For months, the mayor of Tibu, a Colombian town under the yoke of guerrilla violence, was forced to do his job from more than 115 kilometers (71 miles) away, after receiving death threats. Nelson Leal says he had no choice but to leave behind a “no-man’s land” under the control of dissidents who distanced themselves from the peace agreement the FARC guerrilla group signed with the government in 2016. In March, when he had been on the job for 18 months, rebels stopped him on a road and intimidated him in the presence of his wife, his 13-year-old son and a niece. Then they took his car. That was the incident that finally convinced him he had to leave, Leal told AFP in the city of Cucuta, where he now lives, governing Tibu by telephone Prior to that experience, another of his sons had guns pointed at him from a motorcycle, as a warning. But on October 8, Leal finally returned — under heavy guard — to the town of 60,000, which is now playing host to long-awaited talks between Bogota and dissident guerrillas who call themselves the Central General Staff (EMC). The talks kicked off on Monday after a weeklong delay amid rising tensions and several deaths in clashes between the two sides. Tibu is in the Catatumbo region, largely abandoned by state security forces and heavily contested by a plethora of armed groups. It is also the municipality with the most drug cultivation in the world, according to UN data, with an area of over 22,000 hectares (84 square-miles) planted with coca, the base ingredient for cocaine — of which Colombia is the world’s biggest producer. Apart from the EMC, Leal said, guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Gulf Clan — Colombia’s biggest drug organization — and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel are also active around Tibu, near the porous border with Venezuela