A new massacre mourns Colombia and shows the security crisis that the country is experiencing

A woman demonstrates against the massacres in a recent mobilization in Bogotá.Daniel Garzon Herazo / Europa Press

El Cauca, one of the departments hardest hit by the non-stop violence in Colombia, has suffered a new massacre.

At least six people were shot dead in the Munchique sector of the Buenos Aires municipality by an illegal armed group, which also threw a grenade at them, while they were in a cockpit –the places where cockfights are organized in the Colombian countryside–, confirmed this Sunday afternoon the Ombudsman's Office.

Both the security forces and the judicial authorities went to the scene to establish what happened, while the number of wounded left by the attack is still being investigated.

In Munchique, the massacre of three people had already been perpetrated on April 26, and the Ombudsman's Office, in charge of ensuring human rights, had since issued two alerts warning of the imminent danger of violence in the area.

“We insist on the urgent need to eradicate the factors of violence that affect rights and constantly endanger the lives of Colombians.

We call for a prompt response to the early warnings that we have been issuing, and to avoid events such as the one we are lamenting, ”declared the Ombudsman, Carlos Camargo, who has just assumed office.

A recent wave of massacres has lowered Colombia into its darkest past.

In August, several massacres that left at least 45 dead forced President Iván Duque to react to a problem that he had sought to minimize.

The president himself announced the creation of a Special Unit against Collective Homicides, although concrete progress on this front is unknown.

Duque has been focused on addressing the coronavirus crisis and has been presenting a daily television program on the pandemic for a semester, while his Government has faced a wave of criticism for insisting on that term, "collective homicides" - which the Ministry of Defense has used for various periods - to refer to these crimes.

"It is not that they returned, it is that these acts of collective homicides have not sadly gone away," the president defended.

Among the indicators of violence, that of massacres, in particular, may have different criteria depending on the source, but the deterioration in the two years that Duque has been in power has set off all alarms.

The UN Human Rights office recorded 36 massacres in 2019, the highest number of its count since 2014, and this year it is on track to vastly exceed that number.

According to Indepaz, an NGO dedicated to issues of armed conflict, there have already been 60 massacres so far in 2020 in Colombia, nine of them in Cauca.

Both Cauca and the neighboring department of Nariño, near the Pacific corridor and the border with Ecuador, are two of the areas most besieged by paramilitary groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN), considered the last active guerrilla in Colombia, and dissidents from the extinct FARC guerrilla groups are fighting over drug trafficking routes and control of the territory.

The increase in massacres is accumulating with the incessant murder of social leaders and ex-combatants who signed the peace to draw a worrying security crisis in many remote regions.

The agreement with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), signed at the end of 2016, sought to extend the presence of the State, but the authorities have not filled the void left by what was the oldest guerrilla in America.

The new stage of armed violence is more fragmented, without dominant actors such as the FARC or the paramilitaries grouped in the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

An archipelago of armed groups remains active in different regions even in the midst of the pandemic.