The South American nation’s Constitutional Court said on Friday that the tech firm had removed Esperanza Gómez’s account “without a clear and transparent justification” and without offering similar treatment to other, similar accounts.

The 45-year-old, whose account had more than five million followers, is one of Colombia’s best known adult content actresses.

Meta argued in the case that she had violated its rules on nudity. The company, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, did not immediately react to the ruling.

Ms Gómez had alleged that the decision to close her account had affected her ability to work and had been influenced by her pornographic work beyond the platform. She also claimed Meta had not followed due process.

In its ruling, the court said that, while it recognised the social media platform’s need to moderate content, this did not justify closing a porn star’s account “without a clear and transparent justification”.

It also found Meta “applied its policies on nudity and sexual services inconsistently”, with other accounts with similar content remaining active.

The court said social media posts were protected under Colombia’s constitution and should only be limited in a proportionate way where necessary.

It ordered Meta to “review and adjust Instagram’s terms of use and privacy policy so that users are clearly aware of the mechanisms for challenging moderation decisions” and “more precisely define” its rules on implicit sexual content.

If social media platforms use offline activities as a criterion for content moderation, they must clearly state these, the court said.

The court did not specify sanctions for non-compliance, nor whether Ms Gómez would receive any redress.

The BBC has contacted Meta for comment.

It is not the first time that a South American court has required a social network to change its policies.

Brazil’s Supreme Court recent ruled that social media were directly liable for illegal content, including hate speech, and must immediately act to remove it and accounts proliferating it.

That ruling followed a judge ordering the suspension of dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation.

It led to the social media platform briefly being banned in Brazil, before it began complying with the ruling and paid a $5.1 (£3.8m) fine.

Data leaked by a former employee reveals more than 800 records of these sites from 1989 to 2018, and indicates the company had failed to report about a fifth of them.

The BBC has also obtained figures showing the company has spilled oil hundreds of times since then.

Ecopetrol says it complies fully with Colombian law and has industry-leading practices on sustainability.

The company’s main refinery is in Barrancabermeja, 260km (162 miles) north of the Colombian capital Bogota.

The huge cluster of processing plants, industrial chimneys and storage tanks stretches for close to 2km (1.2 miles) along the banks of Colombia’s longest river, the Magdalena – a water source for millions of people.

Members of the fishing community there believe oil pollution is affecting wildlife in the river.

The wider area is home to endangered river turtles, manatees and spider monkeys, and is part of a species-rich hotspot in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. Nearby wetlands include a protected habitat for jaguars.

When the BBC visited last June, families were fishing together in waterways criss-crossed by oil pipelines.

One local said some of the fish they caught released the pungent smell of crude oil as they were cooked.

In places, a film with iridescent swirls could be seen on the surface of the water – a distinctive signature of contamination by oil.

A fisherman dived down in the water and brought up a clump of vegetation caked in dark slime.

Pointing to it, Yuly Velásquez, president of Fedepesan, a federation of fishing organisations in the region, said: “This is all grease and waste that comes directly from the Ecopetrol refinery.”

Ecopetrol, which is 88% owned by the Colombian state and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, rejects the fishers’ claims that it is polluting the water.

In response to the BBC’s questions, it says it has efficient wastewater treatment systems and effective contingency plans for oil spills.

Andrés Olarte, the whistleblower who has shared the company’s data, says pollution by the firm dates back many years.

He joined Ecopetrol in 2017 and started working as an adviser to the CEO. He says he soon realised “something was wrong”.

Mr Olarte says he challenged managers about what he describes as “awful” pollution data, but was rebuffed with reactions such as: “Why are you asking these questions? You’re not getting what this job is about.”

He left the company in 2019, and shared a large amount of company data with US-based NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and later with the BBC. The BBC has verified it came from Ecopetrol’s servers.

One database he has shared, dated January 2019, contains a list of 839 so-called “unresolved environmental impacts” across Colombia.

Ecopetrol uses this term to mean areas where oil is not fully cleaned up from soil and water. The data shows that, as of 2019, some of these sites had remained polluted in this way for over a decade.

Mr Olarte alleges that the firm was trying to hide some of them from Colombian authorities, pointing to about a fifth of the records labelled “only known to Ecopetrol”.

