According to the 34-year-old flight attendant, in an interview with Colombian daily El Tiempo, she said she came to Cali for a two week vacation to learn Salsa, but when nationwide protests and riots broke out across the country at the end of April, Sprößer decided to join with the group of protesters known as the “Primera Linea” or Front Lines.

Above photo: Sprößer (3rd from right) with “Primera Linea” protesters in Cali, Colombia (photo: Facebook)

According to her conversation with El Tiempo, Sprößer, whose visa would have expired after 90 days, said she would not be returning to Germany, but planned to give classes on politics and economics to protesters. “I have never felt very German, I have always liked Latin America,” she told the paper.

Things turn deadly

On the night of July 22^nd, Sprößer was with her friend and fellow protester Joan Sebastian Bonilla Bermudez, when a gunman approached and shot Bonilla 13 times. Based on her Facebook post, Sprößer believes she was the target of the attack. However, Colombian police disagree, and Bonilla’s family said in an interview that suspicious men had been searching for him recently.

Sprößer was summoned to Colombia’s prosecutor’s offices in Cali, where she gave her version of the shooting, but due to an expired visa, and what immigration officials called “activities inconsistent with a tourist visa”—protesting and political organizing as a foreigner, Migration Colombia detained her and sent her to Bogotá, then onward via commercial flight to Germany. Sprößer is banned from entering Colombia for 10 years, and then, should she wish to return, must apply for a visa.

Sprößer’s expulsion was predictably, politically divisive. José Miguel VIvanco of the nonprofit Human Rights Watch protested the expulsion, tweeting “The legislation that Migration Colombia applied against Rebecca Linda Marlene Sproesser contradicts international standards because it permits the expulsion of a foreigner who is legally in the country without guaranteeing the right to have her case reviewed by a competent authority.”

La legislación que aplicó @MigracionCol contra Rebecca Linda Marlene Sproesser contradice estándares internacionales porque permite expulsar a un extranjero que está legalmente en el país sin garantizar el derecho a que su caso sea revisado por una autoridad competente.

— José Miguel Vivanco (@JMVivancoHRW) July 28, 2021

Leftist senator and presidential hopeful Gustavo Petro tweeted that “The government forcefully removed the only witness to the assassination of the youth Johan Sebastian Bonilla. It is an act of complicity with the assassins. In my government Rebecca will return to Colombia and every journalist that wishes to enter.”

El gobierno sacó a la fuerza del país a la única testigo del asesinato del joven Johan Sebastian Bonilla. Es un verdadero acto de complicidad con los.asesinos.

En mi gobierno Rebecca volverá a Colombia y todo periodista que quiera ingresar. https://t.co/qZyYczaOdp

— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) July 31, 2021

Sprößer had styled herself a journalist, though she was actively participating in and supporting the protesters, rather than covering the protests.

Sprößer had styled herself a journalist, though she was actively participating in and supporting the protesters, rather than covering the protests. Her resumé, downloadable from LinkedIn as of publication lists her as a flight attendant since 2009 and recent college graduate but does not list any media affiliations or blogs. She lists a compulsory 6-month university internship in 2016-2017 with Romero & Braas, a “German/ Mexican production company making films, covering news, managing international productions and developing TV formats” in México City.

“When I arrived in Cali, I totally fell in love with the people, with the way of living, and I decided that I wanted to live here for a while longer. I started working as a volunteer and community manager in a very well-known dance school called Arrebato Caleño, but when the national strike began and the curfews were intensified, they could no longer give the classes that were held at night and they broke down. That was a strong motivation to join the people who started protesting. Later I thought that since I had worked in journalism in Mexico, here I could also document what was happening with my eyes. Then I started recording testimonies and abuses of the police and send them to my contacts that I had press,” Sprößer told Colombian daily “El Espectador.”

Below: Sprößer poses in Cali with a flag of the defunct M-19 guerilla group that seized the Dominican Embassy and the Colombian Palace of Justice in the 1980s. Senator Gustavo Petro is a former member of the M-19 group.

 

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Left Undefended Killings of Rights Defenders in Colombia’s Remote Communities

• Download the full report in English

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).

“Colombia has had the highest number of human rights defenders killed of any Latin American country in recent years, but the government’s response has been mostly talk, with little meaningful action,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The administration of President Iván Duque frequently condemns the killings, but most of the government systems to address the problem are barely functional or have serious shortcomings.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 130 people in 20 of Colombia’s 32 states, including judicial authorities, prosecutors, government officials, human rights officials, humanitarian workers, human rights defenders, and police officers. Human Rights Watch also reviewed information and statistics provided by multiple government agencies and ministries, including the Interior and Defense Ministries, the Attorney General’s Office, the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office, the Inspector General’s Office, the National Protection Unit, and the Superior Council of the Judiciary.

