Bloody attacks with nine dead

Nine people, including four police officers, were killed in Colombia during three separate attacks, authorities announced Sunday (27/7).

Three off-duty police officers were killed in an attack carried out “indiscriminately” in the town of Pailitas, in which a pregnant woman was also injured, police said in a press release.

The perpetrators have not been identified, but police suspect that it was an action of the National Liberation Army (ELN), officially the last guerrilla organization that continues the armed struggle in the Andean country.

In the southern part of the country, five men were found dead in the municipality of San Vicente del Caguan, Mayor Julian Perdomo told AFP, complaining that “farmers are often killed.”

The killings are being blamed by authorities on dissidents of the former rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), who reject the 2016 peace deal that led to the disarmament, disbandment and transformation of the party into a party.

A fourth police officer was killed in an “armed group invasion” of a wealthy district of Cali, according to its mayor, Jorge Ivan Ospina.

According to the Colombian military intelligence service, FARC insurgents and ELN guerrillas are active around the city, the third largest in the country, as well as far-right paramilitaries.

Colombia is currently facing the worst wave of violence since disarming the FARC. The government of right-wing President Ivan Duque has blamed various armed groups for fighting drug trafficking and illegal mining, especially gold.

The highly complex civil war that broke out in Colombia in 1958 has claimed more than nine million lives, including 260,000 dead, mostly civilians, more than 83,000 missing and more than seven million displaced.

The independent Indepaz Observatory has counted 45 massacres – the simultaneous killing of at least three people, as defined by the UN – in Colombia since the beginning of the year.

On Friday, a helicopter carrying President Ivan Duque was hit by small arms in an area near the border with Venezuela.

It was the first assassination attempt on a Colombian head of state since the FARC did in February 2003’s against Alvaro Uribe, Ivan Duque’s political mentor.