Colombia arrests over 200 suspected members of cartel accused of paying recruits $3,500 for “dead police officers”

Colombian authorities said Monday they had captured more than 200 members of the country’s biggest drug cartel, which is accused of murdering two dozen security force members in the past month.

The Gulf Clan was born out of the right-wing paramilitary groups that fought leftist guerrillas in the 1990s before turning their attention to the cocaine trade.

President Gustavo Petro has accused the group, with which he suspended peace talks in early 2023, of devising a strategy to “systematically murder” members of the security forces.

Armed forces chief Franciso Cubides told a news conference on Monday the security forces had responded by arresting 217 members of the clan since April 15.

He added that 15 other suspected drug traffickers had been shot dead in raids that had netted 6.8 tons of drugs, 123 firearms and more than 15,000 rounds of ammunition.

Sixteen police officers and five soldiers have been killed in attacks blamed on what Petro has called the Gulf Clan’s “pistol plan.”

Cubides said the attacks were part of a “desperate response” by armed groups to the “overwhelming” setbacks they were suffering at the hands of the police and military in the north and west of the country.

The cartel paid its members “between 10 and 15 million (Colombian pesos, between $2,300 and 3,500) for some dead police officers,” Interior Minister Armando Benedetti told a weekly government cabinet meeting.

The Gulf Clan, which engages in illegal gold mining, racketeering and migrant smuggling, is believed to number about 7,500 members, according to government estimates. The group’s “primary source of income is from cocaine trafficking, which it uses to fund its paramilitary activities,” according to the U.S. State Department.

Last month, the police and the DEA killed a man dubbed “Chirimoya,” one of the cartel’s five commanders, as well as eight other members of the group.

The Gulf Clan is one of several cartels recently designated as foreign terrorist groups by the United States. In 2022, the Gulf Clan shut down dozens of towns in northern Colombia for four days in reaction to its leader being extradited to the U.S. for trial.

The arrests come as Colombia suffers its worst outburst of violence since the leftist FARC guerrilla army, one of the world’s oldest rebel movements, signed a peace deal with the government in 2016.

Benedetti admitted last month that Petro’s strategy of pursuing “total peace” by engaging in dialogue with the country’s various armed groups had not borne fruit.

On Petro’s watch, several armed groups, particularly the Gulf Clan, have grown stronger, Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez admitted recently in an AFP interview.