“You could see a category in the Excel where it lists which one is hidden from an authority and which one is not, which shows the process of hiding stuff from the government,” says Mr Olarte.

The BBC filmed at one of the sites marked “only known to Ecopetrol”, which was dated 2017 in the database. Seven years later, a thick, black, oily-looking substance with plastic containment barriers around it was visible along the edge of a section of wetland.

Ecopetrol’s CEO from 2017 to 2023, Felipe Bayón, told the BBC he strongly denied suggestions that there was any policy to withhold information about pollution.

“I say to you with complete confidence that there is not, and was not any policy nor any instruction saying, ‘these things can’t be shared’,” he said.

Mr Bayón blamed sabotage for many oil spills.

Colombia has a long history of armed conflict, and illegal armed groups have targeted oil facilities – but “theft” or “attack” are only mentioned for 6% of the cases listed in the database.

He also said he believed there had been a “significant advance” since then in solving problems that lead to oil pollution.

However, a separate set of data shows Ecopetrol has continued to pollute.

Figures obtained by the BBC from Colombia’s environmental regulator, the Autoridad Nacional de Licencias Ambientales (Anla), show Ecopetrol has reported hundreds of oil spills per year since 2020.

Asked about the 2019 database of polluted sites, Ecopetrol admits it has records of 839 environmental incidents, but disputes that all of them were classed as “unresolved”.

The firm says 95% of polluted sites that have been classed as unresolved since 2018 have now been cleaned up.

It says all pollution incidents are subject to a management process and are reported to the regulator.

The data from the regulator includes hundreds of spills in the Barrancabermeja area where Ms Velásquez and the fishers live.

The fisherwoman and her colleagues have been monitoring biodiversity in the area’s wetlands, which feed into the Magdalena River.

She said there had been a “massacre” of fauna. “This year, there were three dead manatees, five dead buffalo. We found more than 10 caimans. We found turtles, capybaras, birds, thousands of dead fish,” she said last June.

It is not clear what caused the deaths – the El Niño weather phenomenon and climate change may be factors.

A 2022 study by the University of Nottingham lists pollution – from oil production and other industrial and domestic sources – as one factor among several, including climate change, that are degrading the Magdalena river basin.

Mr Olarte left Ecopetrol in 2019. He moved to his family home near Barrancabermeja, and says he met with an old contact to ask about job openings. Soon afterwards, he says an anonymous caller rang his phone threatening to kill him.

“In the call I understood they thought I had put complaints against Ecopetrol, which was not the case,” he says.

Mr Olarte says more threats followed, including a note that he showed to the BBC. He does not know who made the threats and there is no evidence that Ecopetrol ordered them.

Ms Velásquez and seven other people also told the BBC they had received death threats after challenging Ecopetrol.

She said an armed group had fired warning shots at her house and spray-painted the word “leave” on the wall.

The fisherwoman is now protected by armed bodyguards paid for by the government, but the threats have continued.

Asked about the threats Mr Olarte described, the former CEO Mr Bayón said they were “absolutely unacceptable”.

“I want to make it totally clear… that never, at any time, was there any order of that sort,” Mr Bayón said.

Ms Velásquez and Mr Olarte both know the risks are real. Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for environmental defenders, according to the NGO Global Witness, with 79 killed in 2023.

Experts say such killings are linked to Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict, in which government forces and paramilitaries allied to them have fought left-wing rebel groups.

Despite government attempts to end the conflict, armed groups and drug cartels remain active in parts of the country.

Matthew Smith, an oil analyst and financial journalist based in Colombia, says he does not believe Ecopetrol managers are involved in threats by armed groups.

But he says there is an “immense” overlap between former paramilitary groups and the private security sector.

Private security firms often employ former members of paramilitary groups and compete for lucrative contracts to protect oil facilities, he says.

Mr Olarte has shared internal Ecopetrol emails showing that in 2018, the company paid a total of $65m to more than 2,800 private security companies.

“There is always that risk of some sort of contagion between the private security companies, the types of people they employ, and their desire to continually maintain their contract,” Mr Smith says.

He says this could potentially even include kidnapping or murdering community leaders or environmental defenders in order to “ensure that Ecopetrol’s operations proceed smoothly”.

Mr Bayón said he was “convinced that the checks and due diligence were done” regarding the company’s relationships with private security companies.

Ecopetrol says it has never had relationships with illegal armed groups. It says it has a strong due diligence process and carries out human rights impact assessments for its activities.

The BBC contacted other members of Ecopetrol’s former leadership from the time of Mr Olarte’s employment, who strongly deny the allegations in this report.

Now living in Germany, Mr Olarte has been submitting complaints about Ecopetrol’s environmental record to the Colombian authorities and the company itself – so far, without meaningful result.

He has also been in a series of legal cases against Ecopetrol and its management, related to his employment there, which are as yet unresolved.

“I did this in defence of my home, of my land, of my region, of my people,” he says.

Mr Bayón stressed the economic and social importance of Ecopetrol to Colombia.

“We have 1.5 million families who don’t have access to energy or who cook with firewood and coal,” he said. “I believe that we must continue to rely on clean production of oil, gas, all energy sources, to transition without ending an industry that is so important for Colombians.”

And Ms Velásquez remains determined to continue speaking out, despite the threats.

“If we don’t go fishing, we don’t eat,” she said. “If we speak and report, we are killed… And if we don’t report, we kill ourselves, because all these incidents of heavy pollution are destroying the environment around us.”

One day in 1989, Gonzalo Rojas was at school in the Colombian capital of Bogota when a teacher pulled him out of class to deliver some devastating news.

His father, also called Gonzalo, had died in a plane crash that morning.

“I remember leaving and seeing my mum and grandma waiting for me, crying,” says Mr Rojas, who was just 10-years-old at the time. “It was a very, very sad day.”

Minutes after take off, an explosion on board Avianca flight 203 killed the 107 passengers and crew, as well as three people on the ground who were hit by falling debris.

The blast wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate bomb attack by Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel.

While an era defined by drug wars, bombings, kidnappings and a sky high murder rate has largely been relegated to Colombia’s past, Escobar’s legacy has not.

The notorious criminal, who was killed by security forces in 1993, has achieved a near cult-like status around the world, immortalised in books, music and TV productions like the Netflix series Narcos.

In Colombia itself, his name and face are adorned on mugs, keychains, and t-shirts in tourist shops catering mainly to curious visitors.

But a proposed law in Colombia’s Congress is seeking to change this.

The bill wants to ban Escobar merchandise – and that of other convicted criminals – to help put an end to the glorification of a drug boss who was central in the global cocaine trade and widely held responsible for at least 4,000 killings.

“Difficult issues that are part of the history and memory of our country cannot simply be remembered by a T-shirt, or a sticker sold on a street corner,” says Juan Sebastián Gómez, Congress member and co-author of the bill.

The proposed law would prohibit the selling, as well as the use and carrying of clothing and items promoting criminals, including Escobar. It would mean fines for those who violated the rules, and a temporary suspension of businesses.

Many vendors selling the goods claim a law prohibiting this merchandise would harm their livelihoods.

“This is terrible. We have a right to work, and these Pablo T-shirts especially always sell well,” says Joana Montoya, who owns a stall stocked full of Escobar merchandise in Comuna 13, a popular tourist zone of Medellín.

Medellín, Escobar’s hometown, was known as “the most dangerous city in the world” in the late 80s and early 90s due to violence associated with drug wars and Colombia’s armed conflict.

Today it’s been revitalised into a hub of innovation and tourism, with vendors eager to cash in on the influx of visitors wanting to take home souvenirs – some related to Escobar.

“This Escobar merchandise benefits many families here – it sustains us. It helps us pay our rent, buy food, look after our kids,” says Ms Montaya, who supports herself and her young daughter.

Ms Montoya says at least 15% of her sales come from Escobar products, but some sellers tell the BBC that for them it’s as much as 60%.

If the bill is approved there would be a defined time period for sellers to familiarise themselves with the new rules and phase out their Escobar stock.

“We’d need a transition phase so that people could stop selling these products and replace them with other ones,” explains Congressman Gómez. He says that Colombia has more interesting things to show than drug lords, and that the association with Escobar has stigmatised the country abroad.

Some of the T-shirts, sold for around £5, bear a catchphrase linked to Escobar – “silver or lead?”. This symbolises the choice the cartel boss gave to those who posed a threat to his criminal operations: accept a bribe or be killed.

