POPAYN, Colombia — The dead were discovered through local farmers shortly after dawn.Six mendacity bodies in a wooded scrub next to fields planted with palm trees and avocado.His hands tied them up. Showing symptoms of torture. Some shot, some squeathed.Everyone had had their fingertips cut off so they wouldn’t be taken for impressions.
It was Friday, August 21 in the municipality of Tambo in the southern region of the country called Cauca, the day before the dead were discovered, an organization of heavily armed men had ordered the villagers to gather and ask for the name of the six affected.Then they were taken to the woods at gunpoint.
“We’re waiting for the official investigation to tell us who killed them,” Tambo Mayor Carlos Vela told the Daily Beast.”There’s a lot of lack of confidence here now, just like in all of Colombia.”
Vela said that only one of the men was a local resident, while the other five were from Popayón, the capital of Cauca, a few hours’ drive down terracery roads northeast of Tambo.
“We live worried here now, ” said Vela.” The network is terrified of what might happen now.Who can be killed next.
In Colombia, disparate communities are also feeling the terror of what some media outlets call “Bitter August” because of this month’s unprecedented wave of massacres.
The first murders occurred on 11 August in the town of Cali, when five teenagers were crushed to death.Since then, at least nine other massacres have killed a total of 48 people, recently on August 28, when three others, he added.a minor, were killed in Medellín.Se recorded incidents in the southern part of the country, from the western state of Nario on the Pacific coast to the state of Arauca, on the eastern border with Venezuela.
August would have been arguably the most bitter month, but the rest of 2020 not so moderate.A total of 48 massacres have occurred this year, claiming the lives of more than 192 people.During the same period, more than a hundred social leaders and human rights defenders died in selective killings, according to Amnesty International.
All of this raises the question: what drives all these murders?Some Colombian media outlets have blamed the carnage of the “COVID death squads” that allegedly tracked down those who violated the 40s.It is true that the cartels have threatened fatal reprisals for violating the coronavirus.and the rising number of homicide deaths in August has coincided with an increase in coronavirus cases, and Colombia is in one of the world’s leading countries, in line with the 43.1 death-related death rates of millions of people.
But critics of the far-right regime of President Ivan Duque, who remains a close friend of the Trump administration, have advised an alternative explanation.They say the wave of massacres may be linked to the development of territorial disputes between criminal groups, as well as the slow weakening of the 2016 peace agreements aimed at ending the nation’s long civil war.
So let’s dig deeper into separating ourselves from fiction.
When the pandemic first erupted and Duque’s regime imposed a national closure, guerrilla forces and willing criminal teams quickly put quarantine measures into force in rural areas, with threats of the use of lethal force if citizens disobeyed.
“The spread of COVID-19 is a major impediment for criminal teams just because it’s bad for business,” said Mike Vigil, former deA foreign operations chief, in an interview with the Daily Beast.search and call for chains, giving traffickers a strong incentive to temporarily end local pandemic outbreaks.
“Criminal networks also worry about the loss of a key body of workers by the virus.As a result, they have imposed more serious restrictions than the government, adding the risk of “quarantine or dying,” Vigil said.
Insurgencies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and drug cartels such as the Gulf Clan publish leaflets and send messages on social media warning citizens not to come near or suffer fatal consequences.
“The guerrillas stand out on the football field of the village and look at us all the time.Everyone who comes and goes. They say that if we don’t do what they say, they’re going to kill us,” said Aida Piamba, 62, who lives in the village of El Salero, which is located between Tambo and Popayon in Cauca.
Dr. Ariel Avila, a political scientist at the National University of Colombia, said that the teams of criminals were the de facto government in remote spaces ignored by the government for generations, and that the pandemic had highlighted its control.
“In communities where there is a strong presence of criminal structures and illegal armed teams, they all over the place.For example, hours of alcohol consumption, hours of purchases, who can enter the territory and who can’t,” Avila said.In the case of COVID, armed teams fear that this disease will infect them and the communities that control and end up killing their troops, putting serious restrictions in place.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, Colombian armed teams have shown their readiness to deal with these threats, killing at least 10 others for violating a curfew or for bringing court cases to the authorities.Some media reports have estimated the death toll at 30.some of those claims remain in dispute.
On 15 August, 8 other people were killed at a party attended by more than 50 revelers in a rural domain of Nariño state.The families of those who suffered insist that the young men were executed for breaking the quarantine, however, other witnesses said that the assailants who broke into the farm where the party took place asked for the men through their call, as they did in Tambo, indicating that it may have been just a fight.between teams of criminals or a similar drug coup.
