Nos Están Matando / They're Killing Us

Slought is pleased to announce Nos están matando / They're Killing Us, documentary film program and public conversation about the systematic murder of social leaders in Colombia, on Saturday September 29, 2018 from 6:30-8:30pm. The film screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmakers Emily Wright, Tom Laffay, and Daniel Bustos Echeverry; Afro-descendent social leader Héctor Marino Carabalí, founder of the community self-protection group La Guardia Cimarrona in the department of Cauca; and visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Alejandro Jaramillo. The program is presented as part of Slought's ongoing Photographies of Conflict exhibition series, and is co-presented with CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) at the University of Pennsylvania.

As the world focuses on the demobilisation of the FARC rebel group, another war is being waged in Colombia against social leaders—the very people who are key to building peace and shaping the Colombia's future. Since the signing of the peace deal in 2016, more than 300 human rights and land defenders have been murdered across the country. Activists are being targeted with impunity in the interests of territorial control, extractive mining, and illicit crop cultivation as State and paramilitary groups struggle for power in the void left by the FARC. Nos están matando / They're Killing Us, is the cry of social movements across the country in the wake of this violence.

They're Killing Us takes us to the department of Cauca, which bears a disproportionate share of this violence. The film follows two threatened social leaders: Feliciano Valencia, leader of the Nasa Indigenous community in their fight to reclaim ancestral territory, and Héctor Marino, an Afro-descendant community leader working to establish la Guardia Cimarrona, a community self-protection group in Colombia's conflict-ridden Cauca region. From bulletproof SUVs to territory raids backed by state security forces, from marches with indigenous groups to funeral processions through the mountains of Cauca, the film takes viewers into the deadly side of Colombia's peace process. The focus on the personal sacrifices made by these two men in their struggles to advocate for community rights gives us a view from behind the headlines and statistics that shows what is really at stake when peace is promised, but not delivered.