Shop assistant María Suarez believes that the profit gained from sales of Escobar merchandise isn’t ethical.

“We need this ban. He did awful things and these souvenirs are things that shouldn’t exist,” she says, explaining that she feels uncomfortable that her boss stocks Escobar items.

Escobar and his Medellín cartel at one point were believed to have controlled 80% of the cocaine entering the US. In 1987, he was named as one of the richest people in the world by Forbes magazine.

He spent some of his fortune developing deprived neighbourhoods, but many people consider this as a tactic to buy loyalty from some segments of the population.

Years on from his father’s death, Mr Rojas remembers him as a calm and responsible man, who loved his family. For him, the bill is a defining moment.

“It’s a milestone in the road about how we reflect on what is happening in terms of the commercialisation of images of Pablo Escobar in order to correct it,” says Mr Rojas.

Yet he does have criticisms about the proposals. He believes the bill doesn’t focus enough on education.

Mr Rojas recalls a day many years ago when he met a man wearing a green T-shirt with a silhouette of Escobar, and the words “Pablo, President”.

“It caused me such confusion that I wasn’t able to say anything to him about it,” he says.

“There needs to be more of an emphasis on how we deliver different messages to new generations, so that there isn’t a positive image of what a cartel boss is.”

Mr Rojas has actively been involved in efforts to reshape narratives around Escobar and the drug trade. Along with some other victims, he launched narcostore.co in 2019, an online shop that appears to sell Escobar-themed items.

But none of the products actually exist and when customers select an item they are shown a video testimony from a victim. Mr Rojas says the site has attracted 180 million visits from around the world.

In Colombia’s Congress, the bill faces four stages it needs to pass before it can become law. Gómez says he’s hoping it sparks reflection both inside and outside of Congress.

“In Germany you don’t sell Hitler T-shirts or swastikas. In Italy you don’t sell Mussolini stickers, and you don’t go to Chile and get a copy of Pinochet’s ID card.

“I think the most important thing the bill can do is to generate a conversation as a country – a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.”

Medellín’s mayor – who was also a presidential candidate in the 2022 elections – has publicly backed the bill, calling the merchandise “an insult to the city, the country and the victims”.

In El Poblado, an upmarket area of Medellín popular with tourists, three Americans browse a stall brimming with souvenirs. One buys a cap with Escobar’s name and face printed on the front. He says he wants a memento of “history”.

But for supporters of the bill, this isn’t about removing Escobar from history, it’s about erasing a mythical construct of him, fostering new ways to honour the victims he killed – and acknowledging the lingering pain of victims left behind.

The migrants had been on US military flights headed for Colombia on Sunday, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro barred the US military aircraft from landing, arguing that those on board were being treated like criminals.

The incident took the two countries to the brink of a trade war after DonaldTrump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Colombian goods and Petro said he would retaliate in kind.

Diplomats from both countries reached a deal which has seen Colombia send its own air force planes to collect the migrants, a process that Petro said ensured they were treated “with dignity”.

“They are Colombians, free and dignified, and in their homeland where they are loved,” he wrote on X.

He also posted photos of the migrants getting off the plane without handcuffs.

The treatment of deportees on US military flights seems to have been at the centre of the spat between the two governments.

Colombia has accepted deportation flights from the US in the past: in 2024, 124 planes carrying deported migrants from the US landed in the country.

But in one of his posts on X on Sunday, Petro referenced a news video showing migrants deported from the US to Brazil, who had been handcuffed and had their feet restrained during the deportation flight.

The Colombian leader said that he would “never allow Colombians to be returned handcuffed on flights”.

Petro’s refusal to let the US military aircraft land angered President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to remove unlawful migrants from the US through “mass deportations”.

Trump directed his administration to “immediately” slap 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said would increase to 50% after a week.

He also imposed visa restrictions and other sanctions, in what many observers felt was an attempt to send a message to other countries to co-operate or face serious consequences.

US State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told Fox News on Monday that “this was about reminding Colombia that there is a price to pay if you go against your agreements, things that you promise”.

The US embassy in Bogotá cancelled hundreds of visa appointments on Monday and Tuesday.

Colombians arriving at the gates were handed letters which told them the cancellation was “due to the Colombian government’s refusal to accept repatriation flights of Colombian nationals”, the Associated Press reported.

