Colombia: Two New Massacres Not Even 24 Hours Apart

The municipal authorities of Algeciras, in the department of Huila in southern Colombia, confirmed Wednesday that a massacre occurred on a farm in the region on Tuesday night when unknown shooters killed three men.

The information indicates that at least three armed men came to a house in the village of Quebradón Sur and murdered both Jimmy Betancourt Ortiz, 43, and Alejandro Betancourt, 25, father and son. The third person killed was an employee of a property belonging to an ex-combatant of the FARC-EP, who has not yet been identified.

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Police authorities and the Attorney General's Office are in the area to collect the bodies and carry out the respective investigations that could shed more light on this new massacre—which is not the first in this territory—some 200 km southwest of Bogotá.

This massacre took place less than 24 hours after another one recorded in the department of Córdoba in northern Colombia when a group of men killed four people in the rural area known as Versalles, in the jurisdiction of the village of Batatal.

These two massacres occurred in the context of a recent complaint by the FARC party, which reported that ex-combatant Nelson David Sánchez Segura died Tuesday after being a victim of an attack in the municipality of Tumaco, in Nariño department, in the southwest of the country.

A recent massacre on July 16, also in the municipality of Algeciras, Huila, saw six heavily armed individuals kill four other people and wound two more, which generated a series of forced displacements of hundreds of residents.

According to figures from the Institute for Peace and Development Studies, Indepaz, some 246 people have died in the 61 massacres recorded in Colombia this year, in a trend that has not stopped and only increased since the signing of the 2016 peace accords.