Stella Castillo walked into the town registrar's office to declare her candidacy in the mayoral election -- instantly making herself a target for death at the hands of rebels bent on disrupting the next weekend's elections.
Castillo was well aware of the danger: Hit men shot and killed her husband, the previous candidate for mayor, before her eyes two weeks ago.
"At first I thought: `What's the point of trying to change things if it's just to end up like my husband?'" Castillo said in an interview.
"But my daughter told me not to give in, that we should try to make his dreams come true," the 34-year-old law student said at her home in a coastal city that has been flooded with families fleeing decades of guerrilla warfare.
A deluge of death threats, killings and kidnappings have dogged campaigns for the Oct. 25 municipal and state elections throughout Colombia. The rebels have succeeded in sowing terror and have undercut the government's efforts to strengthen democracy.
Leftist guerrillas, battered by an army onslaught that is driving them deeper into the jungles, have threatened to kill every contender who refuses to either strike a deal with them or quit, part of their attempt to sever the state's reach into lawless areas.
But if politicians do seek an accord, or even show sympathy toward the rebels, they risk being killed by right-wing death squads. In the midst of both sides lurk organized crime groups with their own interests who take advantage of the chaos and fear.
At least 30 candidates have been assassinated and a dozen kidnapped, according to the Defense Ministry. One in every five has received a death threat. So far, 181 contenders have withdrawn.
Colombia's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is blamed for most of the attacks. Others are attributed to rightist paramilitaries battling the guerrillas. Common criminals are suspects in a handful of cases.
Police in Soledad arrested two of the four hired gunmen who fired six rounds at Castillo's husband, Jose, as he sipped coffee on his porch on the morning of Sept. 30.
Authorities say they have no doubt the killing was politically motivated but have yet to identify who paid the hit men.
"I don't even want to know who was behind it," said his wife, speaking in a barely audible voice and struggling to hold back tears. "I don't want to fill my heart with feelings of revenge."
Over the spot where her husband died, Castillo has hung a banner summing up her feelings: "You can cut the flowers but never prevent the coming of spring."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema