Bogota – Four soldiers were killed and eight others wounded when they entered a minefield while in pursuit of some FARC rebels in the mountains of Colombia’s Antioquia province, officials said.
Jorge Mejia, the interior minister of Antioquia, told reporters that an officer, a non-commissioned officer and two soldiers were killed by the landmines.
The eight wounded soldiers were taken to Medellin, the capital of Antioquia, for treatment and were listed in serious condition, Mejia said.
Mejia said the incident occurred in the village of Puerto Valdivia, where the soldiers were pursuing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas.
The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has nearly 20,000 members and is still led by 74-year-old founder Pedro Antonio Marin, who is known as “Sureshot.”
Drug smuggling, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC’s main means of financing its operations.
The FARC is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups.
Last month, on the occasion of the first International Day for Mine Awareness, the Colombian Campaign Against Mines, Unicef, the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. Development Program called for the belligerents in Colombia’s armed conflict to forswear the use of landmines.
Colombia has the dubious and sad distinction of seeing more of its citizens, many of them children playing in rural fields, killed or wounded by landmines each year than any other nation on earth, according to the organizations.
Up to 100,000 landmines are estimated to have been planted around the Andean nation, the great majority of them by leftist rebels seeking to inflict casualties on soldiers and protect coca plantations that supply their extensive drug-trafficking operations.
Almost all of the weapons are “non-industrial” homemade mines manufactured in guerrilla camps at low cost.
With 1,060 casualties reported in 2005, Colombia “now occupies the sad first place” in the category of deaths or injuries due to landmines, followed by Cambodia and Afghanistan, the landmine observer unit in the office of Colombia’s vice president said.
Having ratified in 2001 the Ottawa Convention, which outlaws the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel mines, Colombia subsequently developed an action plan to rid the country of the buried bombs.
Colombia’s first reported incident in which a landmine killed or injured a non-combatant was in 1990 and since then, 660 municipalities have in one way or another been affected by the buried explosives.
A report by the international Landmine Monitor said an average of three Colombians per day were victims of landmine blasts, for a total of 4,804 casualties over the past 16 years, including 1,167 dead and 3,637 wounded.
Among those killed were nearly 500 children.
Landmine Monitor said that while some manufactured devices have been imported into Colombia, most of the mines deployed in the Andean nation are more-difficult-to-detect homemade bombs.
The global watchdog outfit also noted that 97 percent of Colombia’s landmine blasts take place in rural areas, which together constitute the main battleground in the country’s internal conflict.
The hardest-hit province has been Antioquia, in the northwest, where 1,766 incidents have occurred since 1990; followed by neighboring Santander, with 657; and the southern province of Meta, with 632.
Antioquia witnessed some of the fiercest fighting between leftist insurgents and the right-wing militias that emerged in the mid-1980s, while Meta was part of a Switzerland-sized expanse that was effectively ceded to the guerrillas for three years as part of an abortive peace process.
In Valle del Cauca, the southwestern province whose capital is Cali, authorities have registered 92 landmine explosions involving casualties.
Colombia is thought to have anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 landmines buried in its soil, each with a “useful” life of 50 years or so.
The Colombian armed forces destroyed the last 6,814 mines in their arsenals on Oct. 24, 2004.
The landmine observation agency said planting each mine costs the insurgents less than $2, while it costs the country about $1,000 to eliminate one.
