On March 30, local campesino leader Gerardo Antonio Crio was assassinated near his home in the community of Vereda El Jordán, Cocorna municipality, in easter Antioquia department. The killers apparently used a gun with a silencer, as nobody in the community heard the shot. Local rights leaders call this evidence that the killing was a pre-planned assassination. Crio was a leader of the Eastern Antioquia Association of Small Producers (ASOPROA), which works to secure land rights and farm aid for campesinos displaced by the conflict. Local rights group Corporación Jurídica Libertad has for two years been calling for international action to defend the lives of ASOPROA's leaders following mounting threats from paramilitaries. (Corporación Jurídica Libertad, via DHColombia, April 2)

See our last post on Colombia and paramilitary terror.