State, ‘paramilitaries’ responsible for most of Colombia’s human rights violations: Report
written by Joel Gillin September 22, 2014
The vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia last year were committed by paramilitaries and government forces, according to a conflict analysis NGO. In the report published this summer by the Center for Research and Public Education (CINEP), the group registered a total of 1,332 human rights violations against Colombian civilians last year.
Groups that had emerged from officially defunct paramilitary organization AUC were the biggest offenders, responsible for some 44% of the violations, while state forces, including the military and police, were responsible for 43%. The FARC and other guerrilla groups committed about 15% of the violations.
2013 human rights violations in Colombia
Neo-paramilitary groups like the Urabeños or the Aguilas Negras were suspected of carrying out the vast majority of homicides and threats, while the police received most complaints over assault.
The numbers released by CINEP are in line with figures from a recent report by the Colombian NGO “Somos Defensores” which claimed that of the 194 crimes against community leaders, five of the known perpetrators were from the FARC or ELN. Paramilitaries and state forces were responsible for 128 of these crimes.
http://colombiareports.com/state-paramilitaries-human-rights-violations/
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Right-wing paramilitarism in Colombia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Paramilitarism in Colombia)
Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are armed groups that claim to be acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population. These paramilitary groups control the large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances and are the parties responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian Armed Conflict. According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups have been responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia per year, with the remainder committed by leftist guerrillas and government forces.
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_paramilitarism_in_Colombia
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CONFLICT-COLOMBIA: Paramilitaries Threaten Peace Talks with FARC
By IPS Correspondents
. . .
Due to the fact that paramilitary forces are blamed for the lion’s share of rights abuses in conflict-torn Colombia, local and international rights groups are staunchly opposed to the possibility of them being granted political status.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2000/06/conflict-colombia-paramilitaries-threaten-peace-talks-with-farc/
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About Colombia
. . .
The Paramilitaries
Colombia�s rightwing paramilitary death squads are notorious for their brutality and have been responsible for the vast majority of the human rights abuses that have occurred in the country in the past 25 years.i They are infamous for their use of vicious violence, including massacres with chainsaws, brutal torture, sexual violence and cutting off of limbs as tactics designed to instil fear and terror among those they target. The scale of their violence is astonishing and it is estimated that the paramilitaries have killed around 150,000 Colombians and displaced hundreds of thousands more (see Forced Displacement).
Though paramilitary-style forces have been around in Colombia since the 1960s, the origins of those which exist today can be found in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These origins, however, are complicated and overlapping though essentially modern day Colombian paramilitaries derived from three sources:
◾As leftwing guerrilla movements grew in strength in the 1970s and 80s some Colombian landowners and business leaders began establishing private armies that would defend them from guerrilla extortion attempts;
◾In the early and mid-1980s as individual drugs traffickers grew more powerful and wealthy they formed cartels, most notably the Medellin and Cali Cartels. These cartels formed their own private armies to defend their business interests.
◾Again in response to the growth of the guerrillas the Colombian Army began to implement, with the assistance of US military advisers, an increasingly brutal counter-insurgency campaign that involved the use of clandestine death squads made up of off-duty soldiers and paramilitary-style personnel to carry out a secret �dirty war� against those perceived to be sympathetic to the guerrillas.
More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/about-colombia/
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Colombian Militia Boss: We Burned Hundreds of Bodies
BOGOTA – The erstwhile commander of Colombia’s right-wing militias said that his men systematically burned hundreds of their victims at the behest of officials and military brass who sought to downplay the level of violence in the Andean nation.
Salvatore Mancuso, extradited to the United States a year ago to face drug charges, made the admission while testifying via videolink from Washington.
A portion of the session, which featured the former head of the AUC militia federation answering questions submitted by families of the paramilitaries’ victims, was aired in Colombia on RCN television. Mancuso said the burning of the bodies “was a favor that (now-deceased AUC founder) Carlos Castaño was doing for the authorities.”
He said the decision came after a meeting where politicians, senior military officers and other notables asked the AUC to dispose of victims’ bodies as a way of holding down the number of deaths that could be attributed to the militias. That discussion took place at a time when evidence of militia massacres was coming to light, according to Mancuso, who said the militias dug up their buried victims and cremated them in ovens set up near the Venezuelan border.
More:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=333321&CategoryId=12393
http://www.ipsnews.net/2000/06/conflict-colombia-paramilitaries-threaten-peace-talks-with-farc/
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Death Squads Continue to Reign in Colombia
03/24/2014 03:18 pm ET | Updated May 24, 2014
Dan Kovalik
Back in 1996, Noam Chomsky wrote a quite terrifying piece about the U.S.-backed “Dirty War” in Colombia, and in Latin America generally, entitled, “The Culture of Fear.” This article was an introduction to the magnificent book by Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., entitled, The Genocidal Democracy. In this piece, Chomsky wrote,
Two facts should be uppermost in the minds of North American readers of Father Giraldo’s documentation of the reign of terror that engulfed Colombia during the “Dirty War” waged by the state security forces and their paramilitary associates from the early 1980s. The first is that the “democra-tatorship,” as Eduardo Galeano termed this amalgam of democratic forms and totalitarian terror, has managed to compile the worst human rights record in the hemisphere in recent years, no small achievement when one considers the competition. The second is that Colombia has had accessories in crime, primary among them the government of the United States ... (which has) helped to train and arm the assassins and torturers of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains ‘stability’ in a country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for many of its people.
As Chomsky further explained, the U.S. bears primary blame for Colombia’s paramilitary state which has carried out this terror against its own population because the U.S. created the paramilitaries haunting Colombia. Chomsky cites Colombia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa who explained that during the Kennedy Administration, Washington ‘’took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.’” Chomsky explains, “the ‘Dirty War’ escalated in the early 1980s — not only in Colombia — as the Reagan administration extended these programs throughout the region, leaving it devastated, strewn with hundreds of thousands of corpses tortured and mutilated people who might otherwise have been insufficiently supportive of the establishment, perhaps even influenced by ‘subversives.’”
In the 1980s, the U.S. support for death squad states in such countries as El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia was fairly well known amongst the U.S. population, and was discussed in the press on an intermittent basis. I recall, for example, watching news segments about this phenomenon on 60 Minutes, including about the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador by U.S.-backed forces on this very day 34 years ago, and even remember this being a topic of conversation in the U.S. Catholic Church. Today, however, this is not a matter of public discourse, is hardly ever mentioned in the press, and most Americans, even ones very well informed, have therefore been led to believe that such death squad states are a thing of the past.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/death-squads-colombia_b_5021244.html
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