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Judi Lynn

(160,586 posts)
Thu Jun 27, 2019, 05:08 AM Jun 2019

North Colombia mayor investigated over community leader's homicide



The Otero family and former President Alvaro Uribe at his Uberrimo estate. (Image: Lengua Caribe)

by Adriaan Alsema June 26, 2019

The Inspector General announced an investigation into the mayor of a town in the north of Colombia over the murder of a local community leader that has triggered a national wave of indignation since Friday.

The killing of Maria Del Pilar Hurtado has put Mayor Fabio Otero and his family in the spotlight after another community leader denounced alleged police ties to a death squad and political activists dug up the family’s history of land dispossession.

The Inspector General’s Office said Thursday it had opened a disciplinary investigation into Otero and his Government Secretary, Willington Ortiz, who is responsible for the local police.

The investigations seeks to “determine the role of the administration against the occupation of plots by a sector of the community as well as the management of the alleged threats suffered by the leader and representative of the community that had squatted a number of lots in the municipality.

. . .

The mayor’s father is a large land owner from the region who has been sentenced to return land he had dispossessed from farmers who were displaced by paramilitary violence in Cordoba.

The Ortero family are associates of former President Alvaro Uribe, another rancher from the region who has been accused of having formed a death squad when he was governor of the neighboring Antioquia province in the 1990s.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/north-colombia-mayor-investigated-over-community-leaders-homicide/
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