By Aura Isabel Olano
Cauca is perhaps the department of Colombia that has suffered the most from violence in all its forms, caused by the guerrilla, by groups of indigenous people who have been subduing the population for years and taking over this territory. It is no longer known which individuals belong to the ELN and the Farc; which are drug dealers and which are common criminals.
In the last year, despite the decreed “Total Peace”, violence has intensified, killing policemen, confining and displacing families, attacking towns with explosives, invading farms and setting them on fire, threatening owners and workers, without the regional and national authorities taking serious measures, they settle for the already discredited “security advice”, of which there are no known strategies and much less results.
Not to go far, just so far this August, criminals have done their thing in this department. Among the insane incursions have been recorded: an attack with explosives in Guachené, where two policemen were injured; In Morales, the so-called “dissidents” of the FARC, (which in Cauca did not accept the peace process in Havana), murdered three police officers, one of them survived, but badly wounded. The four were passing a checkpoint and were miserably attacked with heavy weapons. El Plateado, a village in Argelia, is once again the victim of terrorist attacks, its inhabitants are under siege.
On the night of August 24, at about seven o’clock, artifacts were thrown explosives against the base of the Pichincha Battalion, located near the San Bernabé neighborhood of the municipality of Santander de Quilichao, that leads to Popayán, a sector of high vehicular traffic, drivers and passengers suffered moments of panic.
It seems that this delicate situation does not matter to many people from Cauca, who look the other way, yet they act as politicians, much less their authorities, Governor Larrahondo’s spokesperson is nil, neither is the national government, his Minister of the Interior, the Payané Luis Fernando Velasco, who is unfazed by what is happening in various towns in this tormented department, which has spent decades in the midst of bullets, extortion, kidnapping, invasion of rural private property, corruption , of politicking, of impunity.
Since Cauca is one of the regions that supported Gustavo Petro to become President of Colombia, it is striking that, in the face of all this violence, he has not taken charge of such a serious problem, being the head of State and Government , the supreme administrative authority of Colombia and supreme commander of the Public Force, who is even heard to reproach those who do so much harm to Cauca, a department that he knows very well, that he toured every inch of it when he was part of the M-19, whose “sanctuary” was this region, where the first peace agreement was signed between that guerrilla and the State in 1990, precisely in Caloto, a town where violence has not yet stopped.
All these circumstances should move the fibers of who went from facing the State, to being its supreme boss.
That the very serious situation of Cauca does not become a mere landscape, defending itself only with communications to public opinion, by weak local unions.