A Colombian army officer abducted over the weekend in southwestern Colombia has been killed by his captors, believed to be former rebel insurgents, Colombian authorities said Monday.
Lieutenant Christian Calderon was abducted on Saturday while driving alongside local officials and public officials on a town street in the Cauca Valley.
According to the General Staff, the kidnappers were members of a rebel group of the former Marxist rebel organization FARC (Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, signed a peace agreement with the then government in 2016, disbanded and transformed into a political party).
The perpetrators, members of the Adan Ischierdo group, stopped the motorcade, abducted the officer and let the other occupants of the vehicles, all citizens, leave.
Authorities then located the body of a man believed to belong to “our officer”, the staff said in a press release.
The lieutenant “was abducted while participating in technical road construction studies (…) that would benefit local communities,” President Ivan Duque denounced via Twitter, blaming FARC insurgents for the crime, which he described as a “blatant violation of human rights.” and international humanitarian law.
Hundreds of guerrillas have refused to lay down their arms since the historic 2016 peace deal, which formally ended a half-century-long conflict between security forces and the FARC.
Without a unified administration, FARC insurgents are estimated to have about 2,500 fighters at present; they are funded mainly by drug trafficking, illegal mining and extortion, according to the Colombian military intelligence service.
About 13,000 men and women who had joined the insurgency, including about 7,000 fighters, were demobilized after the peace agreement. Nearly 300 of them have since been killed in targeted killings, which authorities blame mainly on their former comrades-in-arms.
