Colombia military atrocities alleged

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia military atrocities alleged
Human rights groups say extrajudicial killings by the army and police have risen, with at least 329 last year. Officials acknowledge problems and point to efforts to train troops.
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
9:25 PM PDT, August 20, 2008

MELGAR, COLOMBIA -- The number of civilians killed by the Colombian armed forces has soared, activist groups allege, with many of the abuses committed by army units that had been vetted by the State Department.

There were 329 so-called extrajudicial killings by the Colombian military and police last year, a coalition of Colombian rights groups asserts in a report, a 48% increase from the 223 reported in 2006.

The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogota-based civil society group that is responsible for verifying many of the deaths, said last week that a significant number of killings of civilians by the armed forces had been reported so far in 2008 in five Colombian states, but provided no precise numbers.

A separate analysis of last year's killings by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a New York-based peace group, alleges that 47% of the homicides were committed by army units that had been scrutinized in 2006 or 2007 by the State Department, which determined that they had complied with human rights requirements, making them eligible for U.S. military aid and training.

More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-abuses21-2008aug21,0,2705496.story

[Judi Lynn]

1. The “Sixth Division”: Military-paramilitary Ties and U.S. Policy in Colombia

The “Sixth Division”: Military-paramilitary Ties and U.S. Policy in Colombia


I. Summary and Recommendations
The "Sixth Division" is a phrase used in Colombia to refer to paramilitary groups. Colombia's Army has five divisions, but many Colombians told Human Rights Watch that paramilitaries are so fully integrated into the army's battle strategy, coordinated with its soldiers in the field, and linked to government units via intelligence, supplies, radios, weapons, cash, and common purpose that they effectively constitute a sixth division of the army.

Clearly, Colombia is more complex than this perception implies. President Andrés Pastrana, his vice president, Colombian government ministers, diplomats, and top generals alike publicly denounce paramilitary groups. Increasingly, paramilitary fighters are arrested. This is a stark contrast to years past, when military commanders denied that paramilitaries even existed and government officials were largely silent about their activities. Today, Colombian officials routinely describe paramilitaries as criminals, an advance Human Rights Watch acknowledges.

Nevertheless, the reference to the "sixth division" reflects a reality that is in plain view. Human Rights Watch has documented abundant, detailed, and compelling evidence that certain Colombian army brigades and police detachments continue to promote, work with, support, profit from, and tolerate paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied to and compatible with their own.

At their most brazen, the relationships described in this report involve active coordination during military operations between government and paramilitary units; communication via radios, cellular telephones, and beepers; the sharing of intelligence, including the names of suspected guerrilla collaborators; the sharing of fighters, including active-duty soldiers serving in paramilitary units and paramilitary commanders lodging on military bases; the sharing of vehicles, including army trucks used to transport paramilitary fighters; coordination of army roadblocks, which routinely let heavily-armed paramilitary fighters pass; and payments made from paramilitaries to military officers for their support.

In the words of one Colombian municipal official, the relationship between Colombian military units, particularly the army, and paramilitaries is a "marriage."

More:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/colombia/1.htm

[Judi Lynn]

2. COLOMBIA: Torture as a ‘Side Effect’ of Forced Disappearance, Killings

Wednesday 23 July 2008, San José, Costa Rica / SPECIAL REPORTS

COLOMBIA:
Torture as a ‘Side Effect’ of Forced Disappearance, Killings
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA (IPS) - The body of trade unionist Guillermo Rivera, who was missing since April, was finally found after 84 days of desperate searching by his family and friends.

The forensic experts reported that the body showed "clear signs of torture," Jorge Gómez, the widow's lawyer, told IPS.

The 52-year-old Rivera was last seen when he took his daughter to her bus stop on the morning of Apr. 22. A witness said she saw him arguing with the police as they handcuffed him and shoved him into a police car. "Why are you taking me?" she heard him ask the officers.

Security cameras located near Rivera’s home on the south side of Bogotá "showed that several police cars were present at the time and place where the gentleman disappeared," a source at the Attorney General’s Office told IPS.

IPS was able to confirm that there were four police cars and several motorcycles.

The day after he went missing, Rivera's wife, Sonia Betancur, received a call from the cell-phone of her husband, who worked for the city government, was the president of a Bogotá trade union and was a member of the Communist Party.

"The phone call was very confusing, she didn't understand a thing," said Gómez.

A week later, the Attorney General’s Office reported that the call had been made from San Martín, 159 km south of Bogotá, a town that is a centre of operations of the far-right paramilitaries in the province of Meta.

