(Bogotá) The Colombian army will investigate after the broadcast on social networks of images of armed, unidentified soldiers threatening villagers in northern Colombia, an incident that the government described on Wednesday as “extremely severe “.
In these images, repeated endlessly by all the country’s media, one of the soldiers, with his face masked, takes out a pistol and points it at a mother carrying her baby. Another brandished his automatic rifle at a group of villagers, including crying and frightened children clinging to their parents.
“Do you think it is right to threaten me with a gun while I have my child in my arms? Identify yourself! “, says the mother with her baby at arm’s length, while around twenty people apostrophize the soldiers wearing no identification badge, dressed in black long-sleeved t-shirts under their cartridge belts and fatigue pants, like guerrillas operating in the country are often dressed in this.
“What happened in Tierralta, in the department of Cordoba, is extremely serious and requires the adoption of drastic decisions,” Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez commented on Wednesday on the X network (formerly Twitter).
“There is no tolerance for behavior that affects not only communities but also the military forces themselves,” he said, implicitly acknowledging that these were members of the armed forces.
In a statement, the army said an “inspection commission” had visited the area to investigate “a possible act of violence against the civilian population.” The incident allegedly involved soldiers “from the Junin battalion, […] of the seventh division,” said the head of the armed forces, General Helder Giraldo.
According to Orlando Triana, a local community leader, contacted by AFP, the soldiers intended to pose as members of the FARC dissidence, a guerrilla group which rejects the peace agreement signed in 2016 with this Marxist group.
“We believe that the security forces will defend the civilian population, but here we are stunned […]we keep a bitter taste” from the incident, he said.
Several armed groups are active in this area known for hosting coca crops: the FARC dissidence, the Guevarist ELN, but especially the drug traffickers and ex-paramilitaries of the Clan del Golfo.
“A return to paramilitarism and land theft would be the security forces’ worst military error. This cannot happen under this government,” left-wing President Gustavo Petro lambasted on X, demanding that “the army present publicly” the conclusions of its investigation.
Countless massacres of civilian populations and other crimes have marked more than half a century of bloody internal conflict in Colombia, including those committed by the army implicated in the so-called “false positive” scandal, with civilians executed. and then presented as fallen guerrillas.