A mayor and five people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed on Friday night in two separate attacks in southwestern Colombia, where coca plantations are rampant, authorities said.
Elmer Abonia Rodriguez, mayor of the city of Guachené in the Cauca department, was shot dead on the night of Friday to Saturday, the public prosecutor's office said on the “To determine the causes of the murder.”
A few hours earlier, according to local authorities, five people, including a 15-year-old girl, were also killed in the Nasa indigenous community in the Colombian municipality of Santander de Quilichao, about twenty kilometers from Gauchené.
At around 4 a.m. (9 a.m. GMT), gunmen stormed into the home of teacher Jhon Freiman Ramos and shot his entire family.
In addition to the teacher, his wife Yisel Menza and a minor daughter, Jelen Ramos, were also killed, the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca said in a bulletin.
Shortly afterwards, two men were killed in a neighboring house on the same indigenous reserve.
“The situation is very delicate for us. In this region, over the last four years, we have already faced situations in which the lives of indigenous community leaders, teachers and social workers in this sector have been threatened. We demand that the crimes be solved,” Lucy Amparo Guzmán, mayor of Santander de Quilichao, told Blu Radio.
Dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who rejected the historic 2016 peace agreement, operate in the region.
According to the NGO Indepaz, massacres – defined by the United Nations as the killing of three or more defenseless people in the same place – have claimed 300 lives so far in 2023, including 93 cases.
Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first leftist president, announced a bilateral ceasefire with the country's five main armed groups on December 31, but suspended the agreement with the EMC – the central headquarters, a FARC splinter – in May, when rebels four young indigenous people killed people who resisted their recruitment.
The EMC is made up of rebels who refused to sign the historic 2016 peace agreement between the government and Marxist guerrillas.
President Petro is trying to end six decades of armed conflict by conducting peace negotiations with all illegal armed groups: the FARC dissidents, the Guerrilla guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN), but also paramilitaries and several criminal groups.