Breaking the silence on Colombia's disappeared

[Judi Lynn]

Breaking the silence on Colombia's disappeared
Thursday, 09 December 2010 11:10 Scott Kobewka

The number of "disappeared" in Colombia may be far higher than the official figure of 51,000, according to a report from the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWG) and the U.S. Office on Colombia.

Victims of disappearances include human rights defenders, trade unionists, Afro-Colombians, indigenous people, young men and girls in rural conflict zones, members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual) community, homeless people, and other groups identified as "undesirables," according to the report.

The report blames the phenomenon on various groups, saying that "Colombia’s armed forces and police and all illegal armed groups have been responsible for disappearances." It points out that as paramilitary activity increased in the 1990s, so did disappearances attributed to the paramilitaries.

LAWG cites the "false positives" scandal as a cause of many disappearances in the past decade. The United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Philip Alston, found that soldiers had committed these killings “in a pattern that was repeated around the country." In a false positive killing a military, or in some cases guerrilla, "recruiter" lured the victim to a remote location where they were then killed by the military and reported as a combat death. "Within the military," says Alston, "success was associated with 'kill counts' of guerrillas." By 2010 there were more than 3,000 cases registered in Colombian courts against the military in relation to false positives.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/13338-breaking-silence-colombias-disappeared.html