Colombian land mines kill, maim nine a month
( 2002-10-09 11:24 ) (7 )

Anti-personnel land mines kill and maim about nine people a month in war-torn Colombia, and 14,000 new mines are planted throughout the Andean nation every year, the government said on Tuesday.

A report from the vice president's office estimated a total of 100,000 land mines buried in Colombia, which is gripped by a 38-year-old guerrilla war which claims thousands of lives every year. Most victims of the mines are combatants, although reports of children tripping the explosives are common.

Almost 400 people have been killed and 960 people wounded by the devices since 1990, the report said. Government forces stopped planting mines two years ago, after ratifying the Ottawa treaty banning their use, but Marxist rebel fighters and paramilitary forces still scatter the devices to prevent incursions into their territory.

Hours after the report was released, the army said it found a rebel stockpile of 3,200 land mines in a remote jungle zone about 215 miles (350 km) southeast of Bogota. It said the mines presumably would have been used to protect nearby rebel camps.

Colombia, the size of France and Spain combined, is believed to have more mines than any other Latin American nation. Some 130,000 land mines were buried in Nicaragua during its civil war in the 1980s + about half of which have been destroyed, according to the Organization of American States.

The United Nations estimates that mines kill about 10,000 people a year around the world, and up to 40 percent of all mine victims are children under 15.