Death Threat by Text - A Day in the Life of a Colombian Lawyer

It was a death threat, sent by text to the mobile telephone of a lawyer in Colombia, South America. The message, translated from the Spanish and sanitised for the firewalls, said: "Hi, b*stard dogs. You have already done your bit, now it's our turn. Get all those b*stards together for your and your buddies' funerals. But calm down - we will send you a nice bunch of flowers."

It was a death threat, sent by text to the mobile telephone of a lawyer in Colombia, South America. The message, translated from the Spanish and sanitised for the firewalls, said: "Hi, b*stard dogs. You have already done your bit, now it's our turn. Get all those b*stards together for your and your buddies' funerals. But calm down - we will send you a nice bunch of flowers."

The person who sent the text, a member of paramilitary group Los Botalones, knew that Colombian lawyers take such threats seriously. Some 400 of them have been murdered since 1991, including five between mid-January and mid-February this year, and today lawyers continue to be threatened, wrongfully detained, assaulted and killed.

The lawyer that received this text, Abelardo Sanchez Serrano, is no stranger to violence. In January of this year two men on a motorcycle intercepted him. The passenger threatened him with a pistol and, after (again) telling him he was an 'hijo de puta', gave him 72 hours to get out of town.

His crime? He had been about to help commemorate the anniversary of the notorious La Rochela massacre of January 1989, when a paramilitary group kidnapped a 15-person commission of judicial officials that was investigating atrocities committed in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region. The paramilitaries killed 12 of the investigators and injured the remaining three.

Despite the threats, Serrano has still not got out of town. That town is Bucaramanga, in the northeast of the country towards the border with Venezuela, and it is where I will be at the end of this month as a member of the Colombia Caravana.

The Colombia Caravana Lawyers Group UK, a registered charity, is a group of international lawyers set up in 2008 to monitor human rights abuses suffered by lawyers in Colombia.

This year the group will include judges and lawyers from this country, Ireland, Canada, France, Holland and perhaps elsewhere - people are still signing up. There will also, for the first time, be a journalist: that's me.

I will be visiting a country that has been racked by civil conflict for decades, with some three million people displaced by the violence and tens of thousands killed or disappeared. Paramilitaries and left wing guerrillas dominate the drugs trade. And the state, particularly away from the larger towns, is powerless and barely evident.

I am to visit prisons to speak to lawyers who have been jailed for defending their human rights activist clients and interview other lawyers, including judges.

I have also set up meetings with journalists and trade unionists, who also daily risk their lives to expose corruption or defend the rights of the ordinary man.

I'll be in Colombia for a little over a week from 25 August and plan to file news stories and blogs from there - so watch this space.

There will be plenty to write about. Only yesterday I was told about another lawyer who has received an envelope containing a 9mm bullet and a note telling him that he had been targeted for death.

His 'crime' had been to defend a gay person.

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