JAMUNDI, Colombia, Sept 22, 2023 (AFP) – A car bomb exploded Friday outside a police station in southwest Colombia, injuring five civilians just days after two people died in a similar attack attributed to guerrilla fighters in talks with the government.
The blast happened in the Jamundi municipality in the Valle del Cauca department where rebels are fighting soldiers engaged in a clampdown on drug trafficking.
“Reprehensible attack in Jamundi,” President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“We continue to affect illegal economies and the reaction is acts of violence,” he added, vowing that the state “will not yield.”
A police statement said the five injured people were all civilians. One was in a serious condition.
The bomb damaged the facade of the police station and five homes in the vicinity.
Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez pointed the finger at a group that calls itself the Central General Staff (EMC) — a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that disarmed in 2017.
“We have had to go meter by meter, we have taken trenches, in some places there was hand-to-hand combat” he said of the ongoing operation against drug trafficking in the area.
“It is clear that the EMC is trying to… distract, to generate pressure in other places so that we will stop this operation, which we are not going to stop,” the minister told Caracol Radio.
Velasquez said about three-quarters of the EMC’s funding comes from drug cultivation in southwestern Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer.
The EMC is made up of former FARC fighters — about 3,500 according to official data — who rejected the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the now-dissolved Marxist rebel group.
It has steadily increased its presence in territories formerly occupied by the FARC and largely abandoned by government forces.
On Wednesday, another car bomb targeting a police station in the same region, killed two civilians.
That attack, which was not claimed by any group but blamed by authorities on FARC dissidents, came just a day after Bogota and the EMC announced they would observe a ceasefire and hold peace talks next month.
Petro took office last August with a vow to bring “total peace” to a country battered by decades of civil conflict between the state and various left-wing guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
It is in talks with the EMC and other armed groups.
