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 January 21, 2006 BOGOTA, Colombia, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Colombian rebels planted landmines that killed four peasants, including a child, earlier this month in a farming community near a coca eradication project, Vice President Francisco Santos said on Friday. The mines, which badly injured four other people outside the town of Vista Hermosa, were meant to impede the advance of police involved in clearing crops used to make cocaine from La Macarena National Park, the first anti-coca program carried out in a Colombian nature reserve, Santos said. "There is no justification for what they are doing, killing children the way they are, and killing poor farmers," Santos told reporters at a news conference at which he showed photographs of the victims' injuries. "This is cowardice." More than 900 civilian workers, guarded by 1,500 police and soldiers, are sweeping through the Meta province park, pulling up waist-high coca bushes used by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to make the cocaine that helps fund its 41-year-old insurrection. The project, which police say is aimed mainly at restoring La Macarena's ecosystem, was ordered by President Alvaro Uribe after guerrillas killed 29 soldiers during a battle in the area last month. Santos said more than 1,000 Colombians were killed and injured by landmines in the country in 2005, part of a conflict that forces tens of thousands of people out of their homes and into poverty every year. URL: page url |
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