To meet its obligations under international human rights law, the Duque administration should move swiftly to implement and fully fund effective policies to prevent the killings – and protect the rights – of human rights defenders, Human Rights Watch said.

Killings of human rights defenders have increased since the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas demobilized as part of a 2016 peace accord with the government. Other armed groups, including several that emerged from the FARC, have stepped into the breach, fighting for control of territory, engaging in illegal activities, and using violence against civilians. Human Rights Watch documented killings in six of the areas that have been most affected.

Tim Reiser, foreign policy aide to US Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the issue strikes at a core component of the peace deal’s implementation and its success going forward. “The peace agreement cannot survive if this continues because the people risked their lives to support it and they are essential to its success. Ultimately its going to require what Senator Leahy has been saying for years, establishing some semblance of security, economic opportunity, and social services in parts of the country where that has never existed. It is a daunting challenge but they need to show it can be done.”

OHCHR has documented an increasing number of killings each year, from 41 in 2015 to 108 in 2019. The office has so far documented 53 cases in 2020, and it is still verifying 80 others. At least 49 of those killed since 2015 were women.

Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office, a government body independent of the executive, reports an increase in killings of human rights defenders between 2019 and 2020.

The authorities’ failure to exercise effective control and establish a civilian state presence in many areas reclaimed from the FARC has to a significant extent enabled this dynamic. The government has deployed the military to many parts of the country but has failed to strengthen the justice system, improve protections for the population, and to ensure adequate access to economic and educational opportunities and public services.

The killings have distinct dynamics in various regions. In North Cauca, groups that emerged from the FARC have killed many human rights defenders from the Indigenous Nasa communities who oppose armed groups and drug trafficking in their territories.

“They [the armed groups] have weapons, cars, and money, they have everything to wage war against us,” an Indigenous leader told Human Rights Watch. “We only have our Indigenous canes that symbolize our authority, our peaceful resistance, and our defense of the territory.”

Armed groups in Tumaco have killed human rights defenders whom they suspect of collaborating with the military or who fail to comply with the groups’ orders. They have threatened people who support projects to replace coca crops – the raw material of cocaine – with food crops.

Argemiro Manuel López Pertuz, 46, who led the crop substitution program for 200 families in a rural area of Tumaco, was killed on March 17, 2019 by men who went to his house and shot him 12 times. Evidence gathered by prosecutors suggests members of the Contadores armed group, who had accused López Pertuz of collaborating with the military, killed him.

Colombia has a broad range of policies, mechanisms, and laws designed to prevent abuses against human rights defenders and other people at risk. But their implementation has often been poor, Human Rights Watch found.

The National Protection Unit, under the Interior Ministry, has been charged since 2011 with protecting people at risk. To its credit, the unit has granted individual protection measures to hundreds of human rights defenders. But it only provides individual protection schemes in response to reported threats, and many of those killed had not received threats or been able to report them.

The unit also provides collective protection measures for communities or groups. But its budget is extremely limited, and the unit has rejected the vast majority of collective protection requests. The government has also failed to implement the Interior Ministry’s 2018 comprehensive protection plan. A pilot program to protect specific communities and groups has barely begun.

The Early Warnings System in the National Ombudsperson’s Office plays a crucial role in monitoring risks, including in remote regions. But national, state, and municipal authorities have repeatedly failed to respond to scores of “Early Warnings,” or have reacted in a pro-forma and ineffective way.

The government has also failed periodically to convene the National Commission of Security Guarantees, which is charged with designing policies to dismantle armed groups responsible for killing rights defenders. The commission has yielded no concrete results.

Efforts to bring killers to justice have proven more meaningful. The Attorney General’s office has passed directives and created specialized units to prosecute the killings, with 59 convictions since 2016. Yet serious progress in prosecuting people who ordered the killings, as well as in dismantling the armed groups, is still needed.

A key obstacle is the limited number of judges, prosecutors, and investigators in areas where most of the killings take place. The government has yet to create the “special team” of judges that President Duque announced in May 2019 to try these cases.

To meet its obligations under international human rights law, the Duque administration should move swiftly to implement and fully fund effective policies to prevent the killings – and protect the rights – of human rights defenders, Human Rights Watch said, with attention to ethnicity, gender, race, and other characteristics that may affect individuals’ or communities’ risk and needs. The authorities should substantially increase the capacity of judicial authorities and prosecutors to bring those responsible for such killings to account.

“Unless the government takes serious action, many more human rights defenders are likely to be killed, leaving hundreds of vulnerable communities undefended,” Vivanco said.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit journal Insight Crime, which reports on and analyzes organized crime and corruption throughout Latin America and the Caribbean had been investigating Guillermo León Acevedo Giraldo: A low-profile businessman based in Madrid, Spain, also known as “Memo Fantasma” (Will The Ghost) who according to Insight Crime is “a former drug trafficker and leader of the brutal paramilitary army known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia — AUC).”

