Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Friday January 13 called for investigations into alleged rapes of indigenous minors by Colombian soldiers and an American national.
The American cable news channel in Spanish, Univision Noticias, revealed in December that an American serviceman who “lived in the installations of a battalion” of the Colombian army in 2019, allegedly raped a 10-year-old Nukak indigenous woman, who allegedly became pregnant, in San José del Guaviare, a town in the Colombian Amazon.
Univision Noticias denounced a “increasing phenomenon of rape of indigenous minors in the Guaviare region by mostly older white men, some of whom are soldiers”.
“Unpunished Horror”
Gustavo Petro indicated on Twitter to have “requested that a commission of the ICBF (Colombian Institute of Family Welfare) and the Presidency go immediately to Guaviare to investigate these allegations of rape of minors”. “This horror has gone unpunished for years”he added.
The prosecutor’s office told Univision noticias that it has taken up an investigation into these allegations of abuse of Nukak children by Colombian and North American soldiers.
According to President Petro, “118 members of the army” Colombian are under investigation for these crimes.
When questioned, the United States Embassy in Bogota said in a statement that its troops were not deployed in Guaviare in 2019.
Children and adolescents in the hands of networks
Traditionally nomadic, the Nukak have been displaced by conflict between armed groups and the government since the end of the 20th century. Today, they live in precarious camps on the outskirts of rural areas and live by begging.
According to various NGOs, many children and adolescents end up in the hands of pimping networks that exchange sexual favors for food, and some of them are addicted to drugs.
The Attorney General’s Office has been investigating since 2020 the alleged rape of a 15-year-old indigenous Nukak girl by eight uniformed men. In the same year, a 13-year-old indigenous girl was raped by a group of seven soldiers on patrol in the territory of the Embera Chami community, in the department of Risaralda. The soldiers were sentenced to 16 years in prison.
