Violence Returns to Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Newsweek

Violence Returns to Colombia
September 09, 2010
Despite gains against the FARC guerrillas, the country is now wrestling to quell local drug gangs terrorizing its cities.

http://www.newsweek.com.nyud.net:8090/content/newsweek/2010/09/09/colombia-wrestling-to-quell-local-drug-gangs/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.jpg/1284067146039.jpg

Raul Arboleda / AFP-Getty Images
A Colombian soldier guards a violent
neighborhood in Medellin

Although Colombia delivered some heavy blows in its war against the FARC guerrillas over the past decade, the country is facing violence on an entirely new front. Just three years ago, top U.S. officials were touring the city of Medellín to demonstrate how successfully then-president Alvaro Uribe had rescued the country from Marxist rebels and paramilitary drugrunners. But in August, Medellín’s mayor took to the streets to march with protesters through ghettos racked anew by gang warfare. And just last week, Colombia’s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, deployed troops to the city, where more than 1,200 murders have occurred so far this year, with 503 gang-related deaths in the first four months of 2010 alone—a 50 percent jump from the same period last year.

Alarmingly, Medellín is not alone. Across Colombia, cities that once served as symbols of the country’s turnaround, such as Bogotá and Cali, are witnessing a drastic increase in violence. In mid-August, a car bomb in Bogotá’s financial district injured nine people, and both the FARC and right-wing extremists have been blamed for the attack. The same week, three teens from the embattled Putumayo state in southern Colombia, whose names were on an online list, were shot dead, apparently the victims of gang violence. And Cali’s mayor has called on the national government to address the city’s spiking homicide rate.

Just as murders have increased, so have mass displacements: according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 3.3 million Colombians are now internally displaced, at a rate of 500 new people a day (that’s the second-highest internally displaced population worldwide). Meanwhile, the number of Colombian refugees pouring into Ecuador has spiked to 1,000 a month, and aid workers say many are fleeing gang warfare in the cities.

So why the new uptick in violence? While Colombia’s military has weakened the FARC, and the government has cracked down on the paramilitaries that once controlled the cocaine trade, these operations diverted focus away from local police forces, leaving a vacuum for opportunistic gangsters and loose criminal networks that rushed in to serve the ongoing demand for drug exports. “These successor groups have basically taken the reins of what the paramilitaries were doing,” says Maria McFarland, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch. The new groups, which number somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 members, are now operating in 24 of Colombia’s 32 states.

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/09/colombia-wrestling-to-quell-local-drug-gangs.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. The "New Penitentiary Culture": US Designs for Colombian Jails

The "New Penitentiary Culture": US Designs for Colombian Jails
How the USAID, Federal Bureau of Prisons and the School of the Americas Have Impacted Colombia's Prison System


By James Jordan
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
September 9, 2010

Amid much talk of human rights and improved conditions for those deprived of liberty, in March of 2000, the US ambassador and Colombia’s Minister of Justice signed the “Program for the Improvement of the Colombian Prison System.” Called the dawning of a “New Penitentiary Culture,” the US government, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), would redesign Colombia’s maximum and medium security institutions, providing millions of dollars in funding, advice and oversight. Central to this restructuring has been the building and expansion of as many as sixteen new jails designed to handle an influx of some 30,000 new inmates—an increase in capacity of more than 40%. The reason cited for building these new jails was to alleviate overcrowding as a necessary first step toward better conditions.

Have conditions improved significantly? Indications are that they have not, and the greater capacity seems to have motivated a surge in arrests and the exercise of social and political control rather than with the alleviation of overcrowding. According to some observers, prisons have been turned into fronts of war, and at least five of the sixteen new prisons have been or are currently directed by graduates of the infamous School of the Americas. According to the Colombian Coalition Against Torture, “It is of serious concern that Colombia’s prisons are increasingly militarized. Indeed, the majority of prisons visited by the Fundación Comité de Solidaridad con los Presos Políticos...are under the command of high-ranking members of the military and police forces, either retired or active, and lack the skills necessary to manage a prison.”

Besides detaining members of the political resistance, the dominant purpose for these new prisons appears to be the incarceration of large numbers of prisoners arrested for crimes arising from a worsening economic crisis coupled with a lack of social investment. The Colombian government is following a playbook based on the US experience. The US puts a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other nation on Earth.

The growth of the prison population has been phenomenal since the inception of the new US/Colombian prison program. One Ministry of Justice document from Dec. 2007 shows a prison population of 63,603. An INPEC document from January, 2010 puts the population at 76,471. Just over three months later, an article in the Colombian daily, El Tiempo said that there were 106,000 prisoners under the custody of INPEC.3 If these figures are all true, then the increase in the prison population has already exceeded the new spaces being built. So much for the stated purpose of relieving prison congestion.

More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4200.html

[roody]

2. It never left.