By AFP
October 18, 2023
Tibu is in Colombia's Catatumbo region, known for being the world's largest area of drug cultivation - Copyright AFP Edinson ESTUPINAN
David SALAZAR
For months, the mayor of Tibu, a Colombian town under the yoke of guerrilla violence, was forced to do his job from more than 115 kilometers (71 miles) away, after receiving death threats.
Nelson Leal says he had no choice but to leave behind a “no-man’s land” under the control of dissidents who distanced themselves from the peace agreement the FARC guerrilla group signed with the government in 2016.
In March, when he had been on the job for 18 months, rebels stopped him on a road and intimidated him in the presence of his wife, his 13-year-old son and a niece. Then they took his car.
That was the incident that finally convinced him he had to leave, Leal told AFP in the city of Cucuta, where he now lives, governing Tibu by telephone
Prior to that experience, another of his sons had guns pointed at him from a motorcycle, as a warning.
But on October 8, Leal finally returned — under heavy guard — to the town of 60,000, which is now playing host to long-awaited talks between Bogota and dissident guerrillas who call themselves the Central General Staff (EMC).
The talks kicked off on Monday after a weeklong delay amid rising tensions and several deaths in clashes between the two sides.
Tibu is in the Catatumbo region, largely abandoned by state security forces and heavily contested by a plethora of armed groups.
It is also the municipality with the most drug cultivation in the world, according to UN data, with an area of over 22,000 hectares (84 square-miles) planted with coca, the base ingredient for cocaine — of which Colombia is the world’s biggest producer.
Apart from the EMC, Leal said, guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Gulf Clan — Colombia’s biggest drug organization — and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel are also active around Tibu, near the porous border with Venezuela
“Tibu has become a no-man’s land in which the one with the weapons is the one that governs,” he said.
– ‘Exiled or killed’ –
The Attorney General’s office said in September that about a dozen areas in Colombia, including Tibu, were under the control of armed groups that impose their own “rules of conduct.”
Anyone who diverts from these “is exiled or killed,” it said in a report.
Benigno Neira, a 51-year-old farmer, describes life in Tibu as “complex.”
“One has to take heed, obey, in order to live,” he told AFP.
Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro, took office in August 2022 with the stated goal of achieving “total peace” in a country ravaged by decades of fighting between the security forces, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug gangs.
His government is also in talks with the ELN and other armed groups, though progress has been halting.
Critics say Petro, himself a former urban guerrilla, is being too indulgent with the rebels, having offered reduced sentences in exchange for laying down arms, as their former FARC comrades did.
On the other side of the coin, some locals — many of whom plant coca themselves — pledge support to rebel groups, which are often the only enforcers of law and order, and source of income.
The EMC — which had about 3,500 members at the end of 2022, according to official figures — has steadily increased its presence in territories formerly occupied by the FARC and largely abandoned by government forces.
– ‘Maximum responsibility’ –
According to Kevin Karlen, a local coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Tibu is one of the parts of the country “most affected by the armed conflict.”
The town’s police station has an air of being under siege.
In May, two officers and a civilian were killed in a car bomb, and since then, officers leave the station only when “absolutely necessary” — and then in armored vehicles, according to one, who asked not to be named.
In Tibu, there are no traffic cops. There’s no court, no prosecutor’s office.
The last head prosecutor based here was murdered in 2021, with an open docket of some 400 criminal cases.
His subordinates all moved to Cucuta out of fear, according to Leal. They return only occasionally to the town “where it is very easy to govern with a rifle,” he added.
Monday’s talks kicked off with EMC negotiator Andrey Avendano, Leal and government delegates posing for the world’s media.
The nitty gritty of the negotiations, which also come with a three-month bilateral ceasefire, have not been divulged.
Petro has urged the EMC’s 3,500-odd members to behave with “maximum responsibility” during the process.
Noboa vs organized crime: Can Ecuador’s new president rise to the challenge?