During this investigation into Memo Fantasma, Insight Crime discovered that he participated in the construction project Torre 85, a luxury building in Bogotá’s exclusive El Retiro neighborhood developed by Ramirez’ husband Alvaro Rincón by providing a portion of the land and investing in the project, built by Rincón’s construction company Hitos Urbanos Limitada. Vice President Ramirez remains a shareholder in this company, according to Insight Crime. Rincón admitted to Insight Crime his dealings with Memo Fantasma but insisted that he was unaware of his history.

“I know what story you are working on”—Marta Lucia Ramirez in a message to McDermott just hours after he confronted Memo Fantasma in Spain

After Insight Crime revealed the connections, Vice President Ramirez did an interview in April with W Radio where she insisted:

“I must tell you that if all this information is correct, as it apparently is, what I most desire is for this investigation to advance.”

Insight Crime published a full transcript of her interview, presenting her side of the story, where she contradicted her own husband by saying they had no dealings with Memo Fantasma, who two weeks ago (Memo Fantasma) had eight properties valued at over $2 million USD seized by Colombian prosecutors (Torre 85 was not one of them).

The Criminal Charges

On July 24, Colombia’s Attorney General notified Insight Crime’s co-director and leader of the Memo Fantasma investigation Jeremy McDermott that Vice President Marta Lucia Ramirez filed criminal charges on June 2 against him for “affecting her right to moral integrity, good name, dignity and honor.” The attorney general’s office “invited” McDermott to meet with Ramirez via videoconference to reconcile their differences before the legal proceedings went any further: This an apparent attempt to pressure McDermott to issue statements in defense of the Vice President (even though McDermott never accused Ramirez or her husband Rincón of any wrongdoing) and contradicting his reporting of her links to Memo Fantasma, whether she knew who he was or not.

In April, McDermott received a demand to remove mentions of any connections between Ramirez and Memo Fantasma from the law firm of Abelardo De la Espriella, the same attorneys so far unsuccessfully fighting to quash Matarife, a YouTube show that is vexing another of their powerful clients, former President and current Senator Alvaro Uribe; political patron of current Colombian President Ivan Duque. Vice President Ramirez served as then President Uribe’s defense minister from 2002 to 2003. Espriella has a history of attacking journalists and NGOs on behalf of Uribe, though US based media mammoth Univision has directly accused de la Espriella’s firm of corruption in the case of Nicolas Maduro ally Alex Saab, a Colombian fugitive and former de la Espriella client currently detained in Cape Verde and fighting extradition to the United States. According to the Univision report, de la Espriella’s firm bribed a police officer to provide information on Saab’s pending 2018 arrest by Colombian police so that he could escape—then turned the police officer in for bribery!

Rather than bowing to Ramirez’s tactics, McDermott went public with the Vice President’s charges against him, immediately publishing an article announcing the criminal complaint against him. A conviction would result in 16 to 54 months in prison and a fine of up to $375,000 USD under Colombian law.

The reaction from press freedom advocates was swift. The actions taken by Colombia’s Vice President were condemned by groups like Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Colombia’s Foundation for Press Freedom. Insight Crime, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and non-profit foundation also has diplomatic support, receiving funding from the governments of countries including the UK, Germany, Canada & Sweden, and academic institutions such as American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies.

Ramirez quickly felt the pressure, as evidenced by her direct response on Twitter to José Miguel Vivanco, the Executive Director, Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, who reminded her that her actions violate standards of freedom of expression; penal codes against defamation (though she was never defamed by McDermott) violate human rights norms, and the honor of public officials should never be protected with prison.

Shortly after the scolding by Vivanco, the Vice President announced on Twitter that she was withdrawing the charges against McDermott.

El caso de @jerrymcdermott me puso en una encrucijada y la defensa a mi buen nombre prevaleció. Hoy considero el caso superado y retiraré la denuncia penal. La libertad de prensa y la defensa del honor son derechos inalienables y baluarte de la democracia.

— Marta Lucía Ramírez (@mluciaramirez) July 29, 2020

“The case of @jeremymcdermott put me at a crossroad and the defense of my good name prevailed,” she announced, though Insight Crime has stood by its story in every detail, and further revelations show even closer family ties—convictions even for importing heroin into the United States by her own brother, which she bailed out during his proceedings.

“Today I consider the case overcome, and I will withdraw my penal charges. Liberty of press and the defense of honor are inalienable rights and bulwark of democracy,” she continued in her tweet.

