Colombia’s Religious Violence: Pastors Need Protection Before Politics Turns Faith into Target
After murders in Northern Colombia and a mass grave in Guaviare, a quiet legal change has left pastors exposed just as Washington calls the hemisphere a priority. In rural Colombia, faith leaders aren’t just preachers—they’re the last public institution standing.
A Strategy from Washington, A Funeral in The Countryside
In the language of the countryside, Colombia is a place where the state can feel like a rumor—heard of, rarely seen—while armed groups enforce the daily rules.
On New Year’s Eve, armed individuals assassinated a Protestant pastor in Northern Colombia—the second pastor from that same area targeted and killed in a year, and the tenth reported case in the country since December two thousand twenty-four. The specificity matters because the pattern is no longer deniable. These are not random crimes in a violent country. They are messages. And in rural zones where governance is contested, messages travel faster than justice.
This is why the question for policymakers is not abstract. It is immediate: will the Colombian state protect religious leaders facing targeted violence, or will it leave them to navigate a battlefield with nothing but prayer and luck? The stakes extend beyond one community, because in many isolated places, faith leaders serve as the closest thing to a functioning civic center—mediators, counselors, guardians of social peace, and sometimes the only adults willing to say no to the armed men.
The Promise of Freedom, Then the Paperwork of Risk
President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president in decades, is set to commemorate the country’s National Day of Religious Freedom on July four. The symbolism is strong: a leftist president speaking the language of pluralism and conscience in a nation long shaped by conservative power and brutal counterinsurgency. On that day in two thousand twenty-three, Petro pledged to religious leaders that “nobody would be persecuted for their religious convictions” and that spirituality was essential for peace. It was an expansive idea—peace not just as a ceasefire, but as a moral architecture built in communities.
Yet by the next year, the message rang hollow in the way that political speeches often do in Colombia: sincere on the podium, fragile on the ground. Two days before the annual observance, authorities uncovered a mass grave in Calamar, Guaviare, containing eight civilians forcibly disappeared in April—seven of them Protestant church leaders or active members, plus one family member. In an area still largely controlled by the leftist FARC guerrillas, each individual was personally summoned for a “meeting” and murdered soon after. The cruelty of that detail—summoned, singled out, disappeared—reveals a particular kind of domination. Armed actors do not just kill bodies. They kill trust. They kill the idea that public life is possible.
Petro condemned the killings on X, urging state institutions to “redouble their efforts to protect those who lead through faith.” But the country’s recent record suggests that Colombian institutions have not been redoubling; in one key respect, they have been retreating. Almost exactly one month after Petro’s two thousand twenty-three pledge, his administration amended a national decree to remove “religious leaders” from the list of categories eligible for specific protections under a program designed for individuals at “extreme risk of harm.”
It sounds technical, the kind of bureaucratic tweak that rarely makes headlines. In Colombia, technicalities can be life and death. For more than a decade, the decree served as the backbone of the country’s protection framework for journalists, activists, human rights defenders, former officials—and, until two thousand twenty-three, religious leaders. The National Protection Unit, housed in the Ministry of Interior, is responsible for protecting “the lives and diversity of social leaders throughout the country.” The inclusion of religious leaders as a separate category in two thousand fifteen was a public acknowledgment that they faced distinctive danger, particularly in territories where armed groups view independent moral authority as competition.
Removing that explicit category weakened a straightforward legal pathway for pastors and priests seeking urgent protection. Beyond narrowing formal recognition of their vulnerability, it risks delaying security measures and reducing political visibility for faith leaders under threat. The stated reasoning was that the change would expand access to religious members and institutions. In practice, the change left religious leaders without direct or timely access to protection, precisely when targeted attacks were showing the cost of delay.
When Pastors Become Civic Infrastructure, Their Deaths Become Policy Failures
Religious leaders in rural Colombia do not operate in a tidy category. They baptize children and bury the dead, yes. They also negotiate the fragile boundaries of community life—calming conflicts, discouraging recruitment, protecting families from displacement, and providing the kind of social glue that the state often fails to supply. That multiplicity is not a loophole; it is their public function. Forcing them to fit into other categories—activist, human rights defender, political actor—may be both unnecessary and, in certain places, dangerous. In communities effectively governed by guerrilla armies and criminal groups, labels can be lethal. Being seen as a “rights defender” can be interpreted as being on one side of a war.
Even in places where the state is strongest, the risk persists. A two thousand eighteen State Department report claimed that, in the capital, thirteen percent of Christian leaders had received death threats. If this is the climate in Bogotá, the vulnerability in remote corridors—where roads are bad, institutions thinner, and armed actors louder—requires little imagination.
This is where U.S. policy enters the picture, not as savior, but as stakeholder. The U.S. now frames Latin America as a strategic priority, and it has every incentive to avoid instability that drives migration, undermines counternarcotics goals, and erodes democratic legitimacy. If Washington wants a stable hemisphere, it must care about the local actors who stabilize communities. When governments weaken access to protection for civic figures who keep neighborhoods from collapsing, they weaken the very foundations of order.
The context is already tense. Relations are described as poor, with Bogotá recalling its ambassador to Washington in late October over a U.S. strike on a vessel linked to the National Liberation Army, and with Trump threatening U.S. military action in Colombia following the capture and arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In such an environment, it may be tempting for both sides to treat human security issues as secondary to posturing. That would be a mistake, because the killing of pastors is not a side issue. It is a warning signal from the territories where the Colombian state is still contested.
The text argues that Congress can use confirmation and oversight processes related to the next ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom—or, given former Congressman Mark Walker’s announced appointment as principal adviser for global religious freedom at the State Department—to press Bogotá to reinstate explicit protections for religious leaders in high-risk zones. The point is less about one office than about leverage: policy tools should be used to correct a legal gap that has real consequences in conflict-affected regions.
Restoring explicit protections would not end Colombia’s violence, but it would restore a clear pathway to security for people who are being targeted precisely because they hold communities together. In a country where armed groups often seek to replace the state with fear, pastors can become the last line of public moral life. When they are targeted, it is not merely a religious tragedy. It is a civic emergency.
If two thousand twenty-six is to be a year of hemispheric priorities, it should begin with a simple recognition: security is not only helicopters and intelligence sharing. It is also the protection of the local figures who keep social life intact when institutions fail. In Colombia, that often includes “those who lead through faith.” Removing them from the law did not make the country more inclusive. It made it more exposed.
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