(Bogotá) From the sky, the camera shows a dirt road winding through the green mountain. The drone releases its payload which explodes on contact with the ground.
The Colombian army recently released two videos of drone attacks carried out by armed groups, and there is no longer any doubt: the drone war has reached Colombia.
The method is unprecedented and worrying in a country theater of an internal armed conflict which has lasted for six decades between the State and the guerrillas against a backdrop of deep socio-economic inequalities.
No deaths have been reported so far. “We have fortunately, thanks to God, forestalled these attack attempts and we continue to improve our tactical and technical capabilities to counter this threat,” the commander of the armed forces, General Helder Giraldo, recently said in the media.
The press, alarmed by these “drones of death”, broadcast photos of a wounded man with a back pockmarked with shrapnel and of fighters busy tinkering with these new kinds of weapons, which the EMC, in particular, would have at their disposal, main faction of the dissidence of the former FARC guerrillas.
“Commercial drones equipped with explosives have become a common tactic for armed groups, particularly in the southwest,” noted the think tank La Silla Vacia in an article at the end of May.
For now, these weapons boil down to a DIY craft: a grenade or mortar shell attached to the drone and dropped vertically over the objective. The war in Ukraine, however, demonstrated the deadly capacity of these devices, which changed the dynamics of the conflict there.
For La Silla Vacia, which quotes a former army commander, General Alberto Mejia, “the emergence of commercial drones cobbled together to be adapted to war is part of the tradition of these armed groups to compensate for the lack of conventional weaponry.”
“It’s a homemade technology, but it ends up being effective,” Luis Armas, a specialist in the security and use of these devices, explains to AFP.
According to the Cambio news site, “military intelligence services have discovered that over the last six months, courses on the use of drones […] have been organized in different camps” of the ex-dissidence -FARC as part of a “covert strategy.”
In one of these calls, the possibility of an attack with an “unmanned aerial vehicle” targeting the “neighborhoods of Bogota where the oligarchy hangs out” is even mentioned.
In April, General Giraldo ordered his men “to establish protocols and preventive measures” to “mitigate” the risk of drone attacks, according to a document leaked to the press.
Although there is little film footage of these devices, a rebel commander in the southwest of the country confirmed to AFP that their adoption was underway. “If the enemy is preparing […] with drones, of course we have to see how we can get up to speed.”
With hundreds of Colombian mercenaries fighting on both sides in Ukraine today, a subsidiary question arises: could this know-how have been exported to Colombia via Marxist guerrilla fighters with claimed links to the Russian bloc?
In Popayan, capital of Cauca, the town hall banned drone flights following a June 7 bomb attack on a police station.
Last week, a charge falling from a drone near a hospital in the municipality of Suarez exploded and injured a young girl. Another attack injured three soldiers with shrapnel in Argelia, in the same region, a stronghold of dissidence.
“The armed groups demonstrate that they are better armed, that they have better technology,” alarmed Miller Hurtado, Secretary of Security of Cauca, worried about the lack of precision of these devices, with the obvious risk that they fall near civilian buildings or schools.
It is an instrument “essentially intended for terrorism” and for which “the armed forces are not prepared”, he analyzes.
“We need to increase our capabilities,” Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez conceded on Tuesday. The army chief announced the opening of a “process to acquire this type of unmanned aircraft as a tool to contain these terrorist actions.”
