11:30 PM
In a humble country house in the village of El Hoyito, in the Llanogrande sector of Rionegro, nine people were waiting to watch the match between Argentina and Chile for the Copa América. At that moment, a dozen men armed with a rifle entered the property and fired freely, ending the lives of seven people. One managed to escape and the remaining one was injured in one of her hands. A gang conflict in this municipality would be the origin of the largest massacre in Antioquia since last December.
At 7:30 pm this Tuesday, the murderers arrived at this sector, located about 15 minutes from the José María Córdova airport in Rionegro, in two private vehicles and a motorcycle, a procession that was not seen by the neighbors due to the loneliness of the area. sector. The detonations, mistaken for gunpowder, did not alert anyone either, but when the only one unharmed from this crime warned of what happenedthe community immediately realized the massacre that had occurred.
A resident of the area reported that “he was with other people when the injured person arrived saying: ‘they killed them, they killed them’, five minutes after the detonations were heard, like fireworks. I hugged him so he felt safe and then the other injured person arrived and I immediately helped him.”
The neighbor called the authorities and they arrived at the home. Upon entering, they found in the living room three bodies and a dying man. Inside one of the rooms were the other three bodies. The authorities put the survivor on one of the patrol cars, with the idea of taking him to a nearby care center, but he died on the way, thus leaving the seven dead.
In this event, according to preliminary records, Luis Guillermo Canoles Menco, Jesús Gabriel García Sarmiento, Luis Epinayu, Yensin Luis Fontalvo Buelvas and Marlon José Páez. The identities of the other two victims remained to be established. Forensic work will be carried out on the bodies of these seven people in Forensic Medicine, in Medellín, by a specialized team that will arrive from Bogotá, all in order to clarify what happened.
The commander of the Antioquia Police, Colonel Carlos Andrés Martínez, assured that the victims were from northern Colombia. Three of them, according to the first investigations, arrived from Campo de la Cruz, Atlántico. The rest arrived from Cartagena and La Guajira.
Apparently between December and January 29 people arrived, most of them from the Colombian Caribbean, to work on the construction of a farm on this same path.. As the months passed, several people left the project until only the nine involved in this violent case remained.
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For the mayor of Rionegro, Jorge Rivas, this fact is a mystery. He assured that it is an area full of farms, some for wealthy people and others for humble and hard-working people. “It is an area with a lot of surveillance and security cameras, in which we had no indication of any inconvenience”.
This version was confirmed by several residents of the sector known as Alto del Perro, who pointed out that the residents on the property where the events occurred never caused problems. “They were very hard-working people, who were kept from work to home and vice versa. And we never had problems with them because of any noise issue, much less that we have seen any strange behavior,” said one of them, who lives in one of the houses next to the scene of the events.
The victims had four dogs inside the home, known as Blanca, Miguelito, La Negra and Lulú. From them, three managed to be rescued and taken by the Mayor of Rionegro and the CES University to a temporary shelter, awaiting a decision regarding each of them or if an owner appears to claim them.
The conflict that heats up the East
This massacre is part of the conflict that has been taking place in Eastern Antioquia, where three sides want to fight for control of criminal income: The Mesa, the Gulf Clan and the Oriente Clan, this last heir of what was once the Self-Defense Forces of Magdalena Medio. Last year, several conflicts were generated in municipalities such as Argelia, Sonsón and Nariño.
Apparently, the confrontation between El Mesa and Clan del Golfo originated when the structure originating from Bello, after having control of drug distribution in the Near East (Rionegro, La Ceja, El Retiro, La Unión, El Carmen de Viboral, Cocorná and Guarne), He was not satisfied and in the midst of his ambition he sought to enter the Far Eastthat is, to Sonsón, Argelia, San Francisco, San Luis and Nariño, areas that were under the control of the Clan Oriente.
Faced with this scenario, the Clan del Golfo intervened through the Gener Morales front to support the Clan Oriente and He asked the members of El Mesa to leave all of Oriente Antioquiaincluding the areas that they managed to control with blood and fire since their incursion in 2019.
Even, on June 11, the also called Gaitanista Army of Colombia, distributed a pamphlet through social networks andin which they threatened all the members of El Mesaincluding its top leader, Rodrigo Rodríguez Rodríguez, alias El Montañero, and who recently changed his name in the Registry Office to Gustavo Pérez Peña.
“In some municipalities there have been homicides and threats to the civilian population, due to internal conflicts between criminal gangs, which are led by alias El Montañero, who changed his name to Gustavo Pérez Peña, a subject who for decades, and still being imprisoned, he has led ‘the Mesas’ (sic), who now identify themselves as the 2-13 (or those of the 13), viciously attacking the civilian population that does not align with their purposes. These are the groups that we fight tirelessly,” said the statement from this transnational structure.
The governor of Antioquia, Andrés Julián Rendón, indicated that so far the motives for the massacre are being fully clarified, while attempts are being made to establish the organization that was behind what happened. Mostly They are trying to verify if El Mesa or the Clan del Golfo committed it.while trying to confirm whether the victims belonged to any of the aforementioned organizations, as investigators of the case informed EL COLOMBIANO.
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“We are making progress in the investigation of what happened and our investigation team is in the area establishing mobile phones. Besides, There will be the presence of a specialized group, which will arrive from Bogotáso that they take part in the investigations of this fact,” said the president.
Furthermore, in order to have as much information as possible to find the whereabouts of the 10 responsible for this incident, from the Government of Antioquia A reward of up to $100 million was offered.The decision was made after the security council held at the Rionegro Mayor’s Office, in which the situation in this area was analyzed.
Despite this dispute, the number of homicides throughout Eastern Antioquia shows a decrease when compared to last year, since to date 88 cases are countedagainst the 105 that were in 2023 and the 97 registered in 2022. For the particular case of Rionegro, with these seven cases they reached 18 murders, two less than in 2022.
Related homicides
This conflict in Eastern Antioquia would have left two recent victims in Medellín. One of them occurred on May 27 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Medellín, where armed men ended the lives of Edwin Fernando Morales Londoño, 38 years oldwho was known by the alias El Crespo and would be one of the coordinators of El Mesa in Sonsón.
Three days later, in what would seem like retaliation, the crime of Yovany de Jesús Pérez Estrada, 51 years old, in the Mall del Indio, on Las Palmas road, near the San Diego neighborhood of Medellín. This man, originally from the department of Cesar, was summoned to a commercial establishment and murdered, apparently, after linking him as a strategic partner of members of the Clan del Golfo. However, the deceased only had a record for the crime of tax evasion.
The previous large massacre in Antioquia left six people dead in Santa Fe de Antioquia on December 3 in two events recorded four hours apart. TThere was a similarity with this fact that the victims also came from northern Colombia., although in this case they were from the south of Bolívar, Magdalena and Sucre, as well as a Venezuelan. The crime was attributed to the substructure Edwin Román Velásquez Valle, of the Clan del Golfo.
So far in 2024 There were two other multiple murdersone occurred on April 20 in Urrao and another on May 25 in Amalfi, both with three victims each, according to the records of the Antioquia Police.
