Statement by Jean Arnault, Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) and Head of the UN Mission in Colombia.

15 Aug 2017

Statement by Jean Arnault, Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) and Head of the UN Mission in Colombia.

Pondores, La Guajira - 15 August 2017. I am pleased to report about the balance of operations and activities related to the laying down of arms process:

Container removal 

To date, August 15, concluded the process of extracting all the armament and scrap ammunition in the 26 camps of the FARC-EP, as well as the collected from the arms caches until now. In addition to the operation that is being carried out in Pondores, extraction operations are currently underway in four areas: La Reforma, Yari, La Guajira and La Variante. The material transported in the containers consists of 8,112 guns and almost 1'300, 0000 incinerated cartridges.

I emphasize that the extraction process included 16 aerial-ground movements, and 10 terrestrial movements accounting for more than 50 flight hours from the three UN mission helicopters, and almost 11,000 kilometres travelled.

To date, the destruction of all the unstable material found in all 26 camps, including anti-personnel mines, grenades, homemade explosives, gunpowder, among others, was also completed.

Arms Caches Operations

Regarding the arms caches operations, to date there is information about 873 of which 510 arms caches have been successfully executed.

As the result of the extraction of arms caches operations, the UN Mission in Colombia in the field has counted, to date, the following material:

  • 795 weapons.
  • 293,803 ammunitions of different calibre of small arms.
  • 22,077 kilograms of various explosives.
  • 25,216 meters of detonating cord and slow wick.
  • 3,957 hand grenades and 40 mm grenades.
  • 1,846 antipersonnel mines.
  • 27,282 starters.
  • 1,130 mortar rounds, of which 81 mm, 60 mm and rockets are identified.

I consider this is an important figure, which shows that there has definitely been an exhaustive process of the abandonment of weapons, not only a process of abandoning individual arms, but also an exhaustive process of abandoning everything contained in the FARC-EP target teams and as President Juan Manuel Santos said, this leads the country to a new stage.

Thank you.

* * * *

Videos of the UN Mission containers movements from the zones

Images of the event and containers movements from the zones

*****​