Timeline for entries tagged “Armed Groups”

A chronology of events related to peace, security, and human rights in Colombia.

April 28, 2020

A presidential decree lowers judicial penalties to members of criminal groups who agree to demobilize peacefully and submit to the High Commissioner for Peace.

It does not apply to the ELN, whose “political character” the state recognizes, making benefits available to individual ELN deserters. It applies instead to FARC dissident groups, the Gulf Clan and Caparros neo-paramilitary groups, and the Pelusos or EPL. These are the groups that, according to the government, meet the Geneva Conventions Protocol II definition of those “which, under responsible command, exercise such control over a part of its territory as to enable them to carry out sustained and concerted military operations.”

Tags: Armed Groups, Demobilization Disarmament and Reintegration, High Commissioner for Peace, Justice System, Organized Crime

January 11, 2020

  • Visiting Bojayá, Chocó, President Duque promises to increase military presence and social investment in the battered municipality.
  • That day, Bojayá social leader Leyner Palacios, who had met with President Duque three days before, receives a truculent letter from the commander of the Titan Joint Task Force, a Chocó-based military unit. Palacios had denounced episodes of collusion between members of the security forces and Gulf Clan paramilitaries. In what he calls a “freedom of information request,” Commander Darío Fernando Cardona Castrillón asks Palacios to provide “names or surnames of the security-force members, and the place and date during which such illegal acts were committed, so that respective investigations may be initiated.”

Tags: Afro-Descendant Communities, Armed Groups, Army, Chocó, Civil-Military Relations, Gulf Clan, Military and Human Rights, Stabilization

January 10, 2020

  • The ELN attacks an Air Force base in Yopal, Casanare, launching homemade explosives from a truck. One explosive lands near women’s barracks, wounding an enlisted woman. It is one of the first times the group has attacked an Air Force target, and Yopal is considered to be outside the ELN’s zone of influence.

Tags: Armed Groups, Casanare, ELN

January 8, 2020

  • Amid reports of 23 homicides of social leaders in December, a large-scale “Gulf Clan” paramilitary incursion in Bojayá, Chocó, and the murder of human rights defender Gloria Ocampo in Putumayo, the Presidency convenes a rare meeting of the National Security Guarantees Commission that was established by the peace accord.
  • Bojayá social leader Leyner Palacios, who denounced serious recent threats on his life, is invited to join the Commission’s meeting. Palacios is known nationally as a survivor of the 2002 FARC indiscriminate bombing that destroyed the village’s church, killing 79 people—including 5 of Palacios’s relatives—seeking refuge inside.
  • High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos voices doubt that 300 Gulf Clan members could be deployed all at once in Bojayá, as local groups have denounced.
Photo source: David Romo, Colombian Presidency
Photo source: David Romo, Colombian Presidency

Tags: Afro-Descendant Communities, Armed Groups, Attacks on social leaders, Gulf Clan, High Commissioner for Peace, National Security Guarantees Commission