8 Killed in Raid on Cattle Town in Colombia
Suspected members of a right-wing death squad shot eight people to death in the northern Colombian cattle town of Valledupar, police sources said Sunday.
Colombia’s army also killed two guerrillas of the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, or ELN, in separate clashes in different parts of the country, the army said.
A group of about 40 men in camouflage gear and carrying assault rifles drove to a house on the outskirts of Valledupar, a provincial capital about 400 miles north of Bogota, the national capital, at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday, local police said.
The men, suspected of being right-wing paramilitaries hunting down sympathizers of leftist guerrillas, killed three men, including one who was only 17. They paused to throw a grenade into a nearby house, then drove to another neighborhood, where they killed four men and a woman.
Right-wing paramilitaries have been responsible for many of the 35,000 civilian deaths in the past 10 years of Colombia’s four-decade-long conflict.
The latest bloodletting came as the government of President Andres Pastrana is close to beginning peace talks with the ELN but is struggling to keep talks going with the country’s largest leftist rebel movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Pastrana’s government says it sees the paramilitaries as just as much of a problem as the leftist rebels.
The FARC walked out of peace talks in November, calling for the government to do more against the paramilitaries.
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