Ex-combatants of the disbanded FARC and social activists march to demand the government guarantee their right to life and compliance with the 2016 peace agreement, in Bogota, Colombia, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020. The mobilization coined “Pilgrimage for Life and Peace” is motivated by the murders of ex-combatants after the peace process. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

By Alan Macleod (published by Mint Press)

It is the festive season in Colombia, but not everyone is celebrating. Sunday brought news of the ninetieth massacre of the year. Five people were found dead in Bolívar Department in the north of the country, among them former leftist guerilla Rosa Amalia Mendoza and her infant child. Meanwhile, just hours earlier in the southwestern department of Cauca, the brutally tortured body of 55-year-old Manuel Alonso Villegas was found on a roadside close to his hometown of Miranda….

James Jordan, National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice and a friend of Villegas’, spoke to MintPress about the incident. “Manuel was a master woodworker and had a room full of items he was selling, all the way from little stands to put your cell phone on to really nice beds and rocking chairs and cabinets,” he said. Read more…