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What happened
Fighting between two guerrilla groups in Colombia‘s northern region of Catatumbo has left 80 people dead and forced 18,000 to flee their homes, officials said Monday. It was some of the country’s worst violence since the largest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), put down arms in 2016 in a peace deal with the government.
Who said what
The end of a fragile truce between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and a FARC offshoot called the 33rd Front “delivers a devastating blow to the ‘total peace’ program” of President Gustavo Petro, a leftist former guerrilla, The Washington Post said.
The scale of this fighting is “very different from anything we’ve seen since the peace accords,” and it’s “spiraling out of control very quickly,” said International Crisis Group analyst Elizabeth Dickinson to the Post. “It’s going to be very difficult for Petro to reel the security situation back in.”
THE WEEK
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