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Weekly Report - 09 December 2021 (WR-21-49)

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COLOMBIA: Dissident Farc chief suspected murdered by own men

The commander of Colombia’s national police, General Jorge Luis Vargas, said on 7 December that it is “very likely” that a leading commander in the dissident ‘Segunda Marquetalia’ unit of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) had been murdered in Venezuela. Vargas lent credence to media reports that Hernán Darío Velásquez (‘El Paisa’) had been killed by the guerrillas under his command. Media reports are now claiming that another of the Segunda Marquetalia’s leaders, Henry Castellanos Garzón (‘Romaña’), was killed alongside El Paisa. President Iván Duque suggested that these reports are accurate, but he did not directly mention Romaña.

Press reports of El Paisa’s death first broke on 5 December, citing unnamed intelligence officials who said that the commander had been killed in the Venezuelan border state of Apure. According to the most detailed of these reports, which was published in El Tiempo, El Paisa was murdered by his own guerrilla unit in an ambush that targeted the vehicle in which he was travelling.

  • Intelligence source

The intelligence source cited by the Colombian national daily El Tiempo maintained that El Paisa was killed as a result of his increasingly authoritarian and erratic nature, which included repeatedly threatening to kill the guerrillas fighting under his command.

General Vargas’ statement on 7 December all but confirmed the reports, with the police commander saying that there is a “very, very, very high probability that he is dead due to criminal disputes inside the organisation”. Vargas did not comment on media reports that had emerged the same day claiming that Romaña had been killed alongside El Paisa. President Duque did allude to those claims, albeit without confirming their veracity, saying that “the fall of these symbols of terrorism, evil, and drug trafficking…is good news and demonstrates that criminals have no hiding place”.

If true, the murder of El Paisa and Romaña, both former members of the Farc’s Estado Mayor Central, may herald a splintering of Segunda Marquetalia, which has now been reduced to just one high-profile leader from the Farc’s old guard – Luciano Marín Arango (‘Iván Márquez’) – following the killing of Seuxis Paucias Hernández (‘Jesús Santrich’) in May [WR-21-20]. Since its formation in 2019, Segunda Marquetalia has developed a strong cross-border presence in Colombia’s northern department of Arauca and the neighbouring Venezuelan state of Apure.

Should the guerrilla unit splinter into separate factions, it could further complicate the security situation in these volatile regions, pitting former allies against each other over control of drug trafficking routes. Internecine conflict within Segunda Marquetalia could also strengthen the hand of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla group, which also maintains a strong presence on both sides of the Colombia-Venezuela border.           

Controversial anti-corruption bill advances

Colombia’s chamber of deputies approved a controversial anti-corruption bill on 7 December, which press associations warn would expose journalists to defamation charges for exposing corruption. The bill would mandate sentences of between 60 and 120 months in prison for “false accusations against public servants or their family”. There is currently no mention of public servants in the defamation laws in Colombia’s penal code, which mandates prison sentences of between 16 and 72 months.

Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (FLIP), a press freedom NGO, has warned that the bill “violates basic guarantees of freedom of expression by seeking to impose disproportionate penalties” on journalists, and it argues that the “extraordinary legal protections for public servants” will damage transparency and the fight against corruption. The bill now passes to the senate.

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