Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos lifted a suspension of air strikes against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) after the Marxist guerrillas were suspected in the killing of 10 soldiers in a pre-dawn attack on Wednesday.
The attack in western Colombia, which also left 20 soldiers wounded, was the deadliest since the start of peace talks more than two years ago, officials said.
“I have ordered the armed forces to end the order suspending bombing raids against FARC camps until further notice,” Santos said. “Let this be clear to the FARC: I’m not going to be pressured ... by vile acts like this to make a decision on a bilateral ceasefire.”
Photo: Reuters
Late last year the FARC declared a unilateral ceasefire in a bid to advance peace talks that have been under way in Havana, Cuba, since November 2012.
Santos has refused to commit to a bilateral ceasefire until there is a comprehensive peace agreement, but had suspended air raids in recognition of the move.
Wednesday’s attack occurred in a remote mountainous area in Cauca Province, a stronghold of the FARC, which has been battling the Bogota government for five decades.
A senior military official said the infantry troops were ambushed as they conducted a patrol.
“They were attacked with explosives, grenades and firearms,” army General Mario Augusto Valencia told reporters.
Cauca Governor Temistocles Ortega earlier told Blu radio the soldiers came under fire in a hamlet known as La Esperanza.
The wounded were evacuated with the help of the Red Cross and emergency personnel, but bad weather and the remote location were hampering the operation, Valencia said.
The attack underscored the difficulty of putting an end to the conflict, now more than a half century old and easily Latin America’s longest.
“We deplore the deaths of the soldiers in Cauca. This is precisely the war that we are trying to end,” Santos said in a Twitter post.
In Havana, a FARC spokesman expressed regret over the bloodletting, but blamed the government’s “incoherence in ordering military operations against a guerrilla force observing a truce.”
“Whether it was an ambush or a counter-ambush, what we have before us is some dead Colombians,” FARC spokesman Pastor Alape said, calling on the government to join the FARC in a ceasefire.
Jorge Restrepo, head of the Bogota-based Conflict Analysis Resource Centre, said the attack was a “serious” blow but would not lead to a breakdown in the peace talks, adding that it might even serve “to accelerate the negotiation of a definitive ceasefire in Havana.”
Public defender for human rights Jorge Armando Otalora, denounced the guerrillas’ “rupture of the unilateral ceasefire,” calling it “an open contradiction with the discourse of the FARC negotiators in Havana.”
The attack also aroused opponents of the peace talks, led by former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, a popular figure in the nation for his hardline campaign against the FARC from 2002 to 2010.
“Santos’ peace is the extermination of the armed forces,” Uribe said in a Twitter post. “Santos, please don’t deceive us any more, don’t justify the assassination of our soldiers with the story about ‘the war that wants to end.’”
Formed in 1964 amid a peasant uprising, the FARC has an estimated 8,000 fighters, deployed in rural areas of Colombia.
More than 200,000 people have died and another 5 million have been uprooted as a result of the conflict.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS