The escorts of the Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez, found more than seven kilos of explosives on the road that leads to her family residence in the village of Yolombó, in the municipality of Suárez, in the convulsed department of Cauca, denounced this Tuesday the number two by Gustavo Petro. A police anti-explosive team destroyed the device without anyone being injured, the vice president recounted on her social networks.
“It was a new attempt to make an attempt on my life,” Márquez wrote in a message on Twitter that he accompanied with photos of the explosives and the authorities’ report. “However, we will not stop working, day after day, until we achieve the total peace that Colombia dreams of and needs. We will not give up until in each territory it is possible to live in true harmony, ”he added about a piece of news that aroused a wave of solidarity from various political shores. “We condemn the attempt against the life of the Vice President of the Republic and the endangerment of her family, her entourage and the inhabitants of Yolombó,” the UN human rights office said in Colombia.
Throughout the past weekend, a festive bridge in Colombia, the visit of the vice president to her residence in Suárez was scheduled, “for which reason the review prior to the route was carried out,” the police report states. “Members of her security team detected the explosive charge installed one meter from the road on the route that leads to her residence,” the document continues. Due to the characteristics and location of the artifact, the intelligence and security personnel “concluded that it was an obvious attack against the vice president.”
Márquez, the first Afro woman to reach the Vice Presidency, has been attacked with weapons and grenades, threatened and harassed with calls and messages on her phone throughout her renowned career as an environmental activist, which won her the Goldman prize in 2018. She was already famous for opposing gold mining in her native Cauca before launching a presidential candidacy at the head of her movement Soy Porque Somos within the Pacto Histórico, the left-wing coalition that backed Petro. Throughout the campaign she denounced new threats against her. She took office on August 7 amid promises of profound transformations in Colombian society and the search for the so-called total peace with all armed actors, the flagship policy of the president.
Colombia suffers the incessant murder of all kinds of social and environmental leaders in the midst of an armed conflict of more than half a century that it seeks to leave behind, and Cauca is one of its hardest hit regions. Up to 20% of its inhabitants, some 235,000 people, have been registered as victims by the Government. In that department, a strategic location for drug trafficking routes leading to the Pacific, an archipelago of illegal armed groups operate, including various dissidents from the extinct FARC guerrilla, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Clan del Golfo. , a drug trafficking gang heir to paramilitary groups. They are all part of the government’s efforts to achieve total peace.
The country also has a long history of political violence and assassinations that it has tried to leave behind. In the 1990 presidential campaign, three candidates were assassinated, among them the favorite, Luis Carlos Galán. In the 2002 campaign, the then candidate Álvaro Uribe suffered an attack with explosives in Barranquilla from which he emerged unharmed. In more recent times, on June 25, 2021, the helicopter in which the then president, Iván Duque, was traveling, was hit by rifle bursts while flying over the city of Cúcuta, on the border with Venezuela.
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