Nearly 4,800 indigenous people are caught in the middle of fighting between the ELN guerrillas and a powerful gang of narco-traffickers in northwestern Colombia, the Defender of the People, a public body for the protection of human rights, warned on Monday.
Dozens of families from the indigenous community of Moamia have been forced to flee or have been confined to their homes since the start of these clashes on Friday in Alto Baudo, a locality in the department of Choco.
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"The community finds itself without food, without resources, confined to the reserve, and other people are displaced,"
said the director of the organization, Carlos Camargo.
The natives are trapped by the fighting between the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Clan del Golfo, formed by former far-right paramilitaries, who clash for control of drug trafficking in this border area of Panama.
A native was killed Friday by a crossfire, denounced on Twitter Senator Feliciano Valencia, representative of indigenous peoples.
Since September 2019, the Defender of the People has been alerting to the dangers threatening civilians in this region.
Strategic by its access to the Pacific Ocean as to the Caribbean Sea, the Choco is populated at 89% of natives and Afro-descendants and it is the Colombian department with the highest rate of "monetary poverty. (61.1%), according to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane).
Amerindians are regularly victims of armed groups in isolated regions of the country, which the state has failed to take control of since the peace agreement with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) in 2016.
Last December, a thousand indigenous people from the Bacuru Puru reserve, also in Choco, moved after the kidnapping and slaughter of one of their leaders, whom they accused the Clan del Golfo.
Colombia has been plagued for nearly sixty years by a complex internal war, which has claimed more than nine million victims, most of them displaced by violence.