Colombian port city where body parts wash up following screams in the dark

[Judi Lynn]

Colombian port city where body parts wash up following screams in the dark

Despite efforts to demobilise militias in Buenaventura, many ex-fighters still live by the gun in growing bands of torture gangs

Sibylla Brodzinsky in Buenaventura
The Guardian, Sunday 12 October 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, choosing to by the gun as part of new criminal groups.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/12/colombia-violence-torture-gangs-buenaventura

[jwirr]

1. This OP is sad indeed. Evil fighting evil. I don't think that is going to work.