The vice president of Colombia, Francia Márquez. Photo: AFP.
The car in which the vice president of Colombia, Francia Márquez, usually travels in was shot at on a highway in the county of Cauca. The vice president was not inside the car when the shooting happened.
“I have been informed by my security team that the main vehicle of the vice presidential convoy, in which I usually travel, was hit by a projectile, apparently from a rifle… which penetrated the interior of the vehicle without causing any injury to the occupants,” Márquez said in a statement on Wednesday, July 10.
The vice president, who also heads the Equality and Equity Ministry, said that the incident happened after her team had left her natal municipality of Suárez, department of Cauca, where she had made a visit to what will be the new campus of the Universidad del Valle, accompanied by the outgoing Minister of Education Aurora Vergara.
She added that the attack happened when she was already in the city of Cali (capital of the department of Valle del Cauca), attending another engagement. “This time we do not have anything to lament, but I must express my enormous concern for Cauca and for the constant tension that my people are living every day throughout the region. We have come to bring a public university to Suárez and we will not give up in this effort for the future of our people,” she said.
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She also urged the armed groups operating in the region to give up their guns and allow Cauca to live in peace, and to allow the construction of the university to progress. The principal armed organization operating in the region is the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), the largest dissident group of the ex-guerrilla organization the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Over the last two months, the departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca have been the scene of armed attacks by the EMC against military and police installations. Last month, Sigifredo Márquez, father of Francia Márquez, was the target of a similar attack when he was traveling with the vice president’s six-year-old nephew. That attack occurred on the way between the towns of Timba and the Robles village in rural Jamundí, in the department of Valle del Cauca.
(Página12)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