US officials had said earlier that the visa restrictions would not be lifted until the migrants who had been turned back on Sunday had landed in Colombia.

Neither the US nor the Colombian government have provided details of the deal that defused the situation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement that “the Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on US military aircraft, without limitation or delay”.

Meanwhile, Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said that the “impasse” with Washington had been “overcome”.

Murillo added that his government would continue to receive Colombian deportees in “dignified conditions”.

It is not currently clear if Colombia will continue sending air force planes to the US to collect deported migrants or if Tuesday’s two flights were a one-off.

Central American and South American leaders are expected to discuss how to deal with the Trump administration’s migration policy at a summit convened by Honduras in the wake of the Colombia-US spat.

President Petro has already confirmed his attendance.

The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.

The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.

President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.

The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.

“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.

She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants from the US, with the promise of “mass deportations”.

The row between Colombia’s left-wing president and Trump escalated rapidly on Sunday.

Petro, a keen user of social media, posted on X that he had “barred US planes carrying Colombian migrants from entering our territory” because “the US can’t treat Colombian migrants like criminals”.

He demanded that the US put procedures in place for migrants to be “treated with dignity”.

He also said he was ready to send the presidential plane to the US to transport the migrants.

Colombia has accepted deportation flights from the US in the past. In 2024, 124 planes carrying deported migrants from the US landed in the country.

But President Petro appeared to object to the return of deportees on military rather than civilian flights – and to the way the migrants may be treated on those military flights.

In his posts on X, Petro referenced a news video showing migrants deported from the US to Brazil, who had been handcuffed and had their feet restrained during the deportation flight.

He said that he would “never allow Colombians to be returned handcuffed on flights”.

Petro’s refusal to let two US military planes carrying Colombian deportees to land triggered a quick response by Trump on Truth Social.

“I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people,” he wrote.

Trump argued that Petro’s denial of these flights had jeopardised the national security and public safety of the US.

He said he had directed his administration to “immediately” impose 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said would be raised to 50% if Colombia did not comply within a week.

He also said he had imposed a travel ban and revoked the visas of Colombian government officials “and all allies and supporters”.

In his post, he warned that “these measures are just the beginning”.

Petro responded on X with a long, rambling but ultimately defiant post in which he said he would match any US-imposed tariffs.

“Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, members of Petro’s administration worked behind the scenes to defuse the row.

In a late-night news conference, Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo announced that the two countries had “overcome the impasse” and that Colombia would accept returned citizens.

While Murillo did not directly refer to the White House statement, according to which Colombia had agreed to allow US military flights to take the deportees back, he did not deny it either.

The foreign minister reiterated Colombia’s offer to send its presidential plane to the US to transport the deportees.

While the Colombian concession seems to have averted the looming trade war, the US has said that visa restrictions on Colombian government officials would stay in place until the first planeload of deportees landed in Colombia.

Colombians arriving at US airports will also undergo greater scrutiny under the measures imposed on Sunday, the Trump administration said.

Colombia’s foreign minister said he would travel to Washington “in the coming days” for high-level meetings with administration officials.

Rival factions have been vying for control of the cocaine trade in the region – which sits near the border with Venezuela – for years.

The Ombudsman’s Office said the latest violence involved the National Liberation Army (ELN) – the largest armed group still active in Colombia – and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which signed a peace treaty with the state in 2016.

The attacks broke an uneasy truce between the guerrilla groups, which had been in peace negotiations with the government.

The Ombudsman’s Office, a government agency that oversees the protection of citizens’ human and civil rights, previously reported that 40 had died in the violence.

It said that many people, including community leaders and their families, were facing a “special risk” of being kidnapped or killed at the hands of the ELN. It noted that 20 people had recently been kidnapped, half of whom were women.

The office said that among those killed were seven peace treaty signatories and Carmelo Guerrero, the leader of the Association for Peasant Unity in Catatumbo (Asuncat), a local advocacy group.

Asuncat wrote on social media on Friday that Roger Quintero and Freiman Velasquez, members of its board of directors, had not been seen since the previous day, and that it suspected armed groups had taken them.

“In some communities in the region, food shortages are beginning to be reported, affecting local communities,” the Ombudsman’s Office wrote in a statement on Saturday, adding that thousands of people are believed to have been displaced by the violence.

