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The routine massacres that were believed to be part of the past did not give up in Colombia. At least 17 dead left three "collective homicides" in different parts of the country, as the government of Iván Duque calls them. They met between the nights of Friday and the morning of this Saturday. In the most recent episode, armed men murdered six young men in the municipality of Tumaco, in the department of Nariño, on the border with Ecuador, reported Governor John Rojas, who is receiving the president this Saturday to hold a security council. "What has happened is very sad, we hope that the best measures will be taken with the president's visit," he said, confirming the events that are still being investigated.
The day before, six people were killed in a remote rural area of El Tambo, in the department of Cauca, also in the west of the country, as confirmed by the mayor of that municipality, Carlos Vela. Who is responsible is still unknown. Cauca and Nariño, near the Pacific corridor, are two of the areas hardest hit by paramilitary groups, the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the dissidents of the defunct FARC guerrilla that are fighting over drug trafficking routes and control of the territory.
The Ombudsman's Office denounced on the same Friday that at the other end of the country they had killed five people in a rural area of Arauca, near the border with Venezuela. In this case, the authorities have targeted dissidents from the FARC - a guerrilla now disarmed and turned into a political party with the same initials - who withdrew from the peace process, in a region where the ELN also operates.
"We are hurt by the deaths caused by violence resulting from drug trafficking and terrorism," President Duque wrote on his Twitter account without referring to any of these massacres in particular. “Between 2010 and 2018, our country experienced 189 collective homicides, and between 2019 and 2020, 34 events of that nature. We will continue fighting dissidents [from the] FARC, ELN, Clan del Golfo, cartels and others, "he said. Duque's figures contrast with other sources. The UN has recorded 69 massacres since 2019, in addition to another seven that it has not been able to document.
The previous Saturday the country had already woken up in mourning with the murder of eight young people between 17 and 26 years old shot in the municipality of Samaniego, also in Nariño, a massacre that occurred a few days after five adolescents were slaughtered in the city of Cali and their bodies will end up dumped in a sugar cane field. That chain of killings has scandalized a society that aspired to turn the page on violence after the historic a historic peace agreement with the FARC in late 2016.
Massacres have been a constant during the long armed conflict. According to the National Center for Historical Memory, there were 4,210 massacres between 1958 and 2018 perpetrated by both paramilitary groups and guerrillas, with a balance of 24,447 deaths. The expectation was that the pact with which was the largest guerrilla in America would allow the State to reach the most inaccessible territories of the country, but in 2019 with 36 massacres the highest figure since 2014 was registered again, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Even amid the coronavirus crisis, illegal groups remain active in many regions, completely oblivious to sanitary measures. Authorities such as the attorney general, Fernando Carrillo, have denounced a marked increase in the forced recruitment of minors amid the pandemic, and armed groups have even imposed strict regulations on the population. The ELN has been getting stronger, and together with the FARC dissidents, they remain the groups with the greatest activity, according to the analysis of the Ideas for Peace Foundation on the dynamics of the armed confrontation and its humanitarian impact on the former. four months of the year. Then comes the Clan del Golfo, which emerged after the demobilization of the paramilitary groups in 2016, which brings together remnants of these squads and is considered the most powerful cartel.