Colombian kidnap & murder rates sharply down
Colombians have been celebrating a spate of encouraging statistics on the rollback of crime: kidnapping for ransom has fallen sharply over the past year, Bogotá has rejoined the trend of other major cities in reducing its murder rate to a 21-year low, and manual eradication of coca plantations in the Macarena park has more than met its target in spite of the resistance put up by the Farc guerrillas.
In the first six months of the year the authorities recorded 122 cases of kidnapping for ransom, a fall of 40% from the comparable period of last year. The Farc guerrillas, which last year accounted for 81 such kidnappings (40% of the total), this year were responsible for only 30 (25%). Kidnappings carried out at roadblocks set up by armed groups in highways fell by 75%, from 20 in January-June 2005 to only 5 in the first half of 2006.
This year two northern departments on the border with Venezuela — La Guajira and Arauca — recorded no kidnappings at all. The departments with the highest numbers of reported kidnapping cases were Nariño (on the border with Ecuador), Valle de Cauca (in the southwest) and Antioquia (northwest).
In January-June this year Bogotá was able to reverse the trend of 2005, when the number of murders increased by 5.5% to the equivalent of 23 per 100,000 inhabitants. This year the rate has fallen to 18 per 100,000, just over half the national average (34) and well below those of the cities heading the murder league: Cali (56), Medellín (31) and Barranquilla (25).
Also in the first half of the year, the risk-fraught campaign to eradicate manually the coca plantations established in the La Macarena nature reserve reported that it had achieved 55% of its target, uprooting slightly more than 2,700 hectares of the 4,560ha estimated to have been planted with coca by the end of 2005. The Farc guerrillas had gambled on the government's unwillingness to defy public opinion by resorting to eradication by fumigation with glysophate in one of the country's environmental showpieces.
The government chose to mount a manual eradication drive, conducted mainly by some 210 civilian peasants under police and army protection. Codenamed Operación Colombia Verde (Operation Green Colombia), it was launched in mid-January. The security forces had to overcome a series of guerrilla ambushes, clear away mines and booby-trapped bridges and houses, before the drive could pick up speed. They have deactivated and removed about 300 explosive devices. Apart from clearing the plantations, the drive located 21 camps with infrastructure for the processing of coca leaf, and destroyed 65 labs and their stores of chemicals.
The presidential agency for social action, which runs the eradication programme, says the manual eradication campaign in La Macarena has 'notoriously' affected finances of the Farc's eastern 'bloc'.