Colombian rebel group imposes control in troubled Coca zone

Analysts say the Segunda Marquetalia guerrilla movement has seized power in the southwest of the country, roughly the size of Belgium, using financial support from Mexican drug cartels to unite numerous armed groups.

“The change is spectacular, the groups have united and violence has decreased significantly,” said Jerson David, president of a local association of subsistence farmers who work on the coca plantations.

“Here people grow coca according to the rules of the Segunda Marquetalia,” he added.

Nearby, workers carry sacks full of bright green coca leaves, which are ground up and mixed with gasoline and chemicals in a makeshift laboratory to make a paste that later becomes cocaine.

Coca fields stretch as far as the eye can see around the city of Zavaleta. In 2022, the Narino region produced about 40 percent of the total coca in Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer.

In the city centre, hordes of motorbikes race down the main street, and men with gold chains and pistols at their sides stare suspiciously at strangers.

At the entrance to the city hangs an old banner: “Segunda Marquetalia wishes you a Merry Christmas.”

‘Cauldron of violence’

Until 2016, it was the guerrilla movement FARC (Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) that had a monopoly on the profitable region.

When the group signed a historic peace deal with the government that year, “there was a rush to occupy this space,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, an analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Narino became a “cast-iron crucible of violence and competition surrounding drug trafficking.”

Segunda Marquetalia was founded by the FARC’s chief peace negotiator, Luciano Marin, alias Ivan Marquez, who started a new uprising in 2019.

According to Dickinson, one of the group’s commanders had ties to Mexican drug cartels that provided capital to recruit troops from other regions.

“The Segunda Marquetalia, with that influx of money and fighters, has conquered Narino with remarkable speed,” she said in the past two years.

The takeover was also accompanied by a bloody war with another dissident group of the FARC, the EMC (Central General Staff) in 2023.

Since then, Segunda Marquetalia has reigned supreme in this region of the Pacific coast, where the Andes give way to the foothills of the Amazon, towards burning savannahs and mangrove forests on the coast.

According to the think tank Indepaz, Narino was responsible for 27.3 percent of all conflict victims in Colombia in 2023.

Since 2016, about 30 massacres have taken place there and 130 community leaders have been killed.

‘Pact’ with the local population

In the scorching midday heat of Zavaleta, coca workers and guerrilla fighters, beers in hand, flock to bars like “El Patron”, with a statue of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The police and the army are completely absent, they are hiding behind sandbags on their bases, dozens of kilometers away.

The guerrillas closely monitor coca production and development projects such as road construction.

Like several other armed groups in Colombia, Segunda Marquetalia is involved in protracted peace negotiations with the government.

“Peace and abandoning coca require a transformation of the country, that is, the construction of roads and electricity networks,” Walter Mendoza, the group’s second in command and chief negotiator, told AFP as he was surrounded by armed men.

The group says it works in the interests of local communities, but experts say it is a form of coercive control over the population.

Local journalist Winston Viracacha described the relationship as a “pact” in which local people carry out projects for the benefit of both parties in exchange for paying the guerrilla fighters who “guarantee order and social control.”

One reason for the lack of violence is that the armed group is no longer interested in direct confrontation with the government.

“What they are interested in is local control to facilitate illegal economic activities. Instead of fighting the military, they want to control the population,” Dickinson said.

Segunda Marquetalia has also extended its authority to other cities, such as the coastal town of Tumaco, with its predominantly Afro-Colombian population and a long history of extreme poverty and violence between armed groups.

Until 2023, “no foreigner will be allowed to set foot” in Bajito, a neighborhood in Tumaco with a beautiful beach where mutilated bodies were previously found, according to city councilor Duvan Mosquera Cortes.

Now tourists can come here in peace and quiet.

However, Dickinson warns that “the situation is still extremely fragile” as a rival armed group could try to defeat the Segunda Marquetalia at any time.

© 2024 AFP