Pot-Banging in Colombia Against Government's Political Genocide

The Common Alternative Revolutionary Force (FARC) called for a pot-banging that will take place on Tuesday at 6:00 pm at the Journalist's Park, in Bogota, as a response to the wave of violence that is plaguing the country.

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"The pot-banging is a call for Colombia not to be indifferent to this reality, in which 186 ex-guerrillas and more than 800 social leaders have been killed in recent years", FARC Party Senator Carlos Antonio Lozada declared yesterday to the local press.

In these first two months of 2020, 14 murders of former combatants have been verified, according to the latest report by the head of the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu.

According to Lozada, of the total number of guerrillas killed in 2020, two FARC party members who were executed last week stand out: Winston Moreno, found dead in Quibdó, Chocó; and Esder Pineda Peña, killed in Algeciras, Huila. 

"Both had signed the peace agreements and laid down their arms. So, it's time for the State to stop this cruelty," the senator condemned.

The FARC knows "the names of every person killed, thanks to a daily count and follow-up. We will gather the necessary information to denounce these acts of political Genocide before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the UN," he said.

During the signing of the first peace agreement in Havana, Cuba, in September 2016, the then guerrilla group FARC and former president Juan Manuel Santos's government decided to put an end to a conflict that had lasted more than half a century. 

Afterward, a second and final agreement was needed, signed in November 2016, this time in Cartagena, Colombia.

However, when Ivan Duque became president of Colombia in August 2018, he reversed the gains that the 2016 peace accords had achieved after calling them an "excessive concession to the guerrillas."

During his first years as president, Duque unilaterally modified the text of the agreements, and launched an offensive against the FARC, causing the death of hundreds of former Colombian guerrillas from 2018 to date.