BOGOTÁ (AP) – More than 23,000 indigenous people in Colombia and 5,500 in Ecuador are at risk in the border area due to the actions of armed groups and criminal gangs, mediators from the two countries warned on Tuesday in the first binational alert issued .
The indigenous Awá people are exposed to attacks on life, displacement, confinement and children, to be victims of forced recruitment. Colombian ombudsman Carlos Camargo has warned that up to eight minors are recruited every month in the border towns of Tallambí, Colombia, and Chical, Ecuador.
The report released by state human rights defenders explains that the Awá are settled in a cross-border area mostly made up of jungle and with little or no state presence, which is strategic for armed groups . They take advantage of this for their cocaine marketing circuits to the Pacific Ocean, Ecuador or Central America, as well as for illicit crops and arms trafficking.
Despite the fact that the Colombian state signed a peace agreement in 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which was the oldest guerrilla in Latin America, there has been a reconfiguration of various illegal armed groups, which include splinter factions of the FARC, which occupied the territories previously controlled by the guerrillas.
The Ombudsman’s alert warns that the FARC dissident “Comando Coordinador de Occidente” operates in the territories of the Awá, on the one hand, and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas in alliance with another FARC dissident calling itself “Second Marquetalia”.
The Ecuadorian ombudsman’s office has learned that, despite the fact that the armed groups are on the Colombian side of the border, “there is interference on their part in Ecuadorian territory, which is subject to policies such as the extortion, intimidation, among others.” ”, indicates the document.
From August 2022 to date, 14 Awá indigenous people have been murdered and 10,000 people have been kidnapped or displaced, according to data obtained by mediators from the Awá People’s Indigenous Unit Human Rights Observatory ( Unipa).
The mediators of the two countries agreed in April 2022 to carry out monitoring activities of risk scenarios in the border area in order to promote measures to prevent human rights violations.