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Ten people were murdered over the weekend in the municipality of Betania, located in the coffee sub-region of Antioquia. In this area there have been seven other massacres so far in 2020, but it was sung that violence could increase during the coffee harvest season.
At dawn on Sunday, November 22, seven people were murdered on a coffee farm in the municipality of Betania, in southwestern Antioquia. They were all coffee pickers. Yesterday the death toll rose to ten, as three more victims who had been injured died. This is the seventh massacre to be recorded in this subregion of Antioquia in 2020 and two factors converged that had already been warned by the Ombudsman’s Office in August: first, a boom in micro-trafficking, and, added to this, a growing dispute for control of that business between the criminal groups La Oficina and the Clan del Golfo (or Agc).
Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo traveled to Betania on Sunday night, accompanied by senior military officials and local authorities. There, after a security council, he attributed the massacre to the Gulf Clan and the micro-trafficking, even saying that what happened was proof of how “drug trafficking is the first enemy of Colombians.” However, the portfolio led by Trujillo had already been alerted by the Ombudsman’s Office of the high risk that was coming to the southwest of Antioquia when the coffee harvest arrived, a time when some 80 thousand people arrive from all over the country -and even foreigners- looking to work collecting coffee beans.
Every year, preparing for this time, the local authorities, the Public Force and the Federation of Coffee Growers coordinate what they call the “Harvest Plan”, which this 2020 focused on preventing the collectors who arrived from flooding the southwest of COVID-19 . And, according to Early Warning 044 of the Ombudsman’s Office, which this newspaper was aware of, “simultaneously with the implementation of the ‘Plan Cosecha’, the armed structures organized in Ciudad Bolívar, Salgar, Andes, Betania, Hispania and Jardín They are making efforts to guarantee control of the drug dealing places that are established there, which represent a high value in the finances of the Agc and La Oficina ”.
Gloria Alzate, director of the human rights organization Conciudadania, explained to this newspaper the context in which this massacre took place: “What appears most evident is a territorial dispute for control of micro-trafficking. And it is precisely at this harvest time. It seems that, with the arrival of many collectors from all over the country, they are seen as potential clients of the drugs. So that is the market that the armed actors are competing for ”. This look coincides with what was alerted by the Ombudsman’s Office, which explains that drug stores are usually installed inside the larger farms or on the sidewalks where they are.
These outlets become central, as the group that controls them encompasses the largest number of clients – the larger the farm, the more collectors are hired and the more they may end up consuming – and block the competition of the armed actor with whom they are fighting. Precisely the La Gabriela farm, where the massacre occurred this weekend, is the largest in the municipality of Betania, according to institutional sources. Now, according to the information handled by the Ombudsman’s Office, neither the Office nor the Agc have armed forces in southwest Antioquia, but they do exercise significant control over the population.
According to the entity, they achieve this “from the establishment of pacts with organized criminal groups that are responsible for agency violence, strategic control of the areas and management of the finances of these structures at the local level.” The Office, for example, would be allying itself with the La Cabaña group, which operates in Ciudad Bolívar, and with Sangre Negra, active in Betania and Hispania, although the Agc would also be seeking to take several members of these two combos, as well as another called El Salto, who commits a crime in Salgar. Alliances with these structures allow them to maximize profits and not expose themselves so much to the authorities.
Luis Fernando Quijano, researcher and director of Urban Analysis, explains that in the neighboring municipalities of Betulia and Urrao, also in the southwest, but closer to Chocó than where the recent massacres have occurred, there are armed men from the Agc. While to the east, places like Venecia and La Pintada, have traditionally been dominated by members of La Oficina since the days of the Medellín cartel, as many of them have farms there. Both groups are expanding, with which “there is a dispute over the territory in the southwest that could become a scenario like the one in Bajo Cauca (where Agc and Caparros face off),” says Quijano.
The southwest of Antioquia, adds Alzate, “is a region with a very prosperous economy, there is an institutional presence, access roads, but historically it has experienced complex conflict situations that are made even more difficult because the actors in the territory do not recognize that this happens. ”. That is, there is a tendency to deny war. In this observation, Óscar Yesid Zapata, human rights defender and spokesperson for the Social Guarantee Process in Antioquia, said in dialogue with this newspaper that they have been denouncing this attack for years, but that “there is a direct omission of the alerts and a tendency to make the situation invisible ”.
Minister Trujillo announced from Betania that they will send 90 more soldiers to the area, that they will create a police command for the southwest of Antioquia and that they will coordinate a census of the collectors as part of a plan of attack to “identify and prosecute the Jíbaros that infiltrate the coffee farms ”. However, to the sources who know the goings-on in the region, it sounds like more of the same formula that has not worked. “This is not the way to solve the social control made by paramilitary groups,” says Zapata. “That should be just one element of a more comprehensive solution that allows for security in the territory,” explains Alzate.
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