MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombia has the highest number of landmines victims

More people have been killed or injured by land mines in Colombia last year than in any other country as rebels planted explosive devices to protect crops used to make cocaine, the Colombian government revealed Tuesday.

While the United Nations says countries like Afghanistan and Cambodia recorded fewer than 900 land mine deaths and injuries last year, 1,065 Colombians were killed or maimed by stepping on mines, the Colombian vice president's office reported.

"The number of victims in Colombia is climbing because illegal armed groups continue to plant mines in order to protect their illicit crops" said Luz Piedad Herrera, director of the vice presidency's Mines Observatory, "sadly, we are now top of the list"

Last year's figure jumped from 2004 when Colombia recorded 809 landmine deaths and injuries compared with 874 in Cambodia and 893 in Afghanistan, she said, citing U.N. figures. It is estimated that armed Marxist groups in this country have planted over 100.000 explosive devices to protect cocaine crops.

Colombia is embroiled in a six decade-old guerrilla war involving Marxist rebels who depend on the country's huge cocaine trade to fund their operations. The government is pushing to eradicate coca plants used by the rebels and their right-wing paramilitary foes to make cocaine.

The paramilitaries, organized in the 1980s to help drug dealers and cattle ranchers fight off the rebels, are in peace talks with the government while the guerrillas say they cannot negotiate with President Alvaro Uribe, a staunch U.S. ally expected to win reelection in May based on his tough security policies.

Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, says it is fighting for socialism in a country with deep divisions between rich and poor. But even leftist politicians say the group has scant popular support.

"Mostly it is the FARC that is planting land mines in order to stop the advance of army troops that, under Uribe, are launching more anti-guerrilla operations," said German Espejo, an analyst at Bogota think tank Seguridad & Democracia. "They are also planting mines to secure coca crops, protect camps where they house their kidnap victims and protect their transportation routes," Espejo said. "Land mines are an effective tactical weapon, so the FARC will continue to use them".

This Tuesday on the first International Day for Mine Awareness, the Colombian Campaign against Mines, UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. Development Program called on all belligerents to ban the use of these deadly devices whose victims are mainly among the most vulnerable population groups.

Having ratified in 2001 the Ottawa Convention, which outlaws the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel mines, Colombia subsequently developed an action plan to rid the country of the buried explosives.

"The most decisive way to confront this constant threat that impacts mostly on peasants, children and women, is to condemn the use of mines, in accordance with the Ottawa Convention", the organizations said in a statement released Tuesday in Bogotá.

Colombia's first reported incident in which a land mine killed or injured a non-combatant was in 1990 and since then, 660 municipalities have in one way or another been affected by these deadly and treacherous explosives.

A report by the international Landmine Monitor said that an average of three Colombians per day are victims of land mine blasts, totalling 4,804 casualties over the past 16 years, including 1,167 dead and 3,637 wounded. Among those killed were nearly 500 children.

Landmine Monitor said that while some manufactured devices have been imported, most of the mines deployed in Colombia are more-difficult-to-detect homemade bombs. Apparently 97% of Colombia's land mine blasts occur in rural areas, the main battleground in the country's internal conflict.

Landmine Monitor underlines that Colombia's 100.000 land mines in insurgent areas are estimated to represent a "live threat" for almost fifty years, costing an average two US dollars a piece to plant, but 1.000 US dollars to eliminate.

The report points out that the Colombian Armed Forces destroyed the last of their 6,814 mines October 24, 2004.