Attacks to villages The destruction of towns in Colombia by the parties to the armed conflict has become a practice in the internal war; a practice that further aggravates an already violent situation, on top of the killing of civilians outside combat and massacres. This method of warfare constitutes a threat against the life and integrity of persons, both civilians and members of the armed forces and the police, places national and local institutions in jeopardy, destroys the social fabric of communities and causes displacement. It causes serious damage to the economy of the inhabitants, and of the state. A principal military aim of a large number of raids on towns has been to attack the police who protect them, using indiscriminate weapons. Several types of breaches of International Humanitarian Law are committed in these raids on towns, including threatens, attents, crimes, injuries against life and personal integrity of persons at risk, acts of terrorism, barbaric acts, pillage, hostage-taking, the use of prohibited device, such as gas cylinders, indiscriminate attacks against property and persons, and so on. Processed by the Observatory on Human Rigths of the Vice President´s Office Sources: Army Press Agency Newsletter (Data from 1999 to mid-August 2000) CINEP- Justice and Peace Databank; Noche y Niebla Journal. (Data from July 1996 to March 2000) Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, Office of the President of Colombia 1996-2000). Notes Attacks on towns, as defined by CINEP and by the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, refer to cases in which responsibility falls on guerrilla groups. Self-defense group actions are put into separate categories. * Press chronology. All the illegal armed parties, including the FARC, the ELN, the EPL and self-defense groups, have made recurrent incursions into Colombian towns in the past two years, as the maps and tables show. According to information from the military forces —the main source on this problem—147 towns came under attack between January 1999 and July 2000, that is, almost 10 per cent of all of the country’s municipalities. The FARC have carried out the great majority of attacks on towns (71 per cent), a result of the intensification of their strikes in the first half of this year. Self-defense groups are responsible for 11 per cent of all these armed attacks. March 2000 was the month with the largest number of assaults against towns, most of them launched by the FARC. Some incursions are jointly made by two or more subversive groups. In the eighteen months we have studied, there are cases of towns repeatedly attacked by various armed parties —Betulia and Acandí by AUC and FARC; San Carlos and Tibú by ELN and AUC; Puerto Rondón and Samaniego by FARC and ELN—. The departments worst affected by raids on towns are Cauca, Nariño and Antioquia. Cauca is the department that has suffered most from raids carried out by armed parties: almost all of the department’s municipalities have come under attack.

Source: Army Press Agency
Georeferencing: Observatory on Human Rigths of the Vice President´s Office.