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Two soldiers injured after being burned with gasoline in an uprising in southern Colombia
Bogotá. – Two Colombian soldiers were seriously injured after a group of people doused them with gasoline and set them on fire during an operation to destroy a cocaine processing laboratory in the department of Putumayo, southern part of the country, military sources reported this Wednesday.
The incident occurred in a rural area of the municipality of Villagarzón, reported in a statement the Twenty-Seventh Army Brigade, which indicated that the construction was allegedly owned by the Border Commands, a dissident group of the FARC.
“We condemn and repudiate the insane attempt to burn alive two of our Army soldiers, who were carrying out military operations in Villagarzón, Putumayo,” said the Colombian Minister of Defense, Pedro Sánchez Suárez, on social media.
He detailed that “during the destruction of an illegal cocaine laboratory, they were attacked in a riot: they were doused with gasoline and set on fire to interrupt the procedure.”
In that sense, the minister assured that “those who did this are neither peasants nor communities claiming their rights”, but rather “they are criminals and drug traffickers who tried to assassinate our military”.
The wounded soldiers were transferred to a medical center in Florence, capital of the southern department of Caquetá.
“The Army (…) categorically rejects these criminal actions and will report to the competent authorities the coercion of the civilian population by the organized armed group Comandos de Frontera to obstruct the execution of military operations, as well as the aggressions committed against our men,” the institution stated in a statement.
The Border Commands is a group that is part of the Bolivarian Army National Coordinator, a dissident faction of the FARC that is in a peace process with the Colombian government.
The authorities offered a reward of up to 200 million pesos (about $50,000) for information leading to the identification and capture of those responsible for this criminal act.
The Ministry of Defense recalled at the end of August that since 2021, more than a hundred attacks against military troops have been recorded in different regions, which has hindered security operations and weakened the state’s presence in areas affected by drug trafficking and armed violence.
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