A child was the only survivor of the Mercaderes massacre, Cauca: seven of his relatives were murdered in 2020

After six months, the municipality of Mercaderes, Cauca, was in mourning again. On the night of October 30, a group of men on motorcycles and armed with rifles moved towards a house located in the rural area to assassinate those who lived there. Two women and a man died and, according to unofficial information, only one child was saved.

Everything indicates that the massacre would be related to another act of violence perpetrated in the same municipality, in the same house, on April 29, where an armed group murdered four members of the same family, one of them, Álvaro Narváez Daza , President of the Community Action Board of the El Vado village, in the Mojarras district. In total there are seven members of a family to whom the municipality has mourned.

In the first massacre, the perpetrators, in addition to murdering Álvaro Narváez, killed his wife, son and granddaughter, who was 15 years old. In the second, they ended the lives of his sister, daughter and son-in-law.

According to the Governor of Cauca, Elías Larrahondo, due to the first massacre, which has already been clarified, “five criminals were captured.” Now, what is sought to clarify is the connection between both acts of violence.

What the director of the National Police, General Óscar Atehortúa, affirmed at that time is that the murder would have occurred in retaliation by one of those captured against the communal leader Álvaro Narváez, for publicly denouncing him and asking the citizens not to fall into his acts of extortion, “For what they attacked with his life and that of his family.”

The Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, which has followed up on the massacres perpetrated in the country, has explained to Infobae that these acts of violence have intensified in populations with processes of consolidated Afro, indigenous and peasant organizations, where criminal structures on the fringes of the law fight for the legitimacy of its inhabitants.

This explains why Cauca, according to the Institute of Studies for the Development of Peace (Indepaz), is the second department with the most massacres in the country (10), only after Antioquia (15), where less than 15 days ago they murdered Jhon Jairo Guzmán, vice president of the El Tesorito Community Action Board, in the municipality of Tarazá, for acting like Álvaro Narváez: in favor of the population.

This year alone, Indepaz has documented 70 massacres, in which 278 people have been killed, doubling the figures from last year, when 35 killings were recorded, which cost 113 lives, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

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