Colombian military ‘loses’ 5m bullets and 37 anti-tank missiles

The Colombian military has lost huge quantities of munitions, including millions of bullets, thousands of grenades and 37 anti-tank missiles, President Gustavo Petro has revealed.

Mr Petro blamed the problem on corruption, accusing unnamed officers and civilians of selling off the missing inventory to arms traders, organised criminals, armed rebels and even the gangs currently running riot in Haiti.

He was speaking on Tuesday following unannounced inspections at two military bases, Tolemaida and La Guajira, which first revealed the stunning shortfall.

“The only way to explain this type of shortage is that there has existed, for a long time, networks of people in the armed forces and civilians dedicated to the mass commercialisation of arms, using legal arms from the Colombian state,” he said.

“We must, without a doubt, completely separate the armed forces, as with any branch of public power, from any incident of corruption. That is the only way to guarantee the safety of our citizens and of the armed forces themselves.”

Iván Velásquez, the defence minister, added that a full investigation was under way and the culprits would be brought to justice.

Supported by US military aid, the Colombian armed forces are among the best armed in South America, with the country both the world’s largest producer of coca – the key ingredient in cocaine – and the scene of a bitter internal conflict between various groups of Marxist rebels and security forces.

Lasting some five decades, that conflict has cost an estimated 450,000 lives and displaced millions of civilians, mainly from impoverished rural areas.

That violence subsided thanks to controversial peace accords brokered in 2016 by then president Juan Manuel Santos with the main rebel group, the FARC. But it has recently ramped up again in the southwest of the country, near the lawless borders with Ecuador and Peru, as dissident FARC members refuse to lay down their arms.

Throughout the conflict, members of the Colombian armed forces have frequently been accused of human rights abuses and corruption. Mr Santos’s predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, faces trial for witness tampering for allegedly covering up his links to far-Right paramilitary groups that were also fighting the FARC.

According to the inspections, nearly one million bullets and 10,000 grenades had gone missing from Tolemaida. In La Guajira, more than four million bullets, 9,300 grenades, 550 rocket-propelled grenades, 37 Nimrod missiles and two Spike missiles were unaccounted for.