US renews investigations of extradited ex-paramilitaries

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

US renews investigations of extradited ex-paramilitaries
Monday, 18 April 2011 18:21
Marguerite Cawley

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U.S. authorities have moved forward a series of 200 proceedings in investigations into over a dozen ex-paramilitary leaders detained in the U.S. since 2008, Colombian media reported Monday.

After meeting Monday with her U.S. equivalent, Eric Holder, in Washington D.C, Colombia's Prosecutor General Viviane Morales said that she was informed that U.S. proceedings against the extraditees have been renewed, after a pause last year that coincided with the change in Colombia's administration.

The AUC ex-paramilitaries were extradited to the U.S. in May 2008 by the administration of then-President Alvaro Uribe to face drug trafficking charges.

Among those extradited are Diego Murillo alias "Don Berna," Salvatore Mancuso and Rodrigo Tovar Pupo alias "Jorge 40," accused along with drug trafficking charges of being responsible for tens of thousands crimes against humanity, including assassinations, rape, forced disappearance and forced displacement.



Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15682-us-authorities-renew-investigations-of-14-ex-paramilitaries.html

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Colombian militia leader confesses to massacres
Sibylla Brodzinsky in Medellín The Guardian, Thursday 18 January 2007

A senior commander of Colombia's rightwing militias has admitted taking part in some of the country's most grisly crimes in the first of what could become a flood of confessions from demobilised paramilitary leaders.
Salvatore Mancuso told a prosecutor in Medellín this week that he was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, murders and massacres during his 15-year career in the death squads that spread terror throughout Colombia in the name of fighting leftist rebels.

In two days of testimony, Mancuso admitted to directly participating in or ordering the murder of hundreds of people, among them mayors, union leaders and peasants. With presentations projected from his laptop computer, Mancuso listed in chronological order the massacres at El Aro, Mápiripan, El Salado and other towns, all of which he called "anti-subversive operations". He also named the victims.

Some relatives of the dead heard the confessions. When Miryam Areiza heard Mancuso read her father's name as he recounted the 1997 massacre at El Aro, where he and 14 others were tortured and killed, she said she felt ill. "Where does he get off saying my father was a guerrilla? My father was a peasant, tending to his farm. He was tortured and killed and Mancuso was responsible," she said outside the special room for victims and their families to watch the closed proceedings.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/18/colombia.sibyllabrodzinsky

[midnight]

1. Our focus in only on drugs, and not tens of thousands of human rights violations?

Really? Why waste the money and time...

[Judi Lynn]

2. The loved ones of the victims in Colombia don't like it, you can be assured.

By hustling them out of Colombia to the US, where they'll stand trial for drug charges, they miss being tried for the massacres, tortures, etc. in Colombia, and having to answer questions from the prosecutor concerning their ties to Colombian politicians, many of whom have already been tried and thrown in jail, although their terms are questionable, and some claim to have done their "community service" while actually doing anything in the world OTHER than community service.

The former Prsident Alvaro Uribe has had MANY among his highest officials, as well as his brother, and his cousin named by witnesses as connected to these narcotrafficking war lords in ways which have advanced them politically, and/or monetarily. There have been multiple witnesses claiming the ties go directly to the little emperor, himself. He was mentioned long ago, as in 1991, in documents from investigations by the Department of Defense here, naming both Alvaro Uribe and his father as narcotrafficking connected, and Alvaro Uribe himself as close to the total fiend, Pablo Escobar.

What a filthy shame the U.S. has been cooperative in this hideous miscarriage of justice. The U.S. objective certainly seems to be the use of Colombia as a "forward operating location" from which they can launch any number of actions against other Latin American countries. A "lilly pad," as Donald Rumsfeld fondly names countries like this. It's imperative to certain US personalities to keep that control going in Colombia, militarily, politically, as well as keeping the country completely at the disposal of American mega-corporations for total exploitation of natural resources, and the cheap labor of a desperately impoverished and traumatized work force.