Colombian Soldier Says Comrades Killed Brother

[High Plains]

Source: Associated Press

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- The soldiers in Antelope Company's Third Platoon hadn't registered a guerrilla kill in months. And without results, they feared they wouldn't be let off base for Mother's Day. So they hatched a plan, according to Pvt. Luis Esteban Montes: lure a civilian to their camp, murder him and register him as a rebel slain in combat.

Montes, 24, didn't object -- until he met the quarry. It was Leonardo, the older brother he hadn't seen since he was 9. Montes says he tried to dissuade his commander, who responded with threats. He slipped his brother out of the camp, he says, only to see him show up dead a week later, a "guerrilla kill" with three bullets in his torso and a gaping facial wound likely caused by a knife.

<snip>

It is among the most chilling examples of what the top U.N. human rights official, Navi Pillay, calls "widespread and systematic" extrajudicial killings by Colombia's U.S.-backed military. Many of the killings were allegedly committed merely to inflate rebel casualty numbers.

<snip>

The scandal comes at a particularly delicate moment for Uribe. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has cited human rights concerns in opposing the U.S.-Colombia trade agreement that President Bush wants ratified before he leaves office in January. Obama has told Bush that he opposes including the deal in an economic stimulus package the U.S. Congress is to begin debating next week.



Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/11/12/colombia.soldier.killing.ap/index.html

---

Time to zero out Plan Colombia. We've spent $6 billion since 1999 to destroy the Colombian coca crop, and it's increased 15%, according to a GAO report last week. This is a failure.

And with those Colombian soldiers getting big bucks from the US, there is blood on our hands.

[amdezurik]

1. no doubt trained by our "advisors"

who were trained in the "School of the Americas" on torture and death-squad tactics.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Let's hope this leopard, the US, changes its spots soon:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n6_v60/ai_18311896

Obama has a massive popular mandate, even without the mass of disappeared votes, so maybe.... If you look at recent history, with the growth of genuine democracies - populism! - whenever it has occurred, the people have driven our societies towards greater humanity.

Big-game hunting in Africa and India is mainly, if not exclusively, now, the preserve of poachers. Most poorer people don't want animals used as guinea-pigs even for medical purposes; they want the animal concentration camps we call factory-farms closed down, or coverted into more humane environments for the fowl.

Fox-hunting is dying hard in this country because some of our toffs still don't really understand the meaning of the term "parliamentary democracy". Thing is, the toffs are a bit like farmers - they were brought up with it. I remember watching my grandfather holding a chicken upside down by its legs and swinging it a little, having cut the inside of its throat with a penknife, to bleed it to death, and begging him not to. And he was such a kind, old guy, in reality. But he'd been a farmer all his life.

Personally, I'd prefer to be a vegetarian, but being married, it wouldn't be really practicable or all that kind to my wife. Then again, the whole issue is fraught with difficulties. We scoff at vegans, but my mother said it was pitiful to hear cows lowing when their calves had been taken from them. A vegetarian diet is said to be healthy, and, well, Shadrach, Mesach and Abed-nego sure thrived on it.

I've strayed from concern for human beings to concern for animals, but they say cruelty to the latter is often a precursor of the former.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Thanks for posting this. Hope the author gets to see an end to this madness

in her lifetime.

She has been a relentless worker for peace since her release from hell.

http://www.georgiabulletin.org.nyud.net:8090/media/images/20050224-02.jpg

Diana Ortiz

[ck4829]

2. K&R - Everybody needs to K&R this thread

[Judi Lynn]

3. This is the most intense account I've seen. They are blackmailing the soldiers,

forcing them to kill innocent people in order to get any recreational time. That means it corrupts the men, forces them to make evil, murderous choices if they hope to get any time away from the army.

Sad, important snippet from the article posted by High Plains:

One moonless rainy night, Montes' platoon leader, a corporal, told him they had chosen a victim, he said. It was a man from La Guajira, the Caribbean coastal province from which Montes himself hailed.

Curious, Montes went to see the man, gave him a cigarette and, not recognizing him in the dark, determined they were from the same town, the same street. It was Leonardo, with whom Montes shared the same father.

The two hugged and Montes, incredulous and outraged, told his brother of the sinister intentions of the soldiers who had befriended him and invited him to the camp.

Montes pleaded with the company commander, Capt. Jairo Garcia, to let him go, but said the captain told him that if he tried to stop them he'd put Montes on point during patrols "so my legs could be blown off by a mine." The captain, who is under criminal investigation, called Montes a liar and a chronic slacker in a sworn declaration.

Montes got Leonardo safely out of the camp that night and figured the episode was over. But a few days later, as he was being treated for malaria in a nearby town, he learned his company had scored a "positivo" and that soldiers tried to bury his brother in an unmarked grave.

The after-action report said Leonardo was killed in a firefight with a small group of rebels. It said the others got away. Montes, citing fellow fighters, told investigators that the 9mm Browning pistol and grenade found on the body were planted by soldiers.

This is totally consistant with information leaking out from Colombia for YEARS, now. It's not a recent phenomenon.
Sad, sad, sad.

U.S. citizens' hard-earned tax dollars are being pumped into Colombia at a horrendous rate, making Colombia the 3RD LARGEST FOREIGN AID RECIPIENT IN THE WORLD. Colombia's policies have created hordes of homeless, dispossed people who have been driven from their own homes, own farms, the second largest humanitarian disaster in the world, right after Sudan.

We are being forced to sponsor this filth. That means we are being compromised, ourselves.