Colombia president orders troops to violence-hit Caribbean city

BOGOTA: Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella on Tuesday sent troops into the Caribbean city of Santa Marta after gunmen attacked shops and burnt vehicles following the killing of one of their leaders.

Videos shared online showed members of the self-styled Conquering Self Defence Forces of the Sierra Nevada (ACSN) riding through the city on motorbikes, firing on businesses that remained open despite the group announcing a 48-hour curfew.

Santa Marta acts as a gateway to Tayrona National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site overlooking the Caribbean that is highly popular with foreign tourists.

AFP saw a truck ablaze in the middle of a road and a charred bus on another street.

Dozens of shops were shuttered and parts of the city were deserted.

The chaos followed an earlier announcement by the president that the police and air force had killed 13 members of the ACSN, an armed group with roots in Colombia's now-defunct paramilitary movement that lives off extortion and cocaine trafficking.

He said that the 13 "narcoterrorists" killed included the ACSN's second-in-command, who went by the alias "Cholo".

"I have ordered...that Santa Marta be militarised," De la Espriella later announced in a video statement.

Following the military operation against the ACSN, "these criminals are trying to set a large part of the Caribbean region on fire," he said, adding that "anyone who does not submit will be taken down."

He said that he would travel to Santa Marta to oversee the crackdown.

Prison or tomb

Army troops were meanwhile deployed along the highway that connects the city with the La Guajira department on the Venezuelan border, where ACSN also operates.

US-backed millionaire De la Espriella pledged a heavy hand against Colombia's myriad drug-running groups — from dissident members of the defunct Marxist rebel army FARC to the former paramilitary groups set up to fight the guerrillas — when he entered office in August.

He has ordered bombing raids on guerrilla camps in several parts of the country and held press conferences next to the corpses of rebels laid out in body bags.

"Cholo" is the second senior ACSN member to be killed by the security forces in less than a month, after another commander, "Bendito Menor", was killed in La Guajira.

The ACSN is one of the many armed groups that De la Espriella's leftist predecessor Gustavo Petro had engaged in failed peace talks.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia estimates the group has around 800 members.

De la Espriella has ended all dialogue with armed groups and vowed to put them either "in prison or a tomb," with the help of the United States.