Porfirio Jaramillo Bogallo

Porfirio Jaramillo, a 70-year-old farmer, was killed on Saturday, January 28, 2017 by four men who deceived him to come out of his house in Buenos Aires, Nuevo Oriente, Turbo municipality and go with them. As Aanactive member of Asociación Tierra y Paz, an organisation dedicated to recovering farms that were stripped violently from farmers, Porfirio was a land restitution leader in Urabá.

In 1997, the civil war forced Porfirio and his family to leave their farm called El Consuelo (approximately 33ha). They returned to their land in 2014 without institutional support and their land had already been illegally taken by “El Cura”, a man known to be involved in several cases of violent dispossession of land in the region and with links to paramilitary groups.

Despite this, they settled themselves in their house.

The harassment towards Porfirio and his family began shortly after that (for example, El Cura’s workers released cattle on the farm to damage Porfirio’s corn crops) and rapidly turned into death threats. In December 2016, after he received direct death threats and reported them to the proper authorities, he decided to leave his family and home in order to protect them (they were not being threatened, just him).

On Saturday, January 28, 2017 at approximately 8:00PM, four men on motorcycles showed up at his house and identified themselves as officers of Unidad Nacional de Protección, a national government security agency that is in charge of developing and implementing individual and collective protection measures of the target populations. They said he needed to go with them in order to be handed the precautionary measures (bulletproof vest and cellphone, possibly a bodyguard), to which Porfirio agreed. His body was found in the early hours of the next day, Sunday, January 29. He had been stabbed multiple times.


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Region:Americas

Country:Colombia

Department/Province/State:Antioquia

Sex1:Male

Date of Killing:28/01/2017

Previous Threats:Yes

Type of Work:Farmer

Organisation:Asociación Tierra y Paz

Sector or Type of Rights the HRD Worked On:ESC Rights

Sector Detail:Land Rights, Peasant Communities

More information:Front Line Defenders

1This database records an individual's chosen gender identity. If they do not self-identify as male or female they can use the option of recording other/neither or use the term NBGI (non binary gender identity).