Paramilitaries confess to cremating 150 victims

[Judi Lynn]

Paramilitaries confess to cremating 150 victims
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 10:56 Adriaan Alsema

Former paramilitaries admit to cremating the bodies of some 150 of their victims in northern Colombia between 2000 and 2004, prosecutors told news agency AP.

According to Leonardo Cabana of the prosecutor general's Justice and Peace unit, paramilitaries testified that "approximately 150" corpses "were thrown into ovens" made of bricks and cement.

"They used the practice to make their victims disappear without leaving a trace, primarily because of the large number of deaths there were in this area," Cabana told AP.

The paramilitary commanders denied having thrown living victims in the ovens, "but we haven't fully ruled out that possibility," said the prosecutor.

Investigators located the remains of three ovens the paramilitaries said they used to cremate their victims in the Norte de Santander department. The ovens were originally designed for the production of panela, a traditional Colombian sweetener made of sugarcane.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11598-paras-confess-to-cremating-150-victims.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Colombia: Making People Disappear

Colombia: Making People Disappear
This week, Cambio has been tracking down one of the furnaces used to cremate Colombian victims of the paramilitaries.

There is one association and one association only with images like this, and you know it before I say it: the Holocaust. People whose lives somehow, in the view of the state at the time, don't matter any more, are pushed out of sight and then murdered, incinerated, and swept away.

Sure, we are not talking Auschwitz statistics: the estimation is that this furnace, built in an old sugarcane mill, was used to dispose of around 200 people. But you know, 200 is really a lot if you actually stop and think that each one was a living, breathing individual with a family. And this isn't the only furnace in Colombia; the article hints at others.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_OBdltJG8V8Q/Shl1VL8MMqI/AAAAAAAAAZc/Bx8z9qj2Xx8/s320/colombianosdesaparecidos.jpg

As is usually the case, local people knew what was going on. There is sometimes the misconception that state-sponsored acts of terror take place in utter secrecy. They don't, and they aren't supposed to. Establishing a state of generalised fear requires that people know that there is something to fear, and that they have some idea what it is. Their terror then turns them inward, away from society - people stop speaking and socialising freely and simply keep their heads down and concentrate on surviving. In this case, there were witnesses when the paramilitaries arrived and built the furnaces, but they haven't spoken about it openly until now.

This is a long article with some distressing details in the various testimonies, but worth reading for the Spanish speakers.

Cambio conocio los hornos crematorios que construyeron los paramilitares en Norte de Santander
http://www.cambio.com.co/informeespecialcambio/829/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR_CAMBIO-5235387.html

http://memoryinlatinamerica.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

[Bacchus39]

4. the English language blog you copied is not a translation of the Cambio post

you copied an opinion from the memoryinlatinamerica blog. not the content of the cambio report. since you don't speak Spanish you don't know what the cambio post says. this is a deceptive post. no one is arguing that paramilitaries haven't murdered people. or as you prefer "false positived" people but posting comments from another blog should not be an acceptable post especially when referencing another article.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Incentivizing Murder: Plan Colombia and the Bitter Fruits of Empire

Incentivizing Murder: Plan Colombia and the Bitter Fruits of Empire
by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 30 October 2008

The War on Drugs meets the War on Terror, and the result, inevitably, is stone-cold murder: Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents (NYT):

Colombia’s government, the Bush administration’s top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the disappearance of ...dozens of young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light in recent weeks. Some were vagrants, others street vendors and manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: being catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces.

Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia’s security forces are increasingly murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing the corpses in guerrilla fatigues.

With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a grisly facet of Colombia’s long internal war against leftist insurgencies.

The wave of recent killings has also heightened focus on the American Embassy here, which is responsible for vetting Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive aid. A study of civilian killings by Amnesty International and Fellowship of Reconciliation, two human rights groups, found that 47 percent of the reported cases in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States.

....Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in American security aid. But more than 100 claims of civilian deaths at the hands of security forces have emerged in recent weeks alone, from nine different parts of Colombia. Cases have included the killing of a homeless man, a young man who suffered epileptic seizures and a veteran who had left the army after his left arm was amputated.

More:
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/103008Floyd.shtml

[EFerrari]

3. No words.

K&R