Colombian authorities have managed to free some twenty young people who were being held in the town of Tolima, in Colombia’s southern Pacific region, by the ‘Iván Ríos’ column of the Segunda Marquetalia, one of the main dissidents of the FARC’s defunct guerrilla group.
The Ombudsman, Carlos Camargo, reported that the release of these 18 people was achieved after gaining access «to one of the most remote areas of the rural area of the municipality». The captives fell into the hands of this illegal group after several armed confrontations in the area.
«From the Ombudsman’s Office we will continue to use all our humanitarian channels and our institutional capacity to facilitate the release and safe return of people held by illegal armed groups from the territories», Camargo remarked.
In this sense, Camargo has once again asked these armed groups to show signs of willingness to achieve peace so that they can be taken into account as gestures of good will in subsequent negotiations with the Government.
Last week, the government of Gustavo Petro and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas began the first peace talks in Caracas four years after the last time they sat down to negotiate in Havana.
Although Petro’s so-called ‘total peace’ law only concerns armed groups of a political nature such as the ELN, the government has encouraged FARC dissidents – which are not included in this group – to show signs of rapprochement and to sit down to negotiate the definitive cessation of the internal struggle that has been dragging the Colombian state down for more than half a century.
