Deadly violence resurges in Colombia's "laboratory for peace"

[Judi Lynn]

Ceasefire in port city Buenaventura threatened by gangs
by Adriaan Alsema July 5, 2023

Deadly violence in Buenaventura has been escalating amid failures to implement a promised peace process in Colombia’s main port city on the Pacific coast.

The registered surge in homicides threatens a truce that had been upheld by Buenaventura’s largest gangs, “Los Shotas” and “Los Espartanos,” since September last year.

. . .

Avila said on Twitter that political campaigning ahead of October’s local elections is also fueling violence.

Buenaventura historically has suffered persistent and extreme violence because of its port, which is one of the main export hubs for cocaine trafficking.

Extreme poverty among the city’s 400,000 inhabitants and political corruption have further worsened the humanitarian situation in the port city.

https://colombiareports.com/deadly-violence-resurges-in-colombias-laboratory-for-peace/

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Colombia drug gangs cut up people alive in ‘chop-up houses' – HRW

by Anastasia Moloney | @anastasiabogota | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Friday, 21 March 2014 13:06 GMT

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - At night along the river banks of the Colombian port city of Buenaventura, residents say they can hear people scream and plea for mercy as they are cut up with chainsaws. Gang members have been seen emerging from so-called “chop-up houses”, nestled in warrens of wooden shacks on stilts, carrying plastic bags with dismembered body parts that are thrown into the sea.

Fishermen say they have come across body parts floating in the waters of Colombia’s main port on the Pacific coast, an international shipping hub.

Buenaventura, home to 370,000 people, is a key smuggling point for cocaine being transported by sea and overland through Central America and Mexico en route to the United States, making it a hotspot for drug traffickers and criminal gangs and one of Colombia’s most violent cities.

The gangs fight over control of Buenaventura’s waterfront areas where the cocaine is stored and shipped from. This often puts communities in the middle of drug turf wars.

“The chop-up houses do exist even though the government finds it hard to accept that they do,” said a nun and women’s rights leader, who only gave her name as Zoila.
“Women in our support group have heard the screams at night. They fear that their sons, daughters and husbands who’ve disappeared have been dismembered. People are too afraid to act,” Zoila, who until recently lived in Buenaventura, told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Over the past 18 months, the mutilated body parts of at least a dozen people have been found washed up along Buenaventura’s shores, according to Colombian human rights groups, the city’s bishop, Hector Epalza, and testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In an HRW report released on Thursday, the rights group said that when they visited Buenaventura in November 2013, they found a city that was wracked by ‘terror in no-man’s land’ and at the mercy of criminal gangs linked to former right-wing paramilitaries, who demobilised as part of a controversial peace process from 2003 onwards but then returned to crime.

More:
https://news.trust.org/item/20140321130623-3r9w4