Army helecopters fire on the village of Filipinas, Arauca

26.05.08

By Alessandro Bonafede
IPO

On the afternoon of Sunday, May 11, Colombian Army helicopters strafed the small village of Filipinas – in the municipality of Tame, Arauca department – with machine-gun fire. The military operation caused panic among the civilian population. Seventy-five families fled their homes and slept in the street. Although there had been clashes between the army and guerrillas in the jungles around the village in the previous days, the townspeople claim that when the shooting occurred no military operation was taking place.

The Peasant Farmer Association of Arauca (ACA), an organization that defends human rights in the region, reports that while speaking on an official radio station called “Voice of Cinaruco,” General José Rafael González Villamil, commander of the 18th Brigade, described the village as a “red zone” and a “guerrilla camp.”

The oil-producing Arauca department has been hit with a wave of violence that seems to have no end in sight: this year, 3000 people had to flee their homes. The Joel Sierra Human Rights Organization reports that between March and April there were 16 politically-inspired murders throughout the department. A conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and one sector of the National Liberation Army (ELN) is another cause of the region’s violence.

In the same village, there have been several complaints of arbitrary arrests, mistreatment and threats against the civilian population from the military. On April 13, an unidentified armed group executed two campesinos in the nearby village of Caño Claro: Alexander Herrera Gutiérrez and Landerson Novoa Riso, who was only 17. Although the surrounding area includes the military base at Pueblo Nuevo, the armed group moved around without problems for several hours in a true manhunt. They carried a “blacklist” of local residents. Although several calls were placed to the local base commander, he claimed to know nothing of what was going on just a few minutes away.

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