Factions in Colombia exploiting pandemic
MEDELLIN, Colombia — Lorena Paredes sat in the passenger seat of a silver SUV as it sped through the night roads of Colombia’s Pacific coast. The 28-year-old lawyer was nervous. She was returning from a doctor’s appointment late — well past the start of a coronavirus curfew that can be as deadly as the virus itself.
Armed groups in this violence-fraught nation of 50 million are imposing new levels of control during the coronavirus outbreak, and enforcing some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world — with harsh penalties for violators. In the port city of Tumaco, a narcotrafficking hub in the Colombian southwest, guerrillas posted pamphlets declaring all curfew violators “military targets.” In a warning to all, a medical transport responding to a call after curfew was torched in early May, its driver and patient killed.
Paredes, driven by a friend, thought she might get lucky. Then she saw the roadblock.
Enforcers with shotguns and automatic weapons opened fire, piercing the sport utility vehicle. Paredes felt stabs of pain as three bullets struck her leg. Her friend, hit in the face and arm, nevertheless managed to pull over, where the pair begged for their lives. They were released with a warning, to seek assistance on their own.
“Absolutely no one helped us,” Paredes, a prosecutor in Tumaco who handles domestic abuse cases, said from the safety of a neighboring city. “One person approached us, because I screamed. I begged for help because my friend was bleeding out horribly. He came close to the window of our car and told us, ‘Hey, quiet, because here, it is prohibited to help.’”
Human rights groups, community leaders and government officials say leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug cartels are using the outbreak to consolidate control over parts of a country still reeling from the aftermath of five decades of armed conflict. The increasingly violent competition shows the power of the pandemic to deepen societal challenges and loosen the grip of government in fragile states.
“For these groups, this isn’t a health issue,” said Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, Andes director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “It’s about exerting social control on the population.”
While the government of President Ivan Duque is focusing on a worsening coronavirus outbreak — the country has reported more than 240,000 infections and more than 8,200 deaths — the draconian measures imposed by armed groups are serving at least two purposes: to expand control over roads and communities central to narcotrafficking and illegal mining, and to reinforce their standing as the absolute rulers of their territories.
The conditions echo a global trend of armed groups moving to supplant weak governments during the pandemic. The Taliban in Afghanistan, Comando Vermehlo in Rio and MS-13 in El Salvador, among others, have imposed their own curfews and, in some instances, distributed food, masks and disinfectant in areas they control.
But the Colombian groups have distinguished themselves in the level of violence they’re applying to enforcement. Observers fear they’re accelerating an already dangerous drift away from the 2016 peace accord that ended the 52-year conflict between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC.
Critics blame Duque, who opposed the peace accord before he became president in 2018, for the slow pace of promised land reform and faltering efforts to reintegrate former fighters into society. They say his conservative administration has not done enough to stop the killings of leftist community leaders and ex-rebels.
Now, the group’s dissidents — guerrillas who have taken up arms again, or never put them down — are among the groups solidifying their hold on hot spots that never completely cooled.