Colombia Leader Warns FARC Attacks could Break up Peace Talks
Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos warned Tuesday the leftist FARC rebels could cause a breakdown of peace talks after a bombing of an electric tower left 450,000 people without power.
The government has been in talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia since November 2012, in a push to end Latin America's longest running armed conflict. The FARC, founded in 1964, boasts about 8,000 fighters.
The process has so far led to agreement on three points of a six-point agenda.
But Santos, who was recently re-elected in a cliffhanger poll seen as a referendum on the peace talks, said attacks like the one on the electric tower and a weekend pipeline bombing, could put the whole process in jeopardy.
"If you continue with that, you are playing with fire, and this process may end, because we cannot continue indefinitely in this situation," the president said in a speech Tuesday in southwestern Colombia.
"The people of Colombia are confused," Santos said, adding it is difficult "to explain why you are talking about peace and war is still here."
He emphasized his refusal to consider a ceasefire during the peace process, saying he did not want to "end up as a former president who tried for peace but failed and left the guerrillas stronger."
The attack on the electric tower was carried out by the FARC guerrilla group, which detonated an explosive device that knocked out power to Colombia's largest Pacific port, Buenaventura, the military said.
The Pacific Power Company (EPSA) said it hoped to restore service Wednesday, after the outage began 8:00 pm Monday, noting that access was difficult due to topography and vegetation.
The port of Buenaventura has been hard-hit by violence that has plagued parts of the country's Pacific Coast, a key drug-trafficking staging ground.
In the first four months of this year, political violence has claimed the lives of 87 people in the port city.
Later on Wednesday, a leading human rights group accused FARC guerrillas of widespread rights abuses in a Colombian port city whose residents are predominantly of African descent.
Human Rights Watch said the abuses by FARC included 12 assassinations, kidnappings, disappearances, torture, forced recruitment, planting landmines, extortion and death threats in and around the southwestern city of Tumaco.
"FARC abuses are devastating Tumaco's Afro-Colombian communities," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, HRW's Americas director.
"The FARC has a tight grip over the lives of many Tumaco residents, who are forced to keep silent as the guerrillas plant their fields with landmines, drive them from their homes, and kill their neighbors and loved ones with impunity," he said.
An investigation by HRW between May and June documented rights violations against more than 70 people in Tumaco in 2013-14.
It said there was "strong indication the FARC was responsible" in those cases, which included, in addition to the 12 killings, three disappearances, six cases of attempted forced recruitment and five cases of torture.
HRW said it also documented 16 cases apparently carried out by successors of right-wing paramilitary groups, including the disappearance of three teenage girls and the attempted forced recruitment of two teenage boys.
It denounced a broader climate of impunity, noting that of 1,300 homicides investigated in the area since 2009 only seven have resulted in convictions.
"Almost no one has been held accountable for the atrocities in Tumaco," Vivanco said. "As long as Colombia fails to deliver justice in Tumaco, residents will remain vulnerable to abuses, whether from guerrillas, paramilitaries, gangs or security force members."
Since 2013, the FARC has had an "undisputed presence" in the area, one of the most violent in Colombia's armed conflict, HRW said.
In one of the most recent cases, two police officers who had been kidnapped were found dead in March, a crime authorities attributed to the FARC.
Tumaco, Colombia's second largest port on the Pacific, has a population of about 200,000, most of them blacks beset by high rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality.
The FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest guerrilla group with some 8,000 fighters, is currently in peace talks with the government of President Juan Manuel Santos.
"As the FARC discusses peace in Havana with the Colombian government, in Tumaco its members have been brutalizing some of the most vulnerable communities in Colombia," Vivanco said.
“A peace agreement could eventually improve conditions in Tumaco but, in the meantime, the FARC needs to end its abuses against the civilian population, and the government should ensure justice for atrocities by all sides," he added.
Source: Agence France Presse
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