This last conclusion is the same as that of the mayor of Tambo, Vela, on the bloodbath committed in his municipality.Tambo is a primary production of coca leaves, which are the raw tissues of cocaine, and Vela said this month’s executions were most likely similar to the festival in drug trafficking, unlike COVID’s vigilantism.
“The maximum probable situation is that it is a territorial dispute between trafficking groups,” Vela said.
Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, a Colombian expert from the Washington Office for Latin America [WOLA], said she doubted the application of the lockdown was behind any of the recent massacres of several victims in Colombia, calling it a “practical history for Duque.” . .
“While I have no doubt that criminal teams are employing COVID as an excuse to pursue their goals, I doubt this is the genuine explanation for why such massacres,” Sanchez-Garzoli said, explaining that armed teams [want] to argue that they are guilty [for drug production areas].
Vigil backed the assessment and said that a larger party between cartels and insurgents “is a more logical explanation of why the horrific killings, due to the development spaces of coca and drug routes is more vital to them than the application of quarantine measures.”
For his part, Avila demonstrated that the killings were “independent of each other” on the ground, connected only through “the degradation of war” between rival factions involved in territorial struggles.
But there could be a more oblique link between the pandemic and the wave of murders: the closure of foreign borders and the closure of narcotics transport routes have caused a crater in the coca market, which has led to a sharp fall in cocaine prices.it also simply pushes the toughest traffickers to larger portions of the coca crop, to offset their declining profits through a higher volume.
“Lowering the coke accentuates the festival and violence among criminal groups, as it provides a wonderful opportunity for the winner to take it all,” said former DEA Vigil agent.
Decreasing coca revenue is also forcing criminal teams to diversify their portfolios, Vigil said.”They are fighting not only for drug trafficking, but also for other corporations, such as illegal gold mining and extortion,” leaving “other innocent people caught in the crossfire..”
Many observers told the Daily Beast that the accumulation of killings and the growing lack of confidence in rural Colombia are directly similar to the Duke’s failure to breach the historic 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC.
“Colombian President Ivón Duque and his people obstructed the peace process with the FARC, which rekindled the violence,” said Vigil, who added that a whole break of the armistice would be “a crisis for Colombia.”
“The only thing Duke has to do is blame the peace procedure for more drug trafficking,” said the political scientist Avila, “because it is to forget the deterioration of security and the explosion of criminal groups” that have happened since he came to power.
Duque’s predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the 50-year civil war in Bogota opposite the left-wing FARC, but Duque came to force him to eliminate many of those measures, such as rural and coca substitution programs, and so on.So far, in two years as president, he has kept his promises.
Under the direction of Duke, farC members who surrendered in intelligent religion were killed at an alarming rate, with more than two hundred killed since 2016.Colombian security forces under Duque have also been charged with crimes such as the rape of young people and extrajudicial executions in spaces previously controlled through the rebels, which has led some guerrillas to take up arms and return to the jungle , adding the New Marquetalia Front, which now operates in Cauca and has been linked to the recent murders in Tambo.
Recruitment through the ELN is on the rise and FARC dissidents are returning to war because those teams “don’t see a serious effort from the state to demobilize them,” said Sanchez-Garzoli of WOLA, who also said Duke felt able to do so.those “strict security measures” because of its close alliance with the Trump administration (Washington has already allocated nearly $450 million in army aid to Colombia by 2020, despite Congressional considerations of war crimes and other abuses).
Meanwhile, other teams of criminals have risen to fill the void left through the FARC, which controlled cocaine production and distribution in much of Colombia, according to Vigil.
“The FARC has left big gaps, especially in rural areas, and now crook networks are fighting violently over this lucrative territory, leading to a in savagery,” he said.
Sanchez-Garzoli said that most of the massacres occurred in spaces suffering from “an extreme settlement of marginalization …where the implementation of the peace agreement prevails and the need is the ultimate for the old and chronic abandonment of the state.”
Vigil, who as an agent of the DEA was stationed for years in Colombia, also called on Bogota to “develop a strong presence in spaces now controlled by corrupt elements”.It will have to fill the void [and] try to eliminate situations “such as poverty and lack of educational opportunities “that are at the root of the current structural violence.”
As for Mayor Vela in Tambo, he had a plea couple.
“We are humble people,” he said. All we need is to know when we can at peace.”