Colombian military uses latest technology to disarm landmines

Latin America

Colombia has the second-largest number of landmines in the world behind Afghanistan. In 2016, more than 70 Colombians died as a result of landmine explosions.

The military is using the latest technology, and developing new ones, to disarm them.

CGTN’s Michelle Begue reports from Bogota.

Tolemaida is home to a military air base where soldiers are testing the latest technology to disarm landmines. An anti-landmine boot is one of the technologies in development. It weighs one kilo, and promises to minimize the damage from a landmine.

Officials point out that it can cost less than a dollar to create a landmine versus $100 to deactivate just one of them.

Plastic bottles and syringes are some of the materials used by armed groups to create land mines. Soldiers explain that in the past seven years, landmine manufacturers stopped using metal to make the mines harder to detect. That is why new detectors were created to find the mines through variations in the terrains’ density of the terrain.

Thousands of Colombian soldiers are working non-stop to de-mine former guerrilla territories. In 2016, they destroyed nearly 160 explosive artifacts and cleared mines from around 261,000 square meters of land.