Colombia must speed up the dismantling of illegal armed groups to reduce violence and abuses of individual freedoms, while implementing the 2016 peace agreementsaid the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Juliette de Rivero, on Friday.
The South American country of 50 million inhabitants, an oil, coal and coffee exporter, has been facing for almost six decades a violent armed conflict financed by drug trafficking that has left 450,000 dead, with the intervention of the State Armed Forces, leftist guerrilla groups and criminal gangs.
“We have seen the effect of the violence of the armed groups in the territories and that is why we call so much for the policy of dismantling,” Rivero told journalists, when presenting the report on the human rights situation in Colombia in 2022.
“Adopt this policy of dismantling and implement it, because it is the non-state armed groups and criminal organizations that are generating so much violence in the territories and violating life,” he explained.
The government of leftist President Gustavo Petro seeks total peace in the country through a negotiation with the guerrilla of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and with two dissidences from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) outside the 2016 agreement that allowed the reintegration of some 13,000 members of that group.
Additionally, it seeks the dismantling of criminal gangs involved in drug trafficking and the illegal extraction of gold such as the Clan del Golfo, accused of committing murders, massacres and other human rights violations against the civilian population.
According to the report, in 2022 the Office in Colombia of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights verified 116 murders of social leaders, surpassing 100 in 2021.
It also verified 92 massacres with 321 victims last year, up from 78 in 2021, as well as the displacement of 82,862 people and the confinement of 102,395 due to the conflict.
The report also warned about the recruitment of 115 boys and girls by non-state armed groups, 12 of which reportedly suffered sexual violence.
De Rivero said that Colombia faces a structural problem and that to solve it and reduce violence it is necessary to bring development and the presence of the State to remote jungle and mountainous areas where their inhabitants lack education, health and roads.
“There are structural problems of a long time, of abandonment of the territories and with the need for development to arrive,” said the UN official. “Need for the State to be present in very remote areas where human rights are violated.
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