AFP
October 17, 2023
Fuerzas de seguridad custodian el inicio de una caravana en apoyo al candidato presidencial ecuatoriano Daniel Noboa, del Partido Acción Democrática Nacional, en Guayaquil el 6 de octubre de 2023
Paola LOPEZ y Santiago PIEDRA SILVA
Ecuador’s president-elect Daniel Noboa, its youngest ever, is bracing for a titanic clash with narco traffickers that have turned the South American country upside down with a spate of horrific violence.
With little political experience, the businessman son of one of Ecuador’s richest men will be confronting gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels, seeking to restore the peace that reigned just a few years ago.
He has plans to install a separate judicial system for the most serious crimes, militarize the borders with Colombia and Peru — the world’s biggest cocaine producers — and jail the most violent offenders on barges offshore.
On Sunday, Noboa garnered 52 percent of ballots cast by voters with security concerns uppermost on their minds, according to opinion polls.
By Tuesday he had already called for the country’s security council to convene to report on the actions being taken to “restore peace to Ecuadoran families,” he said in a social media post.
In the four years to 2022, formerly peaceful Ecuador’s murder rate quadrupled, with at least 460 inmates massacred in prisons since February 2021 — many beheaded or burned alive — in fighting between enemy gangs.
As Ecuador went from being a mere transit stop to a hub for drug trafficking itself, the bloodbath has spilled into the streets with narco criminals dangling headless corpses from city bridges and detonating car bombs outside police stations in a show of force.
Could Noboa’s plans work?
– Prison mayhem –
Perhaps the first sign of things to come were simultaneous massacres in four prisons in February 2021. Since then, more than 460 inmates have died as the carnage has spread, some of the bloodshed transmitted live on social media.
Images of bodies hacked up with machetes or burnt beyond recognition spoke to the lack of control in the country’s overcrowded prisons, which have become trafficking centers.
Widespread graft among over-extended prison guards has allowed inmates to obtain guns and explosives, even drones.
In this context, Noboa’s proposal to seclude prisoners offshore under the supervision of “highly corruptible” guards, is risky, Renato Rivera, coordinator for the Ecuadoran Organized Crime Observatory, told AFP.
If individual guards are bought by organized crime and left to operate in isolation, “the (proposed) solution could become an additional problem,” he said.
There are also fears for human rights abuses as well as the high cost of building floating prisons.
It is a solution that would “take a lot of time” to execute, said Rivera, for a president elected to just 16 months in office.
Noboa will be finishing the term of outgoing leader Guillermo Lasso, who called snap elections to avoid possible impeachment.
– Security purge –
“A very aggressive, rapid and effective purge of the security forces, obviously infiltrated by organized crime, is indispensable” for Noboa to have any success, said David Chavez, a political analyst at the Central University of Ecuador.
“Without doing this it will be impossible to regain control of the prisons, I think that is a critical issue, the priority,” he told AFP.
Widespread corruption that spreads far beyond prisons to government and the private sector, was another of voters’ major concerns.
Transparency International gave the country a score of 36 out of 100 on its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2022, lower than the 43 average for the Americas.
In 2021 and 2022, concerned by high levels of graft tied to organized crime, the United States barred several senior police officers, judges and judicial employees from travel to its shores.
Strengthening the organs of state to hit back at organized crime and its ever-expanding web of graft was essential to addressing the security problem, said Chavez.
However, “Noboa and his vice president have made it very clear that their project is to continue… dismantling the state, decreasing its size,” he added.
– Intelligence overhaul –
The country’s intelligence services have been severely weakened in recent years.
Viewed as a tool of political espionage under socialist ex-president Rafael Correa — in office for 10 years until 2017 — the intelligence agencies were enfeebled by subsequent rightwing governments.
It is “a totally weakened intelligence system that is not preventing (crime), not generating alerts,” said Rivera.
Experts estimate that Ecuador could close this year with the record of 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, up from 33 per 100,000 today.
This is more than Mexico or Colombia, countries with “a much longer history of crime,” said Rivera.
The United States said Tuesday it would fund a program in Ecuador offering rewards for information that helps track down members of organized crime groups.
