The bodies of at least 211 victims of right-wing paramilitaries were found on Saturday in mass graves in southern Colombia. ”We are again shocked at how gruesome this war is,” said Interior Minister Carlos Holguin on Saturday. Since 1999, the paramilitaries have waged war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for control of the region.
Several thousand people were evacuated after a volcano erupted in southern Colombia, triggering an avalanche that swelled rivers and threatened local communities, authorities said on Wednesday. Tumbling waters carrying trees, rocks and mud forced about 5 000 people to leave their homes for safer ground.
Heavy rains and flooding since the beginning of the year have killed 102 people and damaged thousands of homes across much of Colombia, according to state rescue agency Socorro Nacional. On Sunday, four more people died in a landslide in a poor Bogotá neighbourhood, and much of the capital remains under emergency warning due to elevated river levels.
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/ 14 February 2006
A distant explosion startles villagers in Vistahermosa, a paradise of nature in southern Colombia where the government is working to destroy about 4 500ha of coca. But calm returns quickly. After one month, this farm town has gotten used to the bombs.
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/ 29 October 2005
Beta was upgraded to a hurricane by the United States National Hurricane Centre early on Saturday as it continued to whip the Colombian island of Providencia with high winds and rain. The hurricane is expected to move north-northwest and slam into Central America by Sunday as a category-two storm.
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/ 11 October 2005
They walk up to an ATM and press their thumbs on the screen. Out spits the cash. Tokyo? No. New York? No. The mountains and jungles of Colombia. It’s one of the few places in the world where banks are using fingerprint biometrics, which verify people’s identities based on their unique physical characteristics.
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/ 13 September 2005
Colombia’s government questioned its own airline security measures and ordered an immediate review after a father in a wheelchair dodged a security check to sneak hand grenades on to a plane and hijacked it along with his son. The father and son finally surrendered five hours after commandeering the Aires airliner on Monday.
A Colombian plane with 152 people on board crashed in a mountainous region in western Venezuela early on Tuesday, Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said. ”According to our estimates, the plane crashed in Sierra de Perija between 3am and 3.45am,” he said on state television. It is unclear whether anyone survived.
A Colombian plane with 160 people on board crashed on Tuesday in the mountains of western Venezuela, leaving no survivors. The West Caribbean Airways plane, on a flight from Panama to Martinique in the French West Indies, came down in a remote zone in the Sierra de Perija mountains.
The Colombian army said on Friday it has seized -million-worth of cocaine belonging to leftist guerrillas that was hidden in a cove on the outskirts of a city near Venezuela’s border. Three people with suspected links to the National Liberation Army were arrested during the raid on Wednesday.
Failure to help with the kids and the dishes could soon be grounds for divorce in Colombia, if a proposed law gets passed. ”Men treat women like slaves who wash the dishes while they relax,” said Senator Carlos Moreno de Caro, the Bill’s author. ”This injustice has to end,” he said.
The Colombian government said on Tuesday it will evacuate 9 000 people living near a volcano in south-west Colombia amid concerns it is about to erupt. The Galeras Volcano Observatory last month set its new warning system at level two, indicating a ”probability of an eruption within days or weeks”.
A Colombian town has taken a hard line against gossip, with fines of up to 000 (R38 200) and three years in jail. ”Residents come out with things that they have no reason to say, that are mere gossip and that have even gotten people killed,” said Margoth Morales, city manager of Iconozo.
Resilient rebels. Rebounding drug crops. Rogue American soldiers snared in plots to smuggle cocaine and funnel stolen ammunition toparamilitary death squads. The bad news has been piling up fast, almost five years after the United States began doling out -billion under its Plan Colombia aid programme to wipe out cocaine and heroin production and crush a long-running leftist insurgency.
A pair of Colombian military helicopter gunships struck at guerrilla positions at the rebel-held town of Tacueyo on Saturday as the government tried to wrest control of the region away from the Marxist fighters. The engagement indicates the insurgents feel confident enough to stand their ground and confront government forces.
A Colombian football fan has won the right to change his name to that of his favourite club, but only after a tortuous seven-year legal battle. The ruling handed down on Friday by the country’s Constitutional Court allows the 55-year-old supporter to call himself Deportivo Independiente Medellin Giraldo Zuluaga.
A top United Nations anti-drug official has predicted cocaine prices in the United States and Europe will rise next year, reflecting the fruits of a six-year, US-funded effort to eradicate drug production in Colombia. ”Considering Colombia supplies 80% of the world cocaine market, we think prices are going to rise starting in 2006,” the official said.
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/ 11 February 2005
Peace is possible in Colombia despite its four decades of civil war, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday, pointing to harmony achieved in South Africa after decades of racial strife under apartheid. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate gave the optimistic outlook during a speech at a peace symposium in the south-western city of Cali.
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/ 17 November 2004
The Colombian government will allow hundreds of families left homeless after a strong earthquake to move temporarily into houses and country estates seized from drug traffickers, officials said on Tuesday. The quake, registering a powerful 6,7 on the Richter scale, hit early on Monday and injured 12 people.
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/ 15 November 2004
An earthquake measuring 6,7 on the Richter scale hit the west coast of Colombia early on Monday, Colombian officials said, adding that no deaths have been reported from the quake thus far. The quake hit at 4.06am local time, according to Julian Villarroel, director of Colombia’s Institute of Geology and Mining.
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/ 16 November 2003
At least 25 people were wounded in two explosions in an exclusive neighborhood of the Colombian capital late on Saturday. The explosions occurred seconds apart, just after 10.20pm, at a time when the area was crowded with restaurant- and bar-goers. Three of the wounded were United States citizens.