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Maria del Pilar Hurtado, mother of four, was shot dead in front of her eldest son in June 2019.
This article was originally published by La Libertad Sublime in June 2019.
The horrible rawness of the video shatters the distance between the viewer and the topic at hand. One cannot fail to be stirred by the sight and sound of a nine year old boy wailing out helplessly at the tragedy of his mother, whose lifeless and bloodied body lays a few feet away, being shot dead in front of his eyes. He screams. He wails. He thrashes about. He kicks a fence. And the viewer gets a glimpse of the violence which looms over large swathes of Colombia, and perhaps more pertinently, the pain and despair it leaves in its wake. The video of course made an impact in this age of social media content. Shared. Commented upon. Suitable emojis assigned. The public, across multiple demographics, were indignant. Rightly so. The point that people need to remember is that cases like these, with families and lives destroyed, and trauma and grief inflicted, are depressingly prevalent in the marginalized sectors of this country. Our indifference to this situation makes us complicit. If we are to change this status, a better understanding of the issue is required. The victims of the violence since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 can still speak to us, and it is our responsibility to listen. Maria Del Pilar Hurtado Montaño, the 34 year old mother of four, who provided for her family as an informal recycling collector, has become yet another of these victims. One more statistic. We glimpsed the pain of her loss in the video of her young son. It should be our duty to him, and as citizens, to learn and reflect on her story, and how it fits into this terrible thread of tragedy and trauma.
Like countless other cases, it seems Maria´s murder is a chronicle of a death foretold. A pamphlet, reportedly from the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, a neo paramilitary group associated with the Clan del Golfo drug trafficking organisation, was circulated in Tierralta (the town in the south of Córdoba where Maria lived) at the beginning of June threatening the lives of NGO workers, social leaders and four other individuals referred to in derogatory terms. Among these, was a threat against la gorda hpta mujer del chatarrero (the fat son of a bitch scrap waste woman), believed to be a reference to Maria. Maria was shot dead on Friday morning (June 21st) as she walked towards her home in Tierralta. In the days since, as the emotional impact of the footage of her distraught son sent ripples across social media in Colombia and beyond, more information regarding Maria has come to light. Like many victims in this current wave of violence, it appears that Maria had been involved in victim´s organisations in her home town of Puerto Tejada, in the department of Cauca. It is reported that Maria, her partner and their four children had arrived to the south of Córdoba in recent years having been forced to flee their home in Cauca due to threats against their lives. Such a factor would certainly seem to correlate with other victims of this recent wave of violence; victims of displacement and representatives of victims rights in one area being murdered in the area they settled. However, information coming out of Córdobexia, an NGO which deals with rights issues in Córdoba, suggests that the murder of Maria may not be directly linked with her previous work with victims organisations in Cauca. The organisation claims that Maria and her family are among several dwellers to build homes in an invasión (unregulated building of informal homes on land without legal permission) of land belonging to the father of the mayor of Tierralta, Fabio Otero. Córdobexia claim their own president, Albeiro Begambre, is among those threatened over the situation, and that two others have supposedly been killed. Such a suggestion of course raises grave concerns given the toxic links between politics and paramilitary violence in the region and country in the not too distant past. Leaving aside the dark motives behind this latest addition to a national tragedy, the murder of Maria highlights the precarious position in which marginalised sectors of society currently find themselves in the south of Córdoba.
Maria Del Pilar Hurtado escaped one region rife with violence when she was forced to flee Cauca only to end up in another. Tierralta may have been the furthest possible destination for a young family of limited means, but it would not represent safety for Maria. The municipal town, like various others in the south of Córdoba, has seen a surge in violence since the signing of peace accords between the government and the FARC in 2016. This agreement and the movement of guerrilla soldiers to demobilisation camps created a power vacuum (likewise in numerous other regions throughout the country) in a region of high strategic importance for drug trafficking. The previously mentioned Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC) have been involved in a violent struggle with the organisation known as the Caparrapos (a splinter group from the AGC, reportedly funded by Mexican drug cartels). Clashes between these neo paramilitary groups have displaced thousands from rural communities in a region with high levels of poverty. Cases of displacement have occurred as a direct consequence of fighting between rival groups, but also as a result of threats against anyone unfortunate enough to be identified as an obstacle by the illegal powers that be. More than ten social leaders, including one mayoral candidate and several supporting substitution of illicit crops programs, have been murdered in the region since the peace agreement. The loved ones left behind by these killings have in some cases packed up their belongings and sought safety wherever they thought it could be found. In addition to this mass displacement, reminiscent of the worst decades of violence in Colombian history, marginalized rural communities in regions like the south of Córdoba continue to face the plight of poverty. When impoverished rural dwellers are forced to flee their homes, the only viable option tends to be the nearest urban or municipal centers. Once there, they must get by however possible, meaning building homes in informal neighborhoods, and making a living in the informal economy, perhaps as an informal recycling collector; sifting through the discarded waste of others to find enough plastic, glass or cardboard to exchange in order to provide for their family.
Maria may not have arrived in Tierralta as a result of the violent confrontations terrorising rural communities in the south of Córdoba, but she would have felt empathy with the tales she no doubt heard from neighbors in the ramshackle sector of the town where she lived and died. She would likely find herself thinking that there are few possibilities for the forgotten rural poor in this Colombia. Poverty and an absence of state support often puts people at the mercy of illegal groups. One false move, or tentative step towards independence (in act or thought), may result in death. If not, they must run. But when they run, they find themselves often unwelcome and without any support in the towns, or outskirts of towns, where they settle. Once there, another cycle of exploitation begins. It seems that in some cases, victims must suffer death by a thousand cuts, a thousand indignations, before the finality of the act is confirmed with bullets from a sicario, paid for by whichever nefarious interest group felt sufficiently motivated to dispose of them. Most of these killings pass without much commotion. There will be some information in the local news, the case will be referred to in a statistical manner in the national press, and life will carry on. In most of these cases, we are not privy to how the family of the victim, be they a social leader, a community activist, a former guerrilla fighter, or a scrap waste collector, reacts to their sudden and violent demise. But the sight of that 9 year old boy wailing at the unjustness of it all provided a window into a world of pain which is an everyday occurrence for many in this Colombia; each victim a beloved mother, father, brother, sister, caregiver, provider. If we are to be emotionally moved by such footage, we should possess the moral courage to demand better from our country.
*Information for this post was taken from the following sources:
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