McDermott stressed that while he is thankful, the dropping of the lawsuit does not change the fact that journalists in Colombia can still be threatened with legal action using the same law that was used against him. He questioned whether a Colombian journalist would have seen the same outcome if faced with a similar situation.

“We did not change a single word in the investigation, and this validates our work,” McDermott said from Medellín.

Headline photo: Felipe Castaño, Vicepresidency of The Republic

Lèse-majesté is a French term meaning “to do wrong to majesty” and defines an offense against the dignity of a reigning sovereign. In medieval countries and some dictatorships such as Iran & North Korea it is against the law to offend the ruler. If Colombia is to be considered a modern republic, it cannot be acceptable for anyone occupying Casa de Nariño (the presidential palace) to use their prosecutors or prisons to intimidate, menace & bully journalists simply for reporting verified & true but embarrassing facts. As the Washington Post reminds us: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

As first reported by investigative reporters at “Cuestión Pública” (Public Question) while investigating the ÑeñePolitica vote-buying scandal that has ensnared the presidency of Ivan Duque and the Centro Democratico political party of his patrón (godfather) Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s army has been caught creating an “enemies list” of individuals and entities that it has deemed “opposition.”

The actions of the Colombian Army are extremely grave and a demonstrable threat to human and civil rights in Colombia. When the army creates a clandestine “opposition” list of media & civil society groups, it recalls shadows of Pinochet, political torture and assassination. The gravity of this act cannot be overstated.

Above image – BONE-CHILLING: “National Army of Colombia has added you to its list ‘Opposition'” 

Ominously,few if any of these groups are political radicals or anti-military, rather anti-corruption civil society groups, mainstream media, and indigenous activists. The military operatives in control of the Colombian military’s Twitter account failed to realize that users’ twitter accounts were notified when they were added to the “Oposición” list created by the Colombian Army.

Once questioned, the operatives immediately deleted the Twitter list. This comes as the Colombian government headed by Ivan Duque is embroiled in multiple scandals, faces tiny public approval, and was just excoriated by the United Nations for human rights violations. Several of the journalists are hot on the trail of the #Ñeñepolitica vote buying scandal that ties massive political corruption and organized crime to the Centro Democratico political party of Alvaro Uribe and the presidential election of his hand-picked candidate Ivan Duque.

Several journalists have already denounced Colombia’s internal security organs for improperly surveilling and intimidating investigative journalists, as revelations seem to further entangle Uribe and Duque.

Though one could argue why the military might view the FARC and some of its top leaders as “opposition,” similar justification does not exist for several of the other groups included on the enemies list. Even the FARC has demobilized, laid down arms and is participating in the political system as agreed by the 2016 peace accords signed between them and then-President Juan Manuel Santos.

• Colombia2020, an initiative of mainstream newspaper El Espectador
• ANZORC “Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina,” a rural civil group
• ASCAMCAT “Asociación Campesina del Catatumbo” a rural civil group in the violent Catatumbo región
• JEP—Jurisidiccion Especial para la Paz; the government entity set up to implement the historic peace accords signed by the previous administration
• José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch
• Aída Avella, Colombian senator
• Gustavo Petro, Colombian senator
• Gustavo Bolívar, Colombian senator
• Iván Cépeda, Colombian senator
• Gustavo Gómez, reporter with Caracol Radio
• Ignacio Gómez, editor with Noticias Uno
• Salud Hernandez, journalist with Semana weekly magazine
• Vicky Dávila, journalist with Semana weekly magazine
• Contagio Radio
• CRIC indigenous advocacy group
• ONIC indigenous advocacy group

The list, before it was made to disappear, had 33 Twitter accounts and appeared to be still under construction, or in other words, was not complete.

#Atención Tras publicación de nuestros hilos investigativos sobre la #ÑeñePolítica, el Twitter oficial del Ejército colombiano @COL_EJERCITO incluyó nuestro medio @cuestion_p en una lista llamada #Oposición. Exigimos respuestas ante esta agresión que nos pone en riesgo. @FLIP_org pic.twitter.com/uaaLJW317v

— Cuestión Pública (@cuestion_p) March 10, 2020

Article 219 of the Colombian Constitution prohibits the military from political interference. Pedro Vaca, director of Colombian freedom of the press foundation FLIP demanded to know “Whoever is in charge of administering the @COL_EJERCITO should explain the criteria under which twitter accounts are added to the military “opposition” list.

Que una cuenta en redes de @COL_EJERCITO elabore lista de OPOSITORES con cuentas y nombres de periodistas es una muestra clara de que, en ocasiones como esta, a “Inteligencia Militar” le sobra una palabra. Pavoroso, ofensivo y peligroso. Que dirá @IvanDuque comandante en jefe…

— GustavoGómezCórdoba (@gusgomez1701) March 10, 2020