Kolumbien

The Colombian army said nine soldiers were killed and six wounded after a military helicopter went down Tuesday in the country’s southeast during an operation against guerrillas. The Black Hawk helicopter went down with 17 people aboard on a stretch of the Inirida River, in the country’s southeastern Guaviare jungle region. “Unfortunately, we have found the bodies of nine of our personnel,” a military spokesperson said on Twitter. The military did not say if the helicopter crashed or was shot down.

In August 2016, negotiators announced a landmark peace deal billed as bringing an end to the longest-running conflict in the western hemisphere – between Colombian government forces and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group. Four years on, this two-part series explores new government policies, renewed violence and conflict displacement, and other emerging trends against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the exodus of millions of Venezuelans into the region.

The killing of former combatants, human rights defenders and social leaders of communities devastated by decades of conflict, remains the most serious threat to peace in Colombia since the signing of a landmark peace agreement in 2016, the top UN official in the country told the Security Council on Tuesday, meeting in-person at UN Headquarters in New York, for the first time in four months.

Scholars monitoring Colombia’s peace process urged the government of President Ivan Duque to accelerate the country’s peace process that has slowed down under his watch. The Kroc Institute of the US University of Notre Dame has quantified the level of progress of the implementation of a 2016 peace deal with now-demobilized FARC rebels. In their latest report, the researchers concluded that the implementation has slowed down over the past year … .

Despite calls for an extension, Colombia’s ELN rebels end their unilateral ceasefire on Thursday, claiming that military offensives demonstrated President Ivan Duque is not interested in peace or in combating the coronavirus pandemic.

While political actors in Colombia are uniting to confront COVID-19, they must also work together to fight “the epidemic of violence” against civil society leaders, human rights defenders and former combatants, the head of the UN mission in the country said on Tuesday during a Security Council meeting held by videoconference.

Colombia’s ELN rebels on Tuesday rejected the “peace promoters” authorized by President Ivan Duque to explore ways to resume peace talks.