and another FARC terrorist attack from August 14 that killed 7

[Bacchus39]

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/08/18/colomb19638.htm

Colombia: Bomb at Party Kills Many Civilians
FARC Should Stop Indefensible Attacks
(Washington, DC, August 18, 2008) – The bombing of a party in Ituango, Colombia, is an indefensible attack on civilians and the perpetrators should be prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said today.

This is a brutal and inhuman attack with no justification, and it should be universally condemned.

José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch


On August 14, 2008, a bomb exploded on a crowded street as hundreds of residents of Ituango, in the northwestern state of Antioquia, celebrated the town’s traditional “Festival of Ituanguinity.” According to media reports, seven people were killed, including several minors, and around 52 were injured.

“This is a brutal and inhuman attack with no justification, and it should be universally condemned,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

Authorities have attributed the bombing to the 18th front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) left-wing guerrillas. While the motives of the attack remain unclear, the Office of the Ombudsman of Colombia (Defensoría del Pueblo) had, through its Early Warning System, previously issued a report warning authorities that civilians in Ituango were at risk due to the activities of the FARC and drug traffickers in the region.

Human Rights Watch said the bombing would not be out of character for the FARC. In several reports, Human Rights Watch has documented the FARC’s systematic practices of recruitment of child soldiers, use of antipersonnel landmines, and kidnappings and killings of civilians.

“The FARC has continuously shown a blatant disregard for the lives of civilians as well as humanitarian and human rights law,” said Vivanco.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Playing the "yeah, sure" card on that.

~snip~
On October 19, a car heavily leaden with explosives entered the parking lot of the Military War College in Bogota, Colombia. Minutes later, a man dressed in a naval officer's uniform was seen exiting the car. Within hours, the car exploded, injuring 23 people. President Uribe immediately blamed F.A.R.C. In a charged speech, he called off hostage exchange talks and vowed to take the fight to the "scoundrels."

At the beginning of November, Uribe still had not released proof that F.A.R.C. committed the acts. At the same time, many Colombians remember when on September 7 Colombia's top military commander, General Mario Montoya, announced that members of a military intelligence unit based in Bogota had planted car bombs around that city, only to find them later and claim credit for the heroic deed. One of the bombs exploded on July 31, killing one civilian and wounding 19 soldiers. At the scene of the explosion, Uribe publicly accused F.A.R.C.

Uribe's lack of proof that links F.A.R.C. to the October 19 bomb has focused attention upon a Colombian senator who insists that the military general in charge of the Bogota War College, General Mario Correa, played a role in planting the October 19 bomb.

Senator Luis Elmer Arenas stated on October 25 that he has proof that General Mario Correa is closely tied to Colombian narco-traffickers. His statement, while not directly blaming General Correa for the car bomb, insinuates that Colombian narco-traffickers in competition with F.A.R.C. -- possibly former members of Colombia's paramilitary units -- planted the bomb knowing that Uribe would immediately blame F.A.R.C.

http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=580&language_id=1

[Bacchus39]

2. "yeah sure" the FARC doesn't commit acts of violence, yep that's it

http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2008/08/15/guerrilla_bomb_kills_7_in_colombian_town/
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1841993/

http://212.150.54.123/spotlight/det.cfm?id=298

[Judi Lynn]

3. 3 SOA Graduates Cited in the Trujillo "Chainsaw" Massacre

3 SOA Graduates Cited in the Trujillo "Chainsaw" Massacre

WHAT IS THE MASSACRE OF TRUJILLO?
Unlike many others in Colombia, the massacre of Trujillo did not occur in just one day. The killing took place over 8 years due to one single reason: during all that time the State acted as instigator, supporter, and protector of criminals who turned murder, forced disappearance, torture, arbitrary detention, and threats, a systematic practice against a defenseless civilian population.

During all that time, the Army and the Police maintained a permanent alliance with two powerful drug traffickers who settled in the region and acquired huge properties. This alliance allowed the financing of a paramilitary structure, constituted by armed civilians, who had license to kill and commit all sorts of crimes with guaranteed impunity. All other State authorities including inspectors, mayors, ombudsmen, councilmen, attorneys general, governors, ministers, and presidents, provided that criminal structure with the most valuable support for their crimes by avoiding action against them, declining to apply justice, and ignoring their acts.

This criminal structure persecuted peasants whose lands were transited by guerrillas, those who were members of peasant or union organizations, those who protested, those who created community production cooperatives, those who saw a need to fight injustice, those who were community leaders beyond the control of the criminals, and those who criticized the criminal powers that had taken over the region. Also persecuted were those who were addicted to drugs, the young "thieves" who were so poor that had to steal food, those who witnessed crimes, those who "saw things and did not keep quiet," those who moved around looking for work and looked "suspicious," drivers who were accused of "transporting guerrillas" or supplying them with food, and those who were thought to possess information that would endanger the safety of the criminals.

The methods used by the criminals created a reign of terror in the region:

* They delivered death threats through general messages warning those who thought of getting involved in the foregoing practices. Everyone knew that these threats were carried out ruthlessly.

* They detained anyone they wanted to. These people were taken to police or military installations ignoring legal requirements.. Sometimes they were taken to private places where they no law had any effect.

* They tortured and punished with cruelty and extreme fierceness, subjecting their victims to unimaginable pain.

* They disappeared people in secret places to then murder them and throw the bodies to the river.

Many families and people fled the region leaving behind their means of subsistence. Others stayed but at the expense of destroying their social life. Their preservation instinct yielded to their compulsive assimilation of their silent and forced coexistence with morally repulsive feelings.

