TIBU, Colombia: For months, the mayor of Tibu, a Colombian town under the yoke of guerrilla violence, was forced to do his job from more than 115 kilometers (seventy-one miles) away, after receiving death threats.
Nelson Leal said that he had no choice but to leave behind a “no-man’s land” under the control of dissidents who distanced themselves from the peace deal the FARC guerrilla group inked with the government in 2016.
In March, when he had been on the job for eighteen months, rebels stopped him on a way and intimidated him in the presence of his wife, his 13-year-old son and a niece. Then they took his vehicle.
That was the incident that finally convinced Leal that he had to leave, and move to he city of Cucuta.
Prior to that bad experience, another of his sons had guns pointed at him from a motorcycle, as a warning.
But on 8 October, Leal finally returned — under heavy guard — to the town of sixty thousand, which is now playing host to long-awaited negotiations between Bogota and dissident guerrillas who call themselves the Central General Staff.
The negotiations started on Monday after a weeklong delay amid rising tensions and multiple deaths in clashes between the two sides.
Tibu is in the Catatumbo region, mainly abandoned by state security forces and heavily contested by a plethora of armed groups.
It is also the municipality with the most drug cultivation in the world, according to the United Nations data, with an area of more than 22,000 hectares planted with coca, the base ingredient for cocaine — of which Colombia is the biggest producer in the world.
Colombia’s biggest drug group active in Tibu
Apart from the EMC, Leal said, guerrillas from the National Liberation Arm, the Gulf Clan — Colombia’s biggest drug group– and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel are also active around Tibu, close to the porous border with Venezuela.
He said that Tibu has become a no-man’s land in which the one with the weapons is the one that governs.
