7,000 Colombians displaced by battles over cocaine
Source: Reuters
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Colombian children carry sleeping pads down a street in Argelia, Antioquia province, August 2006. Rebel from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), fighting a four-decade-old insurgency funded by the narcotics trade, had visited a school, ordering students to spread the word that their families would have to leave their homes.
REUTERS/Albeiro Lopera
REUTERS/Albeiro Lopera
By Hugh Bronstein
BOGOTA, April 4 (Reuters) - Violence has forced up to 7,000 people in southwest Colombia from their homes over the past two weeks as soldiers battle to retake land from left-wing rebels producing cocaine in the area, officials said on Wednesday.
The displacement, which started on March 23 when the military launched an offensive in the area, is one of the biggest in recent years as Colombia cracks down on the 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
"People are leaving their homes because they are afraid of getting caught in the confrontations between the FARC and government security forces," Gloria Paredes, human rights ombudsman for the town of El Charco, Narino province, told Reuters.
Nearby local communities are doing what they can to absorb the wave of refugees, who number up to 7,000, she said.
Colombia's guerrilla war has caused more than 40,000 deaths since 1990, most of them civilians, while over 3 million people have been displaced in the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis outside Africa, the United Nations says.
"The pressure being exerted by armed groups over the civilian population in Narino seems to be increasing, with growing presence of new irregular armed groups," a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, told Reuters.
The agency issued a statement calling on the Colombian government to increase humanitarian aid to the area.
President Alvaro Uribe is popular for his U.S.-backed security policies, which include a peace deal with far-right paramilitary militias under which 31,000 fighters have turned in their guns in exchange for benefits including reduced prison terms.
The government says thousands of demobilized paramilitaries, guilty of some of the worst massacres and other atrocities of the conflict, have regrouped into new crime gangs battling for control of lucrative drug-smuggling routes like those in Narino, near the Ecuadorean border.
The FARC, organized in 1964, says it is fighting for land reform and other measures meant to narrow the wide gap that separates rich and poor in this Andean country. But even left-wing politicians say the guerrilla army, funded principally by drug smuggling, has almost no popular support.
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