More:
http://insidecostarica.com/special_reports/2008-07/colombia_torture.htm

[Judi Lynn]

3. A reminder Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the paras are NOT demobilized.

Don't be fooled by the propaganda:

Justice & Peace Law and Decree 128

Since 2003, paramilitary groups, responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia for over a decade, have been involved in a government-sponsored "demobilization" process. More than 25,000 paramilitaries have supposedly demobilized under a process which has been criticized by AI and other Colombian and international human rights groups, as well as by the OHCHR and the IACHR. The process is lacking in effective mechanisms for justice and in its inability to ensure that paramilitary members actually cease violent activities.

In fact, paramilitarism has not been dismantled, it has simply been "re-engineered." Many demobilized combatants are being encouraged to join "civilian informer networks," to provide military intelligence to the security forces, and to become "civic guards". Since many areas of Colombia have now been wrested from guerrilla control, and paramilitary control established in many of these areas, they no longer see a need to have large numbers of heavily-armed uniformed paramilitaries.

However, evidence suggests that many paramilitary structures remain virtually intact and that paramilitaries continue to kill. Amnesty International continues to document human rights violations committed by paramilitary groups, sometimes operating under new names, and often in collusion with the security forces.

AI would welcome a demobilization process which would lead to the effective dismantling of paramilitarism and end the links between the security forces and paramilitaries. But the current demobilization process is unlikely to guarantee the effective dismantling of such structures. In fact, it is facilitating the re-emergence of paramilitarism and undermining the right of victims to truth, justice and reparation.

Amnesty International is deeply concerned that the law governing the demobilization of armed groups in Colombia is wholly inadequate. It threatens to guarantee the impunity of those responsible for heinous and widespread human rights atrocities, not only paramilitaries, but also those who have backed the paramilitary such as wealthy landowners, and government and military officials.

More:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/colombia/justice-and-peace-law-and-decree-128/page.do?id=1101862&n1=3&n2=30&n3=885

[subsuelo]

4. Thank you

[subsuelo]

5. At least this board isn't filled with excuses for why killing civilians is justified

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x202332">if the atrocities happened to Gazans ... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x202900">another example ... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x204342#204387">and another ...

[Judi Lynn]

6. Colombia - A Case Study in Failed U.S. Intervention

Colombia - A Case Study in Failed U.S. Intervention
Posted August 26, 2008 | 03:23 PM (EST)

As Noam Chomsky had noted many years ago, the amount of U.S. military assistance to a particular country is, as a general rule, directly proportional to the level of human rights violations committed by that country's military. That maxim certainly holds true in the Western Hemisphere where the greatest recipient of U.S. military aid in that region by far - Colombia - is also that region's greatest human rights abuser.

This fact was brought home just last week by an L.A. Times article (by Chris Kraul on August 21) which explained that while Colombia has received over $4 billion of U.S. military assistance since 2000, and while Colombian President Alvaro Uribe "has become the United States' No. 1 Latin American ally in its war on terrorism and drugs," Colombia is actually the greatest purveyor of terror against its own population in the region. To wit, as the article, citing the well-respected Colombian Commission of Jurists, notes, the Colombian military has been credibly accused of murdering 329 civilians in cold blood in 2007 - a 48% increase from the 223 reported in 2006. This brings to 997 the total of civilians murdered by the Colombian military since President Uribe, the U.S.'s top regional ally, took office in the spring of 2002. No other country in the Hemisphere even comes close to this horrendous record of state-sponsored violence.

Equally troubling is the fact that, as brought out in the same L.A. Times article, 47% of the murders carried out by the military had been carried out by army units which the State Department had vetted in 2006 and 2007 and had "determined had complied with human rights requirements."

Meanwhile, while there has been a near total blackout on the continued crisis of the labor movement in Colombia, that crisis is deepening as well. Thus, as of the writing of this article, 38 union leaders have been killed in that country so far this year. This is a rate of over one union leader killed a week. Should this pace continue until the end of the year, the rate of union killings in 2008 will far exceed the 39 union killings which took place during the entire year of 2007. As it stands right now, 2597 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia since 1986, making Colombia the murder capitol of the world for unionists.

If this were not bad enough, President Uribe's government continues to sink under the weight of the growing para-political scandal in which a number of Uribe's close political associates (around 60 in all), including a number of pro-Uribe congresspeople, have been arrested for aiding the violent right-wing paramilitaries - paramilitaries which were designated a "terrorist" group by the United States in 2001. Indeed, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal court in the The Hague, Luis Moreno Ocampo, is in Colombia now to investigate whether he can prosecute such pro-paramilitary officials under international law.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/colombia-a-case-study-in_b_121519.html