2023-06-11 11:26:57
Although unrest last Thursday among a group of hooded youth and members of the Undmo (former Esmad) seemed to be more than those who show up in the city every week, the truth is that they revealed the seriousness of the infiltration of the Farc dissidents in university environments and the imminent risk in which it is Bogota.
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According to an informed source, what was seen that day at the 26th street entrance of the National University was an unprecedented event. Different radical groups, which had never come together due to political differences, met on the same stage to confront the uniformed officers and “commemorate” the day of the fallen student.
Intelligence information known to EL TIEMPO indicates that in the mobs on Thursday the Bolivarian Movement, historically controlled by factions of the Farc and which operates clandestinely within the Nacional campus, came together; the Jaime Bateman movement, which comes from the Pedagogical University, and a remnant group from the almost extinct front lines of Bogotá.
A source informed about these events indicated that on the front line it would be a group of approximately 30 young people, who are fully identified and were recruited by a criminal cell.
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Others, on the other hand, accepted the offer of the district administration to be linked to educational and resocialization plans. A few were captured by the authorities for their participation in acts of vandalism and violence.
“The new group that remained from the first line is now called Unión Bogotá Radical or something like that, and what has happened is that the radical movements have not allowed them to join the groups, because they say they do not have any political line or They defend an ideology. They are not going to let them damage the movement,” the source explained.
On the left, Minister Iván Velásquez.
Ministry of Defense / César Melgarejo. TIME
Block of ‘Iván Mordisco’
Although in Bogotá the ELN, the Farc and the paramilitaries co-opted groups in universities, now the ‘Iván Mordisco’ bloc is doing it, which also has an outpost from Meta towards the Sumapaz region.
Alias ’Iván Mordisco’, head of the Central General Staff (EMC).
Ernest Guzman. EFE / Mauricio Moreno. TIME
What the radical groups’ rejection of the former front lines has generated is that the dissidents of ‘Iván Mordisco’ place them as recruitment targets, as stated in classified information that this newspaper learned.
One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the authorities have to investigate this line of investigation is that during the reappearance of ‘Mordisco’, in the Yarí plains, last April, there was alias Coco, a young man who was recruited from the front line for the Farc dissidents. But he was not alone, with him there were about 20 other young people, also from that structure, who were identified. These have traveled to Guaviare and Meta to be indoctrinated.
“They were being recruited for several months. That is proven and confirmed even by the Prosecutor’s Office. They offer them money and possibilities, and it is all these young people who have ended up in the mobs in Bogotá. They are always the same,” noted a source close to the investigation.
But what happened in the Nacional last Thursday was just one more proof of what the mayor herself, Claudia López, had made public for months.
EL TIEMPO learned that both the Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office had delivered classified information to the president proving the participation of these armed groups in youth recruitment processes in the city and its peripheries. And it is that since 2021 there was already talk of 14 locations where the youth population is susceptible to recruitment.
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Youth of the Front Line.
The issue is so worrisome that the same report from the Ombudsman and the Ombudsman’s Office was shared by the Mayor’s Office with President Gustavo Petro and the High Councilor for Peace during a security council summoned in an extraordinary way in February of this year and in which there were four other mayors of the country.
According to an early warning issued on May 31, 2021 by the Ombudsman’s Office, in Ciudad Bolívar, the UPZ of El Mochuelo, El Tesoro, Lucero, San Francisco, Jerusalén Arborizadora and Isabel Perdomo are the ones with the highest risk of recruiting minors by illegal armed groups. In Usme they would be the Danube, Parque Entre Nubes, La Flora, Alfonso López and Gran Yomasa.
This list also includes two of the towns with the greatest social and security problems and where the phenomenon of multi-crime and the war between gangs for control of the drug trafficking lines has spread: Kennedy and Bosa, where, according to researchers, the Farc dissidents could interfere through the outsourcing of their actions through other smaller criminal structures.
“We cannot be lamenting the events and mourning the wounded and dead a day later. At what point did it become valid for someone to throw a bomb at the head of another human being and we cannot capture them,” said the Secretary of Government, Felipe Jiménez, in support of López’s request that the police enter the campus. He added that the situation is becoming untenable and that the Mayor’s Office has been asking the Prosecutor’s Office to dismantle the primary cell that is recruiting young people in Bogotá.
(Also read: This was the horrifying confession of the young man accused of murdering Yessica Calvera)
funding evidence
Clashes at the National University
Cesar Melgarejo / EL TIEMPO
According to the investigations carried out by the investigative authorities, the events that occurred on the university campus would have served to consolidate the recruitment theory, but, above all, to confirm that behind the already traditional Thursday mobs there are more powerful criminal organizations that can pay to acquire the explosive elements with which the hooded men attacked the uniformed men.
Among the probative material that was recovered, flying machines, Molotov cocktails, potato bombs and pellets, which would account for the financial muscle behind these revolutionary groups. One of the investigators says that black aluminum was found inside the potato bombs, which is classified as war material and is regulated by Indumil.
“Yesterday they did not throw madrazos or insults. What they dropped were bombs, and that shows the economic power behind it, because these devices cost a lot of money, it’s not like these groups of protesters who make a ‘cow’ to go to the hardware store. Behind this there is scaffolding,” added a source who knows information about the process.
Finally, what the Bogotá Mayor’s Office warns is that what is being seen in the city is not only due to an increase in violent displays in the midst of demonstrations or commemorations, but that it could be a reunification of violent groups, “Totally linked to the FARC dissidents that have grown both in number and in violent capacities, especially within the city’s public universities.”
JONATHAN TORO ROMERO
BOGOTA STAFF
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