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“It’s not simple for the entire population,” the country’s top commissioner for peace said in an interview.
By Julie Turkewitz
They were twenty-something years old after months of pandemic-related quarantine.
Then the gunshots sounded and soon eight of them died.
“Peace be our dream,” said Jesus Quintero, whose son John Sebastian died after gunmen opened fire in his small town, Samaniego, a network lined with mountains trapped among groups of war criminals. “But nothing has changed. “
Four years after the end of America’s longest war with a historic peace that has been celebrated around the world, Colombia is in a burst of mass violence.
The United Nations has documented at least 33 massacres this year, up from 11, 2017, the year after the agreement was signed, with at least a dozen more since the United Nations announced its most recent official recount in mid-August.
The peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, ended five decades of war that left thousands dead and some six million displaced, and earned then-President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Peace Prize and considered the country’s greatest chance for a radically different future.
But it has left many disenchanted with the peace procedure and feared that escalation could further destabilize the countryside, turning Colombia into more widespread violence and breaking many of the dreams that arose in the days after the agreement.
“This moment is dangerous,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, colombia analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Colombia’s history is when a wave of violence is released, accelerated and it is very difficult to prevent it. “
In recent days, Colombia’s capital, Bogota, erupted in a violent protest after a guy who dominated the police and continually surprised with a paralyzing gun died in custody. The video-captured footage attracted thousands to the streets in protests that left at least thirteen dead and many wounded. The cause of these deaths is under investigation.
But many say that at the center of the outfusion lies a deeper frustration with the speed of change.
“The last government tried to end the war and it didn’t work,” said Eliana Garzón, 31, whose brother-in-law, Javier Ordoez, killed through the police.
“It’s a country that’s fed up,” he continued. His death is the best excuse to go out on the street. “
The attacks in the field are widely seen as a terrible by-product of the peace agreement. After the agreement, thousands of fighters laid down their arms and agreed to testify in court in exchange for assistance.
But as the FARC withdrew giant and coveted portions of the country, other teams, some old, some new, moved out.
In the past, these teams struggle for territories to control not only the country’s long-standing scourge, the coca harvest used to get cocaine sent to consumers in the United States, but also drug routes, illegal mining, and human trafficking. fighting over who can extort ordinary people.
Many of the communities that suffered the war between the FARC and the government are caught up in the conflict, with teams of criminals using murder as their preferred approach to terror.
And last month, the speed of the murders accelerated, with a bloodshed taking place on average every other day, according to the human rights organization Indepaz, which tracks the murders.
It’s a tragic speed reminiscent of some of the most violent days of war.
“After exceeding this threshold” from a bloodshed every other day, said the country’s leading special war court prosecutor Giovanni Alvarez Santoyo, “there is a very high chance of returning to a humanitarian crisis. “
Independent and UN describe a blood bath as a homicide of 3 or more victims.
In Colombia, massacres have long served as a retaliatory measure to punish others who paint or appear to paint with a rival, or as an intimidation tool to keep entire peoples online.
Samaniego, where Quintero’s son died, is located in the country’s lush southwest, in a coca-producing region controlled by a long-standing guerrilla organization called ELN, according to the government. Quintero, 55, is the education coordinator at a local school.
His son, known as Sebas, 24, grew up in Samaniego, and was a college student and aspiring engineer who had a close relationship with his niece, a little girl.
“He’s a perfect human being, ” said Quintero.
In recent months, a wing of FARC defectors had tried to take force in the region, but the government suspects that a small gang, the Cuyes, running with the authorization of the ELN, guilty of their son’s death.
On the night of mid-August, when his son died, a friend called Mr. Quintero to tell him that everything had come out in a fried fish where his son had met friends. Bullets were flying. Mr. Quintero ran around town on his motorcycle.
By the time he arrived at the party, Sebas in an ambulance with a bullet in his neck, that was the last time he saw his son alive.
In the days that followed, the niece toured the space in search of her favorite friend. “Uncle!” he cried as he discovered his picture.
The Cuyes gave the impression that they had instituted a curfew to facilitate their criminal transactions and might have been angry at being disobeyed, said the country’s top commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos.
“Why did they do it?” he said. ” Shows strength. And to check that they’re in this area.
The government of President Ivon Duque, a conservative whose party has strongly opposed the peace agreement, calling it too simple for the FARC, condemned the wave of massacres and downplayed the recent outbreak.
Ceballos, who named through Duke, noted that there are now far fewer massacres each year compared to the years before the agreement.
“The number of massacres has decreased,” he said. That’s news. “
And overall, he noted, homicides decreased during the pandemic.
Duke’s critics, however, accused him of not fully funding many of the agreement’s systems aimed at resolving the economic and security disorders that keep criminal teams in business.
Many coca growers, for example, were hoping to enroll in a substitution program that would help them move from coca to legal crops, but only a limited number of families have been included in the program, while violent teams seem to multiply only around them.
Ceballos called the complaint unfair and said the president, who took office in 2018, had worked aggressively to fund peacebuilding programs, citing the country’s mountainous terrain, the world’s voracious appetite for cocaine, and the slippery nature of criminal teams as major challenges.
“It’s not simple for the total population,” he said.
“Give this guy a chance, ” he continued to refer to President Duque. “We undone 56 years of war in just two years. “
But Wilder Acosta, head of a coca grower arrangement near the Venezuelan border, gets ahead: “Every day the confrontation worsens,” he said.
Eight manufacturers were recently killed in his area, he said, in the city of Totumito, which caused some three hundred families to flee the area, many of them dressed in young people and suitcases.
In those murders, police accused another group, the Rastrojos, fighting the ELN for the territory. Acosta criticized the government for failing his community.
“When the FARC is in power,” he said, “there is a law and order in our communities. Now that the FARC has disarmed, there’s chaos we don’t understand. “
Many say pandemic quarantines have given criminal teams even more freedom than usual.
“It’s as if the rest of the country is locked in their homes while they were on the loose to loot,” Ms Dickinson said of the International Crisis Group.
On the Monday after the Samaniego bombing, many others gathered at a school to say goodbye to Sebas, many in coronavirus masks.
The network prayed and then took the sebas frame to a cemetery near the city of Providencia, also in the state of Nario.
At the funeral, Quintero thanked God for his time with his son, but expressed his resentment: “It is the duty of the government,” he said afterwards.
“The peace agreement left on the desk, ” he said, “Nario has been completely forgotten. “
Soon there will be seven more funerals.
“Please,” Gladys Betancourt, 51, whose son died in his arms after the attack, “most innocent victims. “
A few days later, the government announced that Samaniego would now be included in one of the government’s peace programs, called Zonas del Futuro, despite the fact that everything allowed the people to get the assistance they needed.
The report contributed to the report in Bogota, Colombia.
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