Drug cartels kill people for breaking their COVID-19 rules in Colombia, group says
Armed groups with ties to drug cartels are enforcing their own COVID-19 lockdown orders in Colombia, and killing people who don’t comply, a human rights organization says.
At least nine Colombians appear to have been killed since April for breaking measures intended to prevent spread of the coronavirus, according to a Human Rights Watch report. The organization also documented examples of the armed groups threatening and attacking people who break lockdowns, curfews and other rules, which at times are broader than the government’s restrictions.
“In communities across Colombia, armed groups have violently enforced their own measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19,” José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in the report released Wednesday. “This abusive social control reflects the government’s long-standing failure to establish a meaningful state presence in remote areas of the country, including to protect at-risk populations.”
The armed groups typically communicate the measures through WhatsApp and pamphlets, ordering movement restrictions, limits on store hours and bans on foreigners and others from going to communities, according to Human Rights Watch.
A pamphlet released by the National Liberation Army, a leftist group involved in drug trafficking and kidnappings, stated it was “forced to kill people in order to preserve lives” because people hadn’t “respected the orders to prevent Covid-19,” according to the report.
Another armed group’s pamphlet says, “Those who fail to comply will be held to account under our law with his own life... Either you comply or you die.”
As of Wednesday, Colombia had reported nearly 160,000 coronavirus cases and almost 6,000 deaths during the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 50 Colombians, including prosecutors, police, humanitarian organizations and community leaders, and reviewed pamphlets, media reports and local human rights groups publications. Here are examples of what they found:
• A farmer was killed in La Medina after going to meet friends in a community locked down by the National Liberation Army.
• Three people died and four were injured in a public park in an attack by a dissident group of FARC, the now-disbanded guerrilla group that funded itself through cocaine trafficking beginning in the late 1970s. A prosecutor said the group warned the people they’d be killed if they didn’t comply.
• Another FARC dissident group is accused of attacking four Venezuelan residents drinking alcohol at a phone repair store — which armed groups in the area banned to prevent COVID-19 from spreading — and two of them died.
• A community leader complained about a health checkpoint established by drug traffickers that he feared was exposing people to the coronavirus because personnel didn’t have protection. He was killed by members of La Mafia after bodyguards dropped him off at his home.
• Members of Contadores, a drug trafficking group, shot up a vehicle with four passengers, including a paramedic and sick passenger, and two people were killed. The car had a flag often used to signify vehicles on a “medical mission.”
Other measures imposed by the armed groups are causing families to starve, the report says. For example, rules limiting fishing in the coastal city of Tumaco mean the residents no longer have fish to sell, and a 5 p.m. curfew has closed food stands at night.
“They are trying to reap terror and gain territorial control so that after this crisis — people in these areas will not report them for drug trafficking, illegal mining, and corruption — the activities they carried out before and will carry out again after coronavirus,” Colombia’s national human rights ombudsman Carlos Negret told The Telegraph in May.