AFP
October 17, 2023
Fuerzas de seguridad custodian el inicio de una caravana en apoyo al candidato presidencial ecuatoriano Daniel Noboa, del Partido Acción Democrática Nacional, en Guayaquil el 6 de octubre de 2023
- Copyright AFP/File MARCOS PIN
Paola LOPEZ y Santiago PIEDRA SILVA
Ecuador’s president-elect Daniel Noboa, its youngest ever, is bracing for a titanic clash with narco traffickers that have turned the South American country upside down with a spate of horrific violence.
With little political experience, the businessman son of one of Ecuador’s richest men will be confronting gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels, seeking to restore the peace that reigned just a few years ago.
He has plans to install a separate judicial system for the most serious crimes, militarize the borders with Colombia and Peru — the world’s biggest cocaine producers — and jail the most violent offenders on barges offshore.
On Sunday, Noboa garnered 52 percent of ballots cast by voters with security concerns uppermost on their minds, according to opinion polls.
By Tuesday he had already called for the country’s security council to convene to report on the actions being taken to “restore peace to Ecuadoran families,” he said in a social media post.
In the four years to 2022, formerly peaceful Ecuador’s murder rate quadrupled, with at least 460 inmates massacred in prisons since February 2021 — many beheaded or burned alive — in fighting between enemy gangs.
As Ecuador went from being a mere transit stop to a hub for drug trafficking itself, the bloodbath has spilled into the streets with narco criminals dangling headless corpses from city bridges and detonating car bombs outside police stations in a show of force.
Could Noboa’s plans work?
– Prison mayhem –
Perhaps the first sign of things to come were simultaneous massacres in four prisons in February 2021. Since then, more than 460 inmates have died as the carnage has spread, some of the bloodshed transmitted live on social media.
Images of bodies hacked up with machetes or burnt beyond recognition spoke to the lack of control in the country’s overcrowded prisons, which have become trafficking centers.
Widespread graft among over-extended prison guards has allowed inmates to obtain guns and explosives, even drones.
In this context, Noboa’s proposal to seclude prisoners offshore under the supervision of “highly corruptible” guards, is risky, Renato Rivera, coordinator for the Ecuadoran Organized Crime Observatory, told AFP.
If individual guards are bought by organized crime and left to operate in isolation, “the (proposed) solution could become an additional problem,” he said.
There are also fears for human rights abuses as well as the high cost of building floating prisons.
It is a solution that would “take a lot of time” to execute, said Rivera, for a president elected to just 16 months in office.
Noboa will be finishing the term of outgoing leader Guillermo Lasso, who called snap elections to avoid possible impeachment.
– Security purge –
“A very aggressive, rapid and effective purge of the security forces, obviously infiltrated by organized crime, is indispensable” for Noboa to have any success, said David Chavez, a political analyst at the Central University of Ecuador.
“Without doing this it will be impossible to regain control of the prisons, I think that is a critical issue, the priority,” he told AFP.
Widespread corruption that spreads far beyond prisons to government and the private sector, was another of voters’ major concerns.
Transparency International gave the country a score of 36 out of 100 on its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2022, lower than the 43 average for the Americas.
In 2021 and 2022, concerned by high levels of graft tied to organized crime, the United States barred several senior police officers, judges and judicial employees from travel to its shores.
Strengthening the organs of state to hit back at organized crime and its ever-expanding web of graft was essential to addressing the security problem, said Chavez.
However, “Noboa and his vice president have made it very clear that their project is to continue… dismantling the state, decreasing its size,” he added.
– Intelligence overhaul –
The country’s intelligence services have been severely weakened in recent years.
Viewed as a tool of political espionage under socialist ex-president Rafael Correa — in office for 10 years until 2017 — the intelligence agencies were enfeebled by subsequent rightwing governments.
It is “a totally weakened intelligence system that is not preventing (crime), not generating alerts,” said Rivera.
Experts estimate that Ecuador could close this year with the record of 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, up from 33 per 100,000 today.
This is more than Mexico or Colombia, countries with “a much longer history of crime,” said Rivera.
The United States said Tuesday it would fund a program in Ecuador offering rewards for information that helps track down members of organized crime groups.
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