The Colombian army says more than 50 soldiers have been seized by civilians in a southwest mountainous area.
A platoon of soldiers was the first to be seized during an operation in El Tambo, a municipality that is part of an area known as the Micay Canyon, a key zone for cocaine production and one of the most tense in the country’s ongoing security crisis. The next day, another group of soldiers was surrounded by at least 200 residents as they headed towards the town of El Plateado, in the same region.
The Colombian army has maintained that the civilians in the region receive orders from the Central General Staff (EMC), the main dissident group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that refused to be part of a peace deal with the government in 2016.
President Gustavo Petro, who has pledged to bring peace to the country, said on social media that freeing the soldiers “is imperative”. But his government has struggled to contain violence in urban and rural areas as several rebel groups try to take over territory abandoned by the FARC after the peace deal. This has made many Colombians fearful of a return to the bloody violence of the 1980s and 90s, when cartel attacks and political assassinations were frequent.
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