“Elderly people, children, adolescents, pregnant women and people with disabilities are suffering the consequences of these events.”

“Catatumbo is once again stained with blood,” the Association of Mothers of Catatumbo for Peace wrote on Friday.

“The bullets exchanged not only hurt those who hold the weapons, but also tear apart the dreams of our communities, break up families and sow terror in the hears of our children.”

The Ombudsman’s Office appeared to lay the blame for the latest violence on the ELN, which had been in peace talks with the Colombian government until they were suspended on Friday due to the violence in Catatumbo.

President Gustavo Petro – who since his election in 2022 has sought to end violence between armed groups in the country – accused the ELN of “war crimes” and said the group “shows no willingness to make peace”.

The ELN accused Farc of having initiated the conflict by killing civilians in a statement on Saturday, according to Reuters news agency. Farc has not publicly responded to the allegation.

On Saturday, the Colombian army announced it was sending additional troops to the region in an effort to restore peace.

The ELN launched an assault in the northeastern Catatumbo region last Thursday on a rival group comprised of ex-members of the now-defunct FARC armed group who kept fighting after it disarmed in 2017.

Civilians were trapped in the middle, and by Sunday, it was estimated that “more than 80 people have lost their lives,” said Governor William Villamizar of the Norte de Santander department that includes Catatumbo.

The last toll on Saturday was estimated at 60 people, including seven former fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in five municipalities of the mountainous cocaine-producing region near the border with Venezuela.

Among the victims are community leader Carmelo Guerrero and seven people who sought to sign a peace deal, according to a report that a government ombudsman agency released late on Saturday.

Thousands  of people are fleeing the area, with some hiding in the nearby lush mountains or seeking help at government shelters.

Villamizar  said about two dozen people had been injured and some 5,000 displaced in the outbreak of violence, and described the resulting humanitarian situation as “alarming”.

“Catatumbo needs help,” Villamizar said in a public address on Saturday.

“Boys, girls, young people, teenagers, entire families are showing up with nothing, riding trucks, dump trucks, motorcycles, whatever they can, on foot, to avoid being victims of this confrontation.”

The army said more than 5,000 soldiers have been sent to the region to “reinforce security”.

Army commander General Luis Emilio Cardozo Santamaria said on Saturday that authorities were reinforcing a humanitarian corridor between Tibu and Cucuta for the safe passage of those forced to flee their homes. He said special urban soldiers also were deployed to municipal capitals “where there are risks and a lot of fear”.

The  FARC disarmed under a 2016 peace deal reached after more than half a century of war.

However, the pact failed to extinguish the violence involving leftist groups, including FARC holdouts, right-wing paramilitaries and drug cartels over resources and trafficking routes in some regions of the country.

The ELN has accused ex-FARC rebels of several killings in the area, including the January 15 slaying of a couple and their nine-month-old baby.

In a statement on Saturday, the ELN said it had warned former FARC members that if they “continued attacking the population … there was no other way out than armed confrontation”.

The ELN has in recent days also clashed with the Gulf Clan, the largest drug cartel in the world’s biggest cocaine producer, leaving at least nine dead in a different part of northern Colombia.

The latest violence prompted President Gustavo Petro on Friday to call off negotiations with the ELN in his pursuit of “total peace” for the violence-riddled country.

Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, now 67 years old, was deported by the US government and landed in Bogota on Monday a free man.

Ochoa was one of the founding members of the notorious cartel and had been a senior lieutenant to infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The Medellin cartel dominated the cocaine trade and waged a violent campaign against the Colombian state before Escobar was killed in 1993.

On his arrival in Bogota, immigration officials ran Ochoa’s fingerprints through their database, the country’s immigration agency said.Confirming that he is not wanted by Colombian authorities, it said that Ochoa was freed “to be reunited with his family”.Amid a sea of reporters in the airport terminal, Ochoa was greeted by his relatives and hugged his daughter.In 2001, Ochoa was flown to the US after being arrested in Colombia in 1999 along with about 30 other alleged traffickers.He had already served a jail sentence in Colombia in the early 90s for his role as one of bosses of the Medellin cartel. Along with his brothers, he was the first major trafficker to surrender under a programme that protected cartel members from extradition to the US if they pleaded guilty to minor offences in Colombia.Ochoa and his brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested once again during the so-called Millennium operation over his involvement in the cocaine smuggling business in the US in the late 1990s.In 2003, Ochoa was sentenced to more than 30 years in a US court for his involvement in the cartel that brought an average of 30 tonnes of cocaine into the US each month between 1997 and 1999.

