Colombian rebels said to have broken ceasefire pledge

They had promised not to attack for two months from 20 November while talking peace with the Colombian state, but this pledge by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was apparently broken by a deadly mortar or explosives attack on 8 December, which the army attributed to the FARC. An army colonel said members of the FARC's Sixth Front were suspected to have thrown explosives at houses in a rural zone of the district of Caloto in the Cauca department, killing a man and injuring three women, the daily El Espectador reported. One of the injured was a 16-year-old girl. "We don't know where the ceasefire is because look what happened here," El Tiempo cited a relative of the victims as saying. The daily cited the head of the army's anti-terrorist Apollo Task force General Jorge Humberto Jerez Cuellar as saying that troops were two kilometres from the site of the incident, meaning this could not have been a defensive action. Another army spokesman was reported as saying that there had been no recent clashes in this area. Jerez was cited by the same daily as saying on 20 November that the FARC broke their ceasefire pledge hours after declaring it. They apparently failed in their bid to draw soldiers onto a minefield that day. On 9 December, the FARC publicly urged the Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno to start a "verbal ceasefire" and stop his alleged hostility to ongoing peace conversations in Havana. "We urge the Defence Minister to at least end his verbal hostility, which is incessantly firing at the peace process," the rebel and FARC negotiator dubbed Iván Márquez stated in Havana, reading out a communiqué. The statement added that peace depended not just on negotiators but on the "involvement of the national country" and the "common people," El Espectador reported.