A wave of massacres in Colombia is putting pressure on the government to protect and protect civilians as the 2016 peace procedure unfolds with the Marxist guerrillas.
Armed men opened fire on a youth organization in a southwestern Colombia on August 15, killing eight, mostly students. The motives of the killers are not yet clear, however, the killings took place in a cocaine-producing region where there are illegal personal armies. fighting for control.
In the days that followed, at least 23 other people were killed in incidents in other parts of the country, the recent high near Medellin on Sunday night, according to Indepaz, a Colombian NGO that is tracking the conflict.
President Ivan Duque accused the Mafias of cocaine trafficking of being guilty of violence and said they were the result of the increase in illicit drug production in recent years, reviving memories of the past 1990s, one of the darkest periods in history. Colombia’s recent history, when illegal paramilitary teams massacred civilians en masse to sow terror and claim control. Massacres were also common in the civil war known as Violence in the 1940s and 1950s.
“Currently, those teams are smaller than their predecessors, with less organized leadership, but they are much more aggressive,” said Camilo González, director of Indepaz.
The peace accord with the Marxist rebels was already in dire straits when Duque took office in 2018. The brief era of calm that followed the peace accord came to a temporary end when cocaine trafficking gangs took control. of spaces deserted by the guerrillas and where former disgruntled rebels have taken up arms.
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Duque has opposed the beneficial benefits for violent teams to disarm, as his predecessor, President Juan Manuel Santos, did with the guerrillas, but he also did not carry out a major offensive by the army opposed to those teams, supervised through from his mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe.
Duque said on Saturday that Colombia had witnessed 1,361 acts of “collective homicide” since 1998, a term he used to describe the massacres, of which he said only about 2% occurred during his administration. He said he had ordered the security forces to be “relentless. ” with illegal armed teams and to improve intelligence work.
The Colombian human rights ombusdman uses the term “massacre” to refer to an incident in which 3 or more people are killed. Using this definition, Indepaz recorded forty-five massacres in the year until August 23.
The production of coca, raw for cocaine manufacturing, reached a record 171,000 hectares in 2017, enough to potentially produce around 900 tons of cocaine, which has led U. S. President Donald Trump to threaten to cut off loans and other aid to Colombia.
Coca production fell by 9% last year in the first full year of Duke’s existence, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. years ago, after the World Health Organization declared that herbicide glyphosate was probably carcinogenic.