leader of a network of non-profit organizations dedicated to improving life in Chocó, the state-level department along Colombia’s northern Pacific coast, including Bojayá fall.

In that role, in 2016 he denounced collusion between security forces and the newly formed paramilitary group that had taken control of the area. Within hours, he received his first death threat.

After the commission’s report came out, he returned to Bojayá and continued to speak out, lamenting that FARC guerrillas and AUC paramilitaries had merely been replaced by other armed groups.

“Chocó is crippled by crime,” he said. “Only the letters on the badges have changed.”

While he publicly deplored the situation, and the extortion and displacement that continue to plague the region’s residents, death threats returned. “They must have said, here comes Leyner again with the same speech,” said Mr Palacios, still protected by government security services.

Mr. Palacios estimates he has heard about 900 testimonies about the commission, including from a former president, senators, landowners, smallholders, drug traffickers and ex-members of the FARC and AUC

One encounter was with a self-proclaimed assassin, who told Mr. Palacios that he had been a target on his long list. “Of all the names,” said Mr. Palacios, “I was the only one alive.”

The former assassin then asked for forgiveness. Mr. Palacios’ answer?

“We hugged,” he said, adding that he was thankful the assassin “taught me some good survival tips.”