Colombian Victims of Paramilitary Violence Plead for Access to U.S. Justice System

[Judi Lynn]

September 10th, 2010
Women, War & Peace in Colombia

Colombian Victims of Paramilitary Violence Plead for Access to U.S. Justice System

Women, War & Peace producers Jennifer Janisch and Oriana Zill de Granados are investigating the U.S. drug cases against the leaders of Colombia’s paramilitary organization, many of which have disappeared from the public record in recent months. These articles are part of a series of Colombia reports coming in the next month.

Here is a background report on the tragic toll this secrecy is taking on Colombian victims of paramilitary violence.

http://www-tc.pbs.org.nyud.net:8090/wnet/wideangle/files/2010/09/Bela_cropped.jpg

Bela Henriquez, a 23-year-old biology student from Colombia, says her father, Julio Henriquez, an environmentalist and human rights defender, had been organizing peasants in the Caribbean state of Magdalena to stop growing coca plants, the chief ingredient in cocaine, and to farm alternative legal crops.

But paramilitaries belonging to the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) controlled coca production in this region, and on the orders of their commander, Hernan Giraldo Serna (alias “El Patron”), they kidnapped and disappeared Henriquez after a community meeting in 2001.

Giraldo Serna confessed to the crime as part of an amnesty program in Colombia called Justice and Peace. He and thousands of paramilitaries demobilized and turned themselves in to the authorities in 2006, promising to tell the truth about the murders and forced disappearances they carried out in exchange for more lenient jail sentences and other benefits.

But on May 13, 2008, in a move that shocked Colombians, President Alvaro Uribe authorized the extradition of Giraldo Serna and 13 other top paramilitary commanders to the United States to face narco-trafficking charges. The possibility that Bela would receive any justice for her father’s murder vanished overnight.

~snip~
As the Justice and Peace process developed, however, questions arose as to whether the paramilitary soldiers were actually telling the whole truth about their crimes. Many also refused to give up land and money acquired during the war as reparations to the victims, a requirement of the reconciliation process. And evidence obtained from one paramilitary commander’s laptop computer proved that many of the “demobilized paramilitaries” were actually peasants recruited as stand-ins, not actual combatants.

More:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/women-war-peace-in-colombia/colombian-victims-of-paramilitary-violence-plead-for-access-to-u-s-justice-system/6139/