At least 18 people were killed during a confrontation between two antagonistic groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents, reported the Ombudsman’s Office.
In the department of Putumayo, municipality of Puerto Guzmán, almost 700 kilometers south of Bogotá, there was a confrontation between the self-styled group Comandos de la Frontera and the Carolina Ramírez front, the agency announced in a statement.
The confrontation occurred on Saturday, November 19, in the villages of Las Delicias and Los Pinos, detailed the Ombudsman’s Office, which requested the presence of the public force and the prosecutor’s office in the area, as well as the Subcommittee on Prevention, Protection and Guarantees of Non-Repetition, and an expanded territorial committee for transitional justice to identify threats and risk factors in the rural area of Puerto Guzmán.
“The bodies of the deceased have been transferred by the community and remain at the moment in the cemetery of the José María Inspection, waiting for the judicial authorities to come to the sector to carry out the appropriate technical surveys of the corpses,” the Ombudsman office stated.
In addition, the organization called on the armed groups active in Colombia to show gestures of peace and contribute to the advancement of the talks for total peace proposed by the administration of President Gustavo Petro.
“These facts are the consummation of the risks warned by the Ombudsman’s Office through early alert 001 of 2021 due to the presence of these illegal armed groups in this municipality,” it said. It also asked the armed groups not to affect the population with their actions.
Despite the fact that the FARC and the Colombian government signed peace at the end of 2016, human rights groups have denounced the systematic murder of ex-guerrillas since then.
So far in 2022 alone, at least 36 signatories to the peace agreements have been assassinated in Colombia, according to the registry prepared by the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), in addition to 162 rights defenders, among peasants, indigenous people, community members, journalists and members of the Afro-Colombian community.
In addition, since 2016, the year of the consolidation of the peace agreements after dialogues in Cuba and Norway, at least 342 signatories have been executed, as well as 1,389 defenders.
At the beginning of November, President Petro launched a law for the construction of peace that empowers dialogue with armed groups, to give rise to talks between the Casa de Nariño, the seat of the Colombian executive branch, and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the main guerrilla force still active in the South American country.
With information from Sputnik