Colombia reopens homicide investigations against U.S.-backed security forces

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Colombia reopens homicide investigations against U.S.-backed security forces

By JOSHUA GOODMAN
Associated Press
2007-06-06 10:58 AM

The five soldiers who killed Maria Elena Rios in a hillside slum of Medellin said she was a guerrilla felled in combat. After a swift investigation, the army closed the case.
But if a rebel fighter, why was Rios wearing 9-centimer (3-inch) platform shoes when soldiers shot the 25-year old in the head and back three years ago?

That is one of many questions being raised by the public prosecutor's office, which has reopened 131 disciplinary investigations against Colombia's U.S.-backed military in the killings of civilians presented as leftist rebels killed in action. Most of these were shelved after internal investigations by the military that typically went no farther than gathering testimony from troops involved, said an official in the public prosecutor's office who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue's political sensitivity.

The renewed investigations come as President Alvaro Uribe travels to Washington on Wednesday to revive a bilateral trade pact that the U.S. Congress refuses to ratify over concerns about his government's human rights record.

Increasingly, the opposition and rights groups abroad are accusing Uribe of turning a blind eye to collusion between his military commanders and right-wing militias blamed for some of the worst atrocities in the Andean nation's half-century civil conflict.





Read more: http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=463521&lang=eng_news&cate_img=logo_world&cate_rss=WORLD_eng

[Judi Lynn]

1. Colombian human rights campaigner Ivan Cepeda named winner of Roger Baldwin Liberty Award

Colombian human rights campaigner Ivan Cepeda named winner of Roger Baldwin Liberty Award
The Associated PressPublished: June 5, 2007

NEW YORK: Colombian activist Ivan Cepeda was named the winner of the 2007 Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty for his efforts to document thousands of cases of serious human rights abuses in his country, a New York-based advocacy group announced Tuesday.

"Ivan Cepeda is a courageous human rights defender who has overcome threats and intimidation to help draw greater attention to rights violations in Colombia," said Maureen Byrnes, executive director of Human Rights First, in a statement announcing the award.

The award citation recognized Cepeda as the founder and spokesman for a number of human rights organizations, including an umbrella group known as the National Movement for Victims of State Crimes.

Human Rights First credited Cepeda with joining with other human rights activists to document approximately 40,000 cases of rights violations committed in Colombia since 1966. It also recognized his "perseverance" in demonstrating that "paramilitary groups have committed serious human rights violations often in complicity with members of the Colombian armed forces."

More:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/05/america/NA-GEN-US-Human-Rights-Award.php

[Peace Patriot]

2. The Colombian regime resembles the Bush regime and it is no accident that they are

buds. Bush has larded Uribe's government with $4 billion of our future tax revenues, while the top echelons of that government--the chief of the military, the former head of intelligence, many office holders--were involved with rightwing paramilitary death squads and drug trafficking. Their victims are union organizers, peasants and leftists--advocates of the poor--with thousands slaughtered and left in mass graves. Similarly, the Bush Junta slaughtered over a half a million innocent people in Iraq (according to the British doctors' report), has tortured thousands at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons, and fomented civil war and now mafia-like tribalism in Iraq with deliberately divisive policies and (quite likely) the use of unlawful, unaccountable mercenaries. Neither government has any compassion for the poor. The Bush Junta left our own poor people to rot and die in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and its economic policies are pure greed run wild. The same in Colombia--the rich get richer and the poor die of neglect, or worse.

There are many healthy democracies in South America, with the priorities of self-determination and social justice. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay. So why is Colombia the Bush Junta's favored nation in South America? Why isn't the U.S. celebrating the success of democracy, and the empowerment of the long excluded and oppressed poor majority, in these other countries? Why is it bullying them, threatening them, bribing them, and, in the case of Venezuela--a major leader of this democracy movement--positively reviling them?

BushWorld is like Alice's Wonderland: everything upside down and backwards. A place where the Red Queen orders the white roses to be PAINTED red. Thus we have a brutal fascist government, Colobmia, painted as a democracy, by our "Red Queen," and a real democracy, Venezuela, painted as a dictatorship. The exact opposite of the truth.