• Commotion Colombia continues to search for the 4 children lost in the jungle
  • Dissidence Commander Ernesto, of the FARC-EP: "We will apply the death penalty to corrupt, rapists and murderers"

While the Colombian military scrutinizes inch by inch the jungle of Caquetá to find Lesly Mucutuy, 13, and her three younger brothers who would have survived the plane crash of May 1, the FARC-Ep murdered four minors in a neighboring region.

The ONIC (National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon) reported that on May 17, the Carolina Ramirez Front of that guerrilla group riddled them with bullets. The deceased belonged to the Murui ethnic group and had managed to escape after being forcibly recruited. As soon as they noticed their absence, the FARC-EP began a hunt to find them and kill them. Unfortunately for the teenagers, they were found in the indigenous community of El Estrecho, Alto Predio Putumayo reservation, a jungle region bordering Caquetá.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, which has dressed the FARC-EP as a political organization, although it is only a criminal gang dedicated to drug trafficking, illegal mining and extortion, repudiated the massacre in a statement.

"We emphatically reject this criminal policy ... They are mechanisms of extermination of the original peoples and, therefore, are inexcusable facts," reads the statement. But in the final paragraph he leaves the door open to continue dialogue with the FARC-EP: "This crime goes against humanity in Putumayo. It is a call for Carolina Ramírez to act in coherence with the requirements of IHL."

Gustavo Petro, for his part, wrote on Twitter that "it is a heinous crime, a slap in the face to peace that violates the foundations of International Humanitarian Law. I have called an extraordinary security meeting to announce measures against these events."

Killing children who defect from guerrillas has been a common practice in the old and renewed FARC. Some of the commanders responsible for executing it in the past, such as Pablo Catatumbo or Carlos Antonio Lozada, occupy seats in the Senate for the second time, under the peace agreement signed with the Government of Juan Manuel Santos. And they have been neither tried nor convicted for this crime against humanity.

It should also be remembered that the current administration of Gustavo Petro agreed to a cessation of hostilities with the renewed FARC-Ep of alias Iván Mordisco and asked the Attorney General's Office to withdraw the arrest warrants against that subject and other leaders in order to negotiate with them a peace process.

This month to announce the start of the talks, Iván Mordisco held a public event in the department of Caquetá, with children and adults waving white flags. Most of the attendees were forced to attend and had to listen to the speech given by the top guerrilla leader as if he were a political leader. The opposition Democratic Center criticized the government's permission to justify criminality.

This newspaper, which has collected reports of recruitment of children and adolescents in tours of areas dominated by the FARC-EP, has also seen large posters of that organization encouraging young people to enlist.

Child survivors

As for the four brothers of the Huitoto ethnic group who could still be alive after the crash of a small plane in which their mother, the pilot and another adult lost their lives, they still do not appear. The intense search for the jungle led by the Army's Special Forces, experts in spending months in the jungle in their work of pursuing guerrillas, has not yet yielded results.

Different sources say that it is almost impossible for four small children, the youngest of eleven months, to have spent weeks wandering through a virgin forest, crossed by countless streams, some wide and with strong currents, and have moved so far away that they do not find you.

The children's grandparents think they are guided by goblins that exist in the depths of the crank. Others say that an armed group was able to hear the noise of the accident, go to the scene and take away the brothers.

In any case, the inexplicable would be the reason why those who have them, if so, have not delivered them.

  • FARC
  • Juan Manuel Santos
  • Gustavo Petro

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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