▲ In Bogotá, amputee soldiers salute during their participation in Independence Day.Photo Ap

Jorge Enrique Botero

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, July 21, 2024, p. 27

Bogotá. Two years and four months after raiding a remote village in the Putumayo department in southern Colombia, 24 soldiers were charged the day before yesterday with the murder of 11 civilians who were holding a bazaar to collect funds for social projects in their region.

According to the Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría), they camouflaged themselves with black suits to perpetuate the massacre that lasted two hellish hours, during which they fired more than 1,600 shots at the residents of the hamlet known as Alto Remanso. A statement issued by the Attorney General’s Office details that, after observing the social activity taking place from a distance, the soldiers opened fire indiscriminately against the small village, affecting 13 houses, the communal hut, the sports center and the small port on the river.

The uniformed officers, members of the 3rd Anti-Drug Battalion, wanted to present the events as combat against irregular forces of the so-called Border Commands, but the evidence and testimonies of the survivors showed that in total, 24 officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers had used their weapons, including grenades and mortars, knowing that they would attack unarmed civilians.

The attack, widely reported at the time by most local media, killed an indigenous governor, the president of the Alto Remanso community action board, a minor and eight other people, peasants and indigenous people from this historically excluded region and the scene of continuous episodes of violence, derived from illegal economies and the presence of four armed structures also outside the law.

According to local analysts, the prosecution’s indictment of the military is a clear sign of the shift that the agency has taken in terms of human rights since Luz Adriana Camargo took office as Attorney General on March 22.

Although the statement was widely disseminated in the morning, human rights activists and agricultural leaders drew attention to the fact that, until late in the afternoon, no media outlet had published the news about the indictment of the military elements for the massacre.

Petro is booed

Meanwhile, Colombian President Gustavo Petro inaugurated the third session of Congress on Saturday, during which a good part of the reforms that were left pending in the first two years of activity will be processed.

In his speech, he apologized for recent corruption incidents involving senior officials and accepted political responsibility for having appointed them.

In the morning, the head of state presided over the military parades commemorating the national Independence Day, a ceremony in which he was booed by part of the public, in protest at his two-hour delay.