Guillermo Pérez Rangel
Guillermo Pérez Rangel is a peasant, human rights defender and social leader from the department of Cesar. He is currently the president of the Mesa de Derechos Humanos y Territorios del Cesar, executive director of the Asociación de Campesinos y Comunidades Sin Tierra del Cesar and a member of the Unión Nacional de Integración Rural UNIR. Guillermo supported the talks to sign the peace accords in 2016 and has opposed large-scale mining extractivism projects, leading land recovery processes. By working for the vindication of the rights of victims of the armed conflict and the restitution of land to peasants dispossessed by paramilitarism, he has received various threats in recent years.
The last couple of years of a peace process has raised hopes for an end to the decades long conflict that has plagued Colombia. However, the negotiations between the government and the FARCs have not had a significant impact on the safety and security of human rights defenders in the country, which remains one of the countries with the highest rates of killing of HRDs in the world. This situation seems to have deteriorated in 2015 with the UN highlighting the alarming number of HRDs killed, with 69 between January and August 2015, while the number was 35 for the same period in 2014.
