Thirty-five of the 267 alleged members of neo-paramilitary group ERPAC who were released after their demobilization in December have been arrested, Colombian authorities said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office, which was stongly criticized after arresting only 17 of the 284 neo-paramilitary suspects, said that investigators were able to arrest 17 ERPAC members in the central Colombian department of Meta and four in the capital Bogota.
The arrests brought the total of alleged ERPAC members behind bars to 35.
All suspected neo-paramilitary suspects face conspiracy charges.
ERPAC is one of the largest groups formed from the remnants of the officially demobilized AUC. According to military intelligence, the drug trafficking organization had 1,100 members. It is unclear whether the demobilization dissolved the group and that the actual size of ERPAC was smaller than assumed or that only a faction of the fighters surrendered to authorities.