Four people died, including two police officers, and at least seven were injured this Monday (05/20/2024) in different attacks by dissidents of the extinct FARC guerrilla in southwestern Colombia, authorities reported.
The rebels of the so-called Central General Staff (EMC), who refused to accept the 2016 peace agreement, attacked a bank and a police station in Morales, in the department of Cauca, with gunshots and cylinder bombs, he said in a press conference. the Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez, presses.
Two patrol officers and two prisoners from the police center died, while three uniformed officers suffered injuries, although they are “out of danger,” added the official, who described the attack as a “terrorist attack.”
The director of the police, General William Salamanca, assured that he deployed an operation due to the presence of more explosives in the streets of Morales. For its part, the army sent 100 soldiers to that population.
Police station was destroyed
An AFP reporter observed the police station destroyed with multiple bullet holes, images that recall the lethal incursions of the extinct FARC in the 1990s.
“It was like two hours of anguish,” a resident of Morales, who preferred not to give her name, told AFP.
The minister traveled at the request of President Gustavo Petro to Popayán, capital of Cauca, and reported other “harassments” by the guerrillas in the municipalities of Dagua, Suárez and Jambaló. Earlier, the department’s governorship reported attacks in Silvia.
Petro described the situation in Cauca as “unacceptable”: “We will not tolerate the continued terrorizing of the population with terrorist attacks,” the leftist president wrote on the social network X.
Also in the neighboring department of Valle del Cauca, a motorcycle loaded with explosives exploded, leaving four injured, including three minors.
Fronts commanded by alias Iván Mordisco operate in Cauca and Valle del Cauca, who until April was thought to be the absolute leader of the EMC, but the government removed him from the peace process that began at the end of 2023.
Petro continued negotiating with other ringleaders, who allegedly make up half of the EMC’s 3,500 combatants, and began an offensive against Mordisco’s forces.
jc (afp, Semana, RCN Noticias)
