Paya, in Boyacá, is an especially vulnerable town with a 94% poverty rate and a long history of repression and exclusion [10]. The local population of 5,000 does not have access to electricity, roads, proper sewage, and is 75% illiterate. In 2002, BP announced plans to drill wells in Paya for Niscota [8]. Local groups have long been organizing against the project because of the serious threats that it poses to local communities, indigenous peoples, and the environment [1]. For decades, activists have been protesting and litigating against the Niscota oil block for polluting groundwater reserves, disrupting ecological balances, destroying biodiversity and protected ecosystems/species, violating prior consent rights, causing loss of livelihoods, threatening culturally important sites, threatening public health, encroaching upon indigenous territories protected by recognized land rights, lack of environmental impact analysis, and more [4]. Niscota is also precariously sited on top of fault lines. However, the Ministry of Mines and Energy refuses to acknowledge that prior consultation was necessary on the false grounds that there are no ancestral people nearby [10].

The Niscota oil block is especially notorious for its violence and threats against local leaders, particularly coming from a thug group called "The Black Eagles Movement of Social Cleaning of the Casanareño Piedemonte" as well as from the XVI Brigade military group, the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrillas, and the FARC EP Front 28 [1, 10]. Guerilla, military, and thug groups camp around farms and towns to threaten locals with kidnappings, assassinations, extortion, recruitment, harassment, torture, sexual assault of women, and more [10]. Notoriously, on December 15, 2012, hitmen shot and killed activist Rosa Helena Bernal Pinto, who was the leader of the Peasant Association of Morcote and the Province of La Libertad, Peasant Workers Protectors of the Land and Territory (ASOCAMPROV-LIBERTAD), and collaborator of the Claretiana Corporation "Norman Pérez Bello" (a religious civil society organization) [9]. [12]. She had been fighting against the Niscota oil block since July 2012. Neighbors found her body after hearing the gunshots between 15:00 and 17:00 that day, but were not able to report which armed group committed the crime. At 18:00, children, relatives, and supporters were transporting the body on the way to Morcote, a nearby urban area, when two bombs went off, killing two. The villagers scattered and hid, and there has still never been any resolution [10]. Hitmen also attacked community leader José María Largo, who since 2014 has been confined to his house following violent threats and an incident wherein he was confronted on horseback and paralyzed, forcing him to use a wheelchair [1].