Violence against Colombia’s social leaders kept rising in 2025, exposing a democracy that still struggles to protect its bravest citizens. The killings, threats, displacement, and impunity show why the peace process remains fragile, unfinished, and painfully vulnerable to old habits.
The People Who Defend Rights Keep Paying the Price
Colombia has learned a cruel routine. Every year, another report arrives with numbers that should shake the country to its bones, and every year, those numbers begin to sound familiar. That familiarity is part of the tragedy. According to the annual report by Somos Defensores, violence against social leaders persisted in 2025, with 165 murdered leaders and 874 recorded attacks, a 5% increase from 2024. The figures do not describe an isolated security problem. They describe a structure that continues to function almost as intended, devouring the people who defend communities, rights, land, dignity, and public life, even when the state is at its weakest.
The report, based on the Information System on Attacks against Human Rights Defenders, says the situation remains critical, especially for women. They accounted for 15% of fatalities, with 27 murders, a 42% increase from the previous year. That detail matters deeply. When women social leaders are being killed at a faster rate, Colombia is not just losing activists. It is losing organizers, caretakers of local memory, and people who often hold together the fragile thread between community survival and public institutions. The violence is not random. It hits precisely where democratic life is most alive at the grassroots.
This is why the problem persists. Not because Colombia lacks reports, or diagnoses, or speeches about peace. It persists because recognizing social leaders is not the same as protecting them, and praising human rights in official language is not the same as building a state that can defend those who embody them. Somos Defensores says exactly that when it warns that the recognition and protection of human rights defenders in Colombia have not been prioritized. That sentence should be read as an indictment, not a technical observation. A democracy shows what it values by what it can keep alive.
And still, the pattern drags on. Threats remain the primary form of violence, accounting for 55% of cases, followed by murders at 19%, and then attacks and forced displacement, both at 8%. Compared with 2024, several forms of violence increased, especially forced displacement, which rose by 64%, followed by kidnappings at 38%. Threats rose by 19%, attacks by 16%, forced disappearances by 24%, and murders by 5%. These are not the signs of a society moving decisively out of political violence. They are signs of a country where pressure, terror, and selective punishment continue to discipline those who speak, organize, and resist.
Impunity Is Not a Side Effect
The ugliest truth in the report may not even be the killings themselves, but what follows them. Or rather, what does not. Between January 2002 and September 2025, 1,840 murders of human rights defenders were recorded, and only 12% resulted in convictions. The document also notes a worrying rate of impunity of nearly 86%, while between 2016 and 2025, the perpetrators remained unknown in 59% of cases. That is not just weak justice. That is a political message written in silence.
Impunity tells every armed actor, every local power broker, every hidden sponsor of intimidation that Colombia still has territories where consequences are negotiable. It also tells every social leader that courage may not be met by protection, and that death may not be met by truth. That is why this problem persists. Violence survives when it is useful, but it becomes durable when it is not punished. In Colombia, the report suggests, both conditions remain too prevalent.
Somos Defensores sharpens the point by questioning the actions of President Gustavo Petro’s government in a chapter titled You Said You Would Change. The criticism is not theatrical. It says structural changes in the protection of social leaders have not materialized. It points to persistent failures in implementing comprehensive protection measures and in the institutional response to risk, all in a context marked by the expansion and conflict between illegal armed groups. That phrasing matters. It suggests a state still reacting in fragments while violence behaves like a system.
The report also argues that the increase in violence is due in part to the unwillingness to listen to the demands of the social movement. That line cuts to the democratic core of the issue. A social leader is not merely an individual target. A social leader often represents a collective demand, a warning, a refusal, or a claim to rights. When those leaders are threatened, displaced, kidnapped, prosecuted, disappeared, or killed, the state is not merely failing to protect certain people. It is failing to hear the voices of those who speak from below. Democracy begins to thin out when only some voices can safely remain audible.
This is why the report’s mention of 15 prosecutions in 2025 also carries a bitter undertone. The state can prosecute, but if the wider field remains marked by threats, disappearances, displacement, and killings, prosecution can also begin to look like another instrument of pressure rather than a sign of neutral order. In a country with this level of fear, even the law becomes suspect when trust is weak.
Peace cannot Survive While Its Local Guardians Die
Colombia’s long peace process was never only about signatures, negotiations, or national political theater. At its most real level, it was always going to depend on what happened afterward in communities, in local leadership, in the daily lives of those trying to turn rights into something tangible. That is why the murder and persecution of social leaders cuts so directly into the peace process. These are often the people who translate peace into lived reality. They are the ones who insist that promises reach the ground. When they are silenced, peace loses its witnesses, its interpreters, and its neighborhood guardians.
The report concludes that targeted violence against human rights defenders has worsened and that security conditions continue to lack structural improvement. Those words should be taken seriously because they describe more than a bad year. They describe a peace process still unable to break the older grammar of Colombia’s violence. Armed groups expand and clash. Institutions fail to respond with depth. Social movements are not adequately heard. Killings continue. Impunity thickens. Then the cycle repeats.
The fact that figures vary across sources does not soften the problem. Indepaz reported at least 187 social leaders murdered in 2025, a figure even higher than that of Somos Defensores. The United Nations has documented at least 972 murders of human rights defenders between 2016 and 2025 and has warned that Colombia remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for carrying out this work. Different counts, same verdict. The ground remains hostile to those who defend rights.
And that is the democratic wound underneath everything. A democracy is not measured only by elections, speeches, or institutions on paper. It is measured by whether people can defend rights, organize communities, and make demands without being hunted for it. Colombia’s social leaders keep doing that work anyway. That is a testament to their courage, but it is also an accusation against the country. A peace process cannot call itself lasting while its local defenders keep being buried, displaced, or erased. Until that changes, Colombia will keep saying peace with its laws while violence keeps answering in practice.
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