Foreign

President’s Son Detained over Alleged Money Laundering

By Web News 371

The son of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been arrested for money laundering and illicit enrichment by the country’s attorney general.

Nicolas Petro, a politician in Atlantico province, was detained over allegations he was paid by drug traffickers to fund his father’s peace efforts and election campaign.

He has denied the claims and welcomed the inquiry when it was launched.

The younger Mr Petro’s ex-wife has also been arrested as part of the probe.

President Petro, the country’s first left-wing leader, has denied taking money from Colombia’s drug traffickers and ordered prosecutors to investigate his son in March.

Writing on social media on Saturday, he said it was painful for one of his children to be sent to prison, but also that he would not interfere with the investigation.

“To my son I wish luck and strength. May these occurrences forge his character and may he reflect about his own errors,” Petro said.

The attorney general’s office said the allegations against Nicolas related to illegal contributions diverted from his father’s election campaign last year.

Nicolas and his former wife, Daysuris del Carmen Vásquez, are being transferred from the Caribbean coast to Colombia’s capital Bogotá.

Ms Vásquez has previously alleged in local media that her former husband was given large amounts of money by drug cartels last year, during the political campaign that led to Gustavo Petro’s victory in the presidential election.

Around 450,000 people are believed to have been killed as a result of 60 years of internal conflict in Colombia.

President Petro vowed to secure peace or surrender in deals with both Colombia’s notorious armed rebel groups and drug cartels as part of his campaign – efforts which have seen intermittent success over his first year in office.

A negotiated ceasefire is set to begin with the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group in August, but talks with major crime gang the Clan del Golfo have failed because of ongoing violence.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Colombia Plane Crash: Dying Mum Told Kids to Leave Her, Get Help

By Web News 983

The mother of four children rescued after 40 days in the Amazon jungle was alive for four days after their plane crashed.

Magdalena Mucutuy told her children to leave and find help as she lay dying.

Speaking to reporters, the children’s father, Manuel Ranoque, said his eldest daughter told him their mother urged them to “get out” and save themselves.

The siblings, aged 13, nine, five, and one, were rescued and airlifted out of the jungle on Friday.

They were moved to a military hospital in the nation’s capital Bogota.

“The one thing that [13-year-old Lesly] has cleared up for me is that, in fact, her mother was alive for four days,” Mr Ranoque told reporters outside the hospital.

“Before she died, their mum told them something like, ‘You guys get out of here. You guys are going to see the kind of man your dad is, and he’s going to show you the same kind of great love that I have shown you,” he said.

Details have been emerging about the children’s time in the jungle and their miraculous rescue – including the first things the children said when they were found.

Rescue worker Nicolas Ordonez Gomes recalled the moment they discovered the children.

“The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: ‘I’m hungry,'” he told public broadcast channel RTVC.

“One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: ‘My mum is dead.'” He said rescuers responded with “positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family”.

Mr Ordonez Gomes said the boy replied: “I want some bread and sausage.”

In footage released on Sunday of the children’s rescue, the four siblings appeared to be emaciated from the weeks they spent fending for themselves in the wilderness.

Ms Mucutuy and her children had been travelling on the Cessna 206 aircraft to Araracuara, in Amazonas province, to San José del Guaviare, on 1 May when it issued a mayday alert due to engine failure.

The bodies of the mother and the two pilots were found at the crash site by the army, but it appeared that the children had wandered into the rainforest to find help.

The missing children became the focus of a huge rescue operation involving dozens of soldiers and local people.

Rescuers tracked the children down after spotting signs in the jungle, including footprints and fruit that had been bitten into.

Members of the children’s community had hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of remaining alive.

Astrid Cáceres, head of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, said the timing of their ordeal meant the “the jungle was in harvest” and they could eat fruit that was in bloom.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Rescuers Find Four Children 40 Days after Plane Crash in Colombia

By Web News 475

Four children have been found alive after surviving a plane crash and spending weeks fending for themselves in Colombia’s Amazon jungle.

Colombia’s president said the rescue of the siblings, aged 13, nine, four and one, was “a joy for the whole country”.

The children’s mother and two pilots were killed when their light aircraft crashed in the jungle on 1 May.

The missing children became the focus of a huge rescue operation involving dozens of soldiers and local people.

President Gustavo Petro said finding the group was a “magical day”, adding: “They were alone, they themselves achieved an example of total survival which will remain in history.

“These children are today the children of peace and the children of Colombia.”

Mr Petro shared a photograph of several members of the military and Indigenous community caring for the siblings, who had been missing for 40 days. One of the rescuers held a bottle up to the mouth of the smallest child, while another fed one of the other children from a mug with a spoon.

