The wars for Colombia's cocaine containers Part 1: Buenaventura
by Adriaan Alsema September 2, 2021
Homicides in Buenaventura have surged amid the latest turf war over who controls the Pacific port city with one of Colombia’s largest shipping container terminals.
Buenaventura’s authorities reportedly counted 123 homicides in the port city that processes approximately 40% of Colombia’s imports and exports so far this year.
Violence not seen in more than a decade
How many bodies of people who disappeared have been dumped in the mangroves and rivers that surround Buenaventura is unknown.
The most recent numbers are from April when authorities said that 13 people had been reported missing in the first three months of this year.
More than 100 people were driven out of their homes in the past week alone as the illegal armed groups are subjecting Buenaventura to levels of violence the locals haven’t seen in more than a decade.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/the-wars-for-colombias-cocaine-containers-part-1-buenaventura/
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Sibylla Brodzinsky in Buenaventura
Sun 12 Oct 2014 12.07 EDT
So many different criminal groups have terrorised the slums of Colombia’s main Pacific port that residents rarely bother to learn the name of the latest clan in control. They simply call the warring gangs los malos or the bad guys.
The rival factions fight for control of some of the poorest neighbourhoods of Buenaventura, a city of 290,000 people that serves as the country’s gateway to the Pacific and handles about half of the country’s cargo. Many of the barrios are major routes for drug trafficking. They also happen to overlap with areas where the government and private investors are planning big infrastructure projects.
The criminals recruit children, extort businesses, force people from their homes and dismember live victims, scattering their remains in the bay or surrounding jungle. Dozens of wooden huts balanced precariously on stilts over the bay have been abandoned by terrorised citizens and taken over by the gangs for use as casas de pique, or chop houses, where they torture and murder their victims.
The chop houses are the most gruesome consequence of a deeply flawed attempt to dismantle rightwing militias, which originally emerged to combat leftwing guerrillas in collusion with state security forces and drug traffickers. These paramilitary groups were gradually demobilised from 2003, but many former fighters neither went to jail nor joined the reintegration programmes, choosingto by the gun as part of new criminal groups.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/12/colombia-violence-torture-gangs-buenaventura