During the 1980s, he was one of the top operators in Escobar’s Medellin ring, a supplier in its prime of 80% of the US cocaine market.The defunct Medellin cartel, along with the Cali cartel, was one of the most powerful and feared drug networks of the 1980s.Its violent campaigns of bombings and assassinations led to extraditions of drugs suspects between Colombia and the US to be suspended, before being resumed in 1997.

More than 12.6m cases and 7,700 deaths were recorded in what Paho says is the biggest outbreak in the region since records began in 1980.

Brazil, Argentina, Colombia in South America and Mexico in North America were hit especially hard by the virus, accounting for the majority of cases and deaths.

Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause serious illness or death in some cases.

Symptoms include a fever, severe headache, pain behind the eyes, muscle and joint pain, and a blotchy rash.

Those with a more severe type of dengue might experience severe stomach pain, fatigue, vomiting, and blood in vomit or stool.

Vaccines have been introduced in some countries in the region, while others, such as Honduras, plan to start distribution in 2025.

In a statement, Paho urged for stronger mitigation efforts and collaboration across the Americas.

Its director, Dr Jarbas Barbosa, said the high number of cases was linked to a hotter, wetter climate and factors such as accumulated water around the home and poor waste management, which create breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

He also said the virus was posing a “higher-than-normal” risk to children.

In Guatemala, 70% of dengue-related deaths were children, while in Mexico, Costa Rica and Paraguay, under-15s made up more than a third of severe cases, Paho data showed.

Children and people with pre-existing health conditions are more likely to catch the disease and develop more serious symptoms.

Around half the world’s population live in areas with a risk of contracting the disease, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It is spread through the bite of an infected mosquito, most commonly the Aedes aegypti.

The shipment – believed to be one of the biggest drug seizures ever seen in the UK – was intercepted at Portsmouth Port in February 2021.

Undercover officers posed as lorry drivers to take dummy crates to a warehouse in north London.

Petko Zhutev, Ghergii Diko and Bruno Kuci pleaded guilty to smuggling, while Erik Muci and Olsi Ebeja were found guilty of their involvement following a trial at the Old Bailey.

The bananas were imported by Agro Food Ltd, which had traded in fresh produce for five years before changing hands in December 2020 and appointing Zhutev as director.

The Bulgarian national had come to the UK to find a legitimate company to purchase as a cover for drug smuggling, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.

He received the shipment at the firm’s Edmonton warehouse, not knowing that the cocaine had been removed and replaced with bananas and listening devices, police said.

When armed police raided the unit, they found the dummy crates had been set to one side and some of the boxes opened.

Police also found a loaded black Turkish Ozkursan revolver in the warehouse.

Zhutev, Diko and Kuci were all arrested and subsequently charged with importing Class A drugs, as well as possessing a firearm and ammunition with intent to endanger life.

Diko and Kuci pleaded guilty to the charges, but Zhutev was cleared of the firearm and ammunition offences after a trial in 2023.

Jurors failed to reach a verdict on the drugs importation charges and a retrial took place this summer.

Kuci, described as a “trusted member of the operation”, was jailed for 21 years and Diko, who also moved to the UK from Albania and had worked as a mechanic, for 18 years.

Zhutev changed his plea to guilty in September and has now been sentenced to 27 years in prison.

Muci, who the NCA described as one of the scheme’s principal organisers, was found guilty of smuggling and jailed for 26 years. He received a further consecutive sentence of seven years for supplying Class A drugs.

Ebeja, who the NCA said was the intended lookout and driver, was found guilty of smuggling Class A drugs at the same trial, but the jury failed to reach a verdict on the charge of supplying them. He was sentenced to 17 years behind bars.

Sentencing them earlier, Judge Rebecca Trowler KC said the importation had been “plainly the work of an organised crime group with international elements”.

The CPS said it would start proceedings to reclaim the money made from the crimes.