Over 2,000 Colombian police officers backed by helicopters and sniffer dogs raided prisons nationwide on Tuesday in an operation to combat extortion rackets run out of penitentiaries.
The operation, which targeted 11 prisons, began in the early hours at detention centers in the capital Bogota, the northwestern city of Medellin and western city of Ibague, the prison service said in a statement.
Police chief William Salamanca said that the aim of the operation was to deal a blow to people “who are disrupting the peace and coexistence” in Colombia from behind bars.
Extortion is one of the main sources of income for organized crime gangs in South America.
Troops have been deployed for the past two months in neighboring Peru’s capital Lima to combat a wave of racketeering by criminal gangs targeting bus drivers, shopkeepers, restaurant owners and even schoolteachers.
Eight people have been arrested so far in Colombia’s prison raids, including six guards accused of acting as accomplices of convicts accused of racketeering from a prison in the central town of Girardot.
More than 300 cell phones have been seized.
Gang members are accused of holding people to ransom from their jail cells with threatening text messages and phone calls.
On the outside, criminal gangs threaten businesspeople and traders with punishment, including even death, if they do not pay protection money.
In Bogota, the authorities say extortion is mainly the work of gangs originating across the border in Venezuela, such as the infamous Tren de Aragua gang which is also active in the United States.
In rural and small-town Colombia, left-wing guerrillas such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), dissidents from the defunct FARC group and drug cartels such as the Gulf Clan also engage in extortion.
In 2023, at least 9,800 people reported being victims of protection rackets, according to data collected by the Ombudsman’s Office.
The office, which oversees the protection of human rights, asked the government to use technology to block mobile phone signals in prison.
