At least five former FARC insurgents have been killed during an army operation in southern Colombia, the general staff said Monday.
According to the staff press release, the guerrillas belonged to the Segunda Marquetalia (“Second Marketing”) group, led by Ivan Marquez, the former leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC), which was also the chief negotiator of the Marxist rebels in the peace negotiations that led to the historic agreement of 2016, the dissolution of the guerrilla, the disarmament of its 13,000 warriors and its transformation into a political party.
Three years later, he announced that he was taking up arms again, judging that the current Colombian government was violating the peace agreement signed in Havana.
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Without a unified administration, FARC insurgents now number about 2,500 warriors and are funded mainly by drug trafficking, mineral exploitation and blackmail, at least according to the military intelligence service.
The operation was carried out in the Kaketa region (south), in the part of the Amazon that passes through Colombia, where political and military authorities blamed FARC insurgents for recent massacres.
The extremely complex six-decade civil war in Colombia – since 1958 – has claimed more than nine million lives: 260,000 dead, mostly civilians, more than 70,000 missing and millions displaced, according to the National Center for Historical Memory.
