La Libertad Sublime is an initiative involving students from level 7 of the International Relations English program. The initiative aims to raise awareness and provide information on the killing of social leaders and human rights defenders in the Caribbean region of Colombia. It began in 2018 following the implementation of a project-based learning methodology throughout the International Relations English (IRE) program. My ex-colleague, Jennifer Gooding, had designed an excellent course which explored the themes of Indigenous Rights and the Rights of Nature; the project at the heart of the course was for pairs of students to create and launch social media campaigns to raise awareness about an important rights issue of their choosing. Students produced fine work around important issues both in Colombia and internationally. The only issue was that with various campaigns ongoing at the same time among the same body of the students, the impact of all this great work was minimal. It was felt that one centralised campaign involving all the students working towards a collective campaign would allow greater attention for the work the students would produce. Given the precarious nature of human rights defense in Colombia, and the ongoing violence towards social leaders and human rights defenders in the country, it was decided that this issue would be more than appropriate for the campaign.
Work in defense of human rights has historically been precarious in Colombia, but since the signing of the peace agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla organization in 2016, the number of killings of social leaders has dramatically increased, with reports from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Office stating that a minimum of 107 leaders were killed during 2019 and 115 the year before. Such figures place Colombia as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for working in defense of human rights (The Guardian). Other organizations (Indepaz, 2020) claim as many as 971 social leaders and human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016. The scale of the killings has meant that coverage in the mainstream media has been superficial, with victims often represented as mere statistics (Otro líder asesinado...Líder social asesinado en el Cauca). Little coverage is given to information about who these victims are, what work they are involved in, the dynamics in their regions, and the context surrounding their killing. This was what IRE 7 students have been asked to explore and represent in their work on La Libertad Sublime; providing information about who these leaders are, the work they do, and why that work is so dangerous in so many parts of Colombia. Such a task allows students to examine critical rights issues at a local level and make their findings available for both local and global communities via the social media campaign.
Since the beginning of the initiative in 2018, it was decided that students would focus on the 7 departments of the Caribbean region. This focus was chosen for two main reasons. On the one hand, much of the violence towards social leaders has been associated with different parts of the country and much of the limited media attention has focused on these regions; the focus on the local region would therefore allow students to raise awareness of the seriousness of the situation in regions and departments many of the university community know well. On the other hand, our students could incorporate and add to the important body of work produced by UNCaribe (a political think centre and human rights observatory at Uninorte) in documenting the violence against leaders in the Caribbean region. Over the past two years, the campaign has grown gradually based on the production of visual and audio-visual content on behalf of students working in groups of 3 or 4. Some of our posts have been seen and shared by numbers in their thousands and our pages have a following of over 500 people. Furthermore, within the past 18 months, students have been documenting particular cases and underlying themes on our WordPress blog page, meaning the project work completed by students is available for anyone with an interest, academic or otherwise. Their work aims to honour those killed in this ceaseless wave of violence in order to ensure that they are indeed more than a mere statistic, and also to offer explanations as to why and how such a scenario exists.
As a teacher, it has given me immense pride to see our students tackle such an important issue and contribute to the body of knowledge available through the creation of these articles.
Over the coming weeks and beyond, we will be using this blog space to share a number of the students’ articles, which range from analyses of the situation in certain departments to investigations into the individual cases of leaders who have been killed in the Caribbean region across the past two years.
If you are interested in knowing more about the initiative, you can follow find the campaign on the following pages:
@LibertadSublime (facebook/twitter)
@libertadsublime (instagram)
As an academic community, it is our responsibility to demand greater care and attention for those leaders and human rights defenders who are working for a better Colombia in the face of threats and violence.
I hope these articles and investigations from our undergraduate students can go some way to honouring their work and raising awareness about this terrible situation.
Conor Keogh
