In January 2021, a group of human rights defenders in Buenaventura received death threats and harassment by armed men who followed them as they went to and from their homes and workplaces. While typical of the threats faced by community leaders across Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement, in Buenaventura this also reflected the continuation of local struggles over the San Antonio Estuary. A project to dredge the estuary, led by the Instituto Nacional de Vías (National Roads Institute) and a consortium of private interests, had generated intense opposition from local residents. Although the public and private investors proposing the plan argued that dredging would allow for the expansion of commercial shipping operations, they had failed to persuade community leaders to drop their legal action to prevent the work. One representative of the local administration who was in support of the dredging called his opponents “enemies of the development of Buenaventura”.

For those community leaders, however, opposition to the dredging was not only environmental: they also cited reliable evidence that the estuary was an acuafosa, or watery grave, containing the remains of hundreds of victims of forced disappearance (Avila and Parada, 2021). The dredging project, they argued, threatened families’ hopes of ever recovering the remains of their loved ones; a serious abuse of the rights of victims’ relatives. They demanded a detailed investigation of the area and, in February 2021, a request for protection of the Estuary was submitted to the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace; JEP), who ordered the suspension of the dredging project. In April of that year, the Pact for the Search of the Disappeared in Buenaventura was signed, a commitment from the Public Prosecutor's Office's Disappeared Persons Unit and the Mayor's office to conduct the first ever search for the disappeared in a maritime zone. At the time of writing, that search is about to begin.

This incident perfectly encapsulates many of the issues that residents and social leaders in Buenaventura face: powerful commercial and economic interests pursuing forms of development that conflict with the wishes of local communities, an ongoing struggle to deal with the legacies of the city's turbulent history of violence and continuing threats of violence against those who try to defend the interests of the community and address the city's problems.