A video shared by Colombia’s ministry of defence showed the children being air-lifted into a helicopter in the dark above the tall trees of the jungle.

Mr Petro said the siblings were receiving medical attention – and that he had spoken to their grandfather, who told him “the mother jungle returned them”.

The children have been flown to the nation’s capital Bogota, where ambulances have taken them to hospital for further medical treatment.

The Cessna 206 aircraft the children and their mother had been travelling on before the crash was flying from Araracuara, in Amazonas province, to San José del Guaviare, when it issued a mayday alert due to engine failure.

The bodies of the three adults were found at the crash site by the army, but it appeared that the children had escaped the wreckage and wandered into the rainforest to find help.

A massive search began and in May, rescuers recovered items left behind by the children, including a child’s drinking bottle, a pair of scissors, a hair tie and a makeshift shelter.

Small footprints were also discovered, which led search teams to believe the children were still alive in the rainforest, which is home to jaguars, snakes and other predators.

The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group and members of their community hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of remaining alive.

Indigenous people joined the search and helicopters broadcast a message from the children’s grandmother, recorded in the Huitoto language, urging them to stop moving to make them easier to locate.

Colombia’s president came under criticism last month when a tweet published on his account mistakenly announced that the children had been found.

He erased the tweet the next day saying that the information – which his office had been given by Colombia’s child welfare agency – could not be confirmed.

BBC/Simeon Ugbodovon

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Foreign

Police Held Hostage in Colombia Protest

By Web News 509 Post a comment

Dozens of police officers and employees from an oilfield company were taken hostage after a violent protest in Colombia on Thursday.

According to Police, violence erupted in a rural part of the San Vicente del Caguan municipality, where protesters from rural and indigenous communities, Colombia’s national, attacked an oil field belonging to the company Emerald Energy.

The report says, protesters blocked access to the oil field to demand the company help fix roads in the region.

BBC/Taiwo Akinola

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Foreign

Four Dead, Hundreds Injured as Bullfight Stand Collapses in Colombia

By Web News 429

Four people were killed and about 70 injured in Colombia on Sunday after spectator stands at a bullfight collapsed, provincial officials said.

The bull reportedly escaped from the plaza hosting the spectacle and was causing panic in the streets of Espinal, Tolima, a city of nearly 60,000 people about 145km (90 miles) south-west of Bogotá, the capital.

Videos posted on social media showed a section of the wood and bamboo stands toppling forward into the ring, where locals were participating in a bull-running event.

The injured included children, women and men, the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo said, citing municipal authorities. They did not immediately say what caused the collapse.

“There are four dead at this moment – two women, a man and a minor,” Tolima’s provincial governor, Jose Ricardo Orozco, told local Blu Radio.No one remained trapped in the wreckage, Major Luis Fernando Velez, director of civil defence in the province, told local Caracol television. Several people reported as missing had been found.

The bullfight was part of a cultural festival honouring Saints Peter and Paul, who were apostles of Jesus Christ and Christian martyrs.

A city council member, Ivan Ferney Rojas, issued a statement saying the local hospital had been overrun and asking for assistance from surrounding areas to treat the injured.“We need help from neighbouring hospitals and ambulances,” he said.

“There’s still a lot of people who haven’t been treated.”

Espinal’s City Hall added in a separate statement that the staff there “profoundly lamented what had happened at the bullfight plaza” but urged residents and visitors to remain calm.

Colombia’s president-elect, Gustavo Petro, said on Twitter that a similar collapse had happened in another part of the county before.

Petro, a former member of an urban guerilla group and Colombia’s first leftist to be elected president, also said he urged local governments “to not authorise any more spectacles involving the deaths of people or animals”.

Net/Olaolu Fawole

News Analysis

Big Butts of Columbia

By Web News 5739

When you hear about big butts in Colombia, the first thing that comes to mind probably aren’t ants.

Big butt ants are a regional delicacy in the Santander region of Colombia. 

The hormigas culonas, a.k.a hormigas santandereanas are pregnant leaf cutter ants that are collected by hand during the Spring mating season.

They are then roasted and lightly salted to make a tasty snack.

Nice and crunchy, they have a sort of earthy and irony taste.

They are actually packed with protein, and locals laud them for having aphrodisiac qualities.

Hormigas culonas ants can be bought in small bags of a handful ranging up to large jars at corner stores and shops in the Santander region.

People take them as a snack like peanuts.

The best places to find hormigas culonas are in Barichara, San Gil, or Bucaramanga, however, street vendors can be found in other places in Colombia, including Cartagena.

They are best enjoyed when they are fresh between the months of March-May, though, one often find them the rest of the year as well.

Titilayo Kupoliyi