Student Among 11 Killed in Colombian Province of Valle Over Weekend
News from Colombia |
on: Monday, 11 October 2010
A 22-year-old student and three members of one family were among those assassinated over the weekend in the southwest Colombian region of Valle del Cauca according to local press reports. The killings are not thought to be related but all occurred within 48 hours of each other in different parts of the province say reports from the RCN television network and the regional newspaper El Pais.
Andres Grueso Riascos, a 22-year-old student was shot in the face as he arrived home in the Cascajal neighbourhood of the town of Buenaventura on Saturday whilst that evening three members of the same family, Olga Cecilia Serna (53), her husband Luis Carlos Arenas (59) and their daughter Yazmin Arena Serna (21), were executed at their home in centre of the town of Buga. All three were shot twice in the head.
Two others victims were murdered in the municipality of La Union whilst in the nearby municipality of El Cairo a 34-year-old woman and her 16-year-old son were both assassinated. Two other youngsters were gunned down in the regional capital, Cali, as they left a funeral on Friday afternoon.
The final killing, also in the town of Buenaventura, was of 22-year-old Marco Antonio Gomez, a local man who had recently finished his compulsory military service. He was shot five times not far from his home in the Campin area of the town. According to the Buenaventura Coroner’s office the latest murders bring the number of deaths in the city so far this year to 260, 85% of which have been homicides.
Meanwhile, a newspaper in the northeast Colombian province of La Guajira says that violent deaths in the region have increased by 70% this year. The figures came from an official report from the National Institute of Legal and Forensic Sciences which also highlighted that most of the crimes remain in impunity, that is to say that those responsible are not being brought to justice.
Worryingly the new report also makes clear that the figures for violent deaths do not include cases from the Wayuu indigenous community, the major indigenous group in the region, as they do not take their dead to approved morgues but rather dispose of bodies themselves. If murders perpetrated against the Wayuu people were included in the statistics the number of violent deaths would likely increase significantly.
