Six Massacres in Nine Days Stir Memories of Colombia’s Worst Era
Six Massacres in Nine Days Stir Memories of Colombia’s Worst Era
(Bloomberg) -- A wave of massacres across Colombia is putting pressure on the government to beef up security and protect civilians as the 2016 peace process with Marxist guerrillas unravels.
Gunmen opened fire on a group of young people at a party in south-west Colombia on Aug 15., killing eight, most of them students. The killers’ motives are still unclear, but the murders took place in a cocaine-producing region where illegal private armies are fighting for control.
Over the days that followed, at least 23 people were killed in similar incidents in different parts of the country, the most recent near Medellin on Sunday evening, according to Indepaz, a Colombian NGO that monitors the conflict.
President Ivan Duque blamed cocaine-trafficking mafias for the violence, and said that they were the product of the increase in illegal drug output in recent years. The killings revived memories of the late 1990s, one of the darkest periods in Colombia’s recent history, when illegal paramilitary groups would slaughter civilians en masse to spread terror and assert control. Massacres were also common during the civil war known as La Violencia in the 1940s and 50s.
“Currently, these groups are smaller than their predecessors, with a less organized leadership, but they are much more aggressive,” said Camilo Gonzalez, head of Indepaz.
The peace accord with Marxist rebels was already in deep trouble when Duque took office in 2018. The brief period of calm after the peace accord soon ended as cocaine-trafficking gangs took over regions abandoned by the guerrillas, and disgruntled former rebels took up arms again.
Duque has consistently opposed offering generous benefits to violent groups to get them to disarm, as his predecessor, President Juan Manuel Santos, did with the guerrillas. But neither has he led a massive military offensive against such groups of the type overseen by his mentor, former President Alvaro Uribe.
Duque said Saturday that Colombia has seen 1,361 acts of “collective homicide” since 1998, a term he used to describe mass killings, of which he said only about 2% occurred during his administration. He said he ordered the security forces to be “implacable” with illegal armed groups, and to improve intelligence work.
Colombia’s human rights Ombusdman uses the term “massacre” to refer to an incident in which three or more people are murdered. Using this definition, Indepaz has recorded 45 massacres in the year through Aug. 23.
The production of coca, the raw material for making cocaine, soared to a record of 171,000 hectares in 2017, enough to potentially produce about 900 tons of cocaine. That led U.S. President Donald Trump to effectively threaten to cut off loans and other forms of aid to Colombia.
Coca output fell 9% last year, during Duque’s first full year in office, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Defense Minister Carlos Trujillo said Monday that the government will re-start aerial spraying of coca fields with weedkiller, which was suspended five years ago after the World Health Organization said the herbicide glyphosate was probably carcinogenic.
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