The massacre yielded nearly 300 people killed. Their images and memories rise today to question State-sponsored terrorism, and they clamor for their right to justice ... they only right left to them.

More:
http://www.soawne.org/trujillo.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. Dominion of Evil: Colombia's paramilitary terror

Dominion of Evil
Colombia's paramilitary terror
by Steven Ambrus
Amnesty International magazine, Spring 2007

Colombia's paramilitary demobilization is unearthing the staggering magnitude of paramilitary terror-and the unholy alliance of political, military and business leaders that sustained it.

In the early 1990s, a butcher named Rodrigo Mercado got fed up with paying protection money to Colombia's leftwing guerrillas. Unable to shake them off, he sought financing from ranchers, politicians and businessmen and raised a 350-man militia. Then he went on the rampage. People accused of leftist sympathies in the state of Sucre were shot. Others were carved to bits with chainsaws, buried in mass graves or fed to alligators. Mercado delighted in the killing, survivors say. Moreover, it provided benefits. As thousands of people fled, Mercado and his men seized control of local governments and acquired vast tracts of farmland and shoreline. Then they used their new possessions to dispatch boats loaded with cocaine to foreign markets.
"They were merciless," said Arnol Gómez, a community leader from the town of San Onofre. "They had so much power that no one could do business or run for office without their approval. Even the police supported them."

Today, after a decade of terror and destruction, an edgy calm has settled over the rolling grasslands and tin-patch towns where Mercado spent his fury. The warlord has been dead for more than a year, a victim of bloodletting in his ranks. His troops have fully demobilized through a 2003 peace deal between the government and a paramilitary umbrella group known as the United Self- Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Local farmers have returned to their tiny plots of plantains and corn. But criminal investigators are only now uncovering graves on Mercado's abandoned farms. And with hundreds of people dead and hundreds more still missing in Sucre, the painful process of uncovering the truth about what happened there and in other areas of paramilitary control is just getting underway. For the first time, Colombians are confronting the immense dimensions of the paramilitary terror that has gripped their country for four decades, and the unholy alliance of military, business and political leaders that propelled it forward.

"Colombia is at a crossroads after years in which the paramilitaries infiltrated the world of legitimate business and the agencies of local and national government," said Iván Cepeda, the son of a left-wing senator who was murdered in 1994 by an alliance of military and paramilitary operatives. "Colombia will either become a nation of laws and democratic institutions or sink further into violence, authoritarianism and the denial of basic rights."

In 2005, Colombia's Congress passed the "Justice and Peace" law governing the demobilization, trial and reintegration of 31,000 AUC combatants, including commanders accused of war crimes and drug trafficking. Harshly criticized by human rights groups and the United Nations, the law allows paramilitary leaders to serve reduced sentences of eight years on special farms and contains loopholes likely to let top commanders keep millions of hectares of stolen land.

The law does, however, give prosecutors new incentives to unveil the truth. Because paramilitaries lose sentence reductions for crimes they fail to confess, it has energized a crusading prosecutor general and Colombia's supreme court to unravel the paramilitaries' criminal activities and to discover their connections with the highest spheres of money and power. Critics say that witness intimidation and legal trickery will prevent the paramilitaries from coming clean. But the dominoes are beginning to fall.

~snip~
"2006 will go down in history as the year in which the country learned how far the tentacles of paramilitarism reached," pronounced Semana, Colombia's leading newsweekly, in an end-of-year editorial in which it made "paramilitarism" its person of the year. "Though many Colombians knew that the paramilitaries controlled various regions of the country ... nobody imagined that this scourge had become a cancer that was silently eating away the pillars of democracy.

More:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Colombia/Dominion_Evil

[Judi Lynn]

5. The Massacre at Alto Naya

February 23, 2004

The Massacre at Alto Naya

by Patricia Dahl

~snip~
In desperation, some traveled to the base of the Colombian Army’s Third Brigade, which was only an hour away. They reported that paramilitaries were at that very moment slaughtering people in Alto Naya. But the soldiers replied, “We’ve heard this already, it’s a lie. We have no orders.”

No one dared to return to the village. “People scrambled higher up into the mountains. Some took their children, but they had no food or blankets. Pregnant women miscarried,” Juan recalls. “We asked for help from the Red Cross. Everyone was desperate to locate their relatives. I worried about my brother in the region, so I enlisted with the commission to rescue bodies in order to find him.” The commission was formed by members of the Prosecutor’s office and Juan, the single representative of the community. People had become so mistrustful of outside authority and of each other, says Juan, “that there were people who mocked us.”

The commission used a helicopter for the search: “We saw bodies thrown down an abyss. Clothes were strewn in a nearby brush. Identification cards were scattered everywhere. When we landed, we found evidence that the paramilitaries had taken drugs. We were afraid personnel mines had been planted, so we had cattle walk ahead to determine if areas were safe.” At Café Bonito, Juan recalls, “We found six dead bodies: the owner, three employees and two customers—Daniel Suarez and his wife Blanca, who showed signs of sexual torture. Some of the victims were shot, some stabbed, and one was chopped into pieces and burned.”

The prosecutor made a decision. The situation was too dangerous to continue the search. The people of Naya were left to recover the bodies of friends and relatives alone. For five hours, they scoured the area. Juan found bodies of people he knew. “Most of those who were tortured had been decapitated. One body had no hand. One’s neck was slit at the throat and his tongue was pulled out through the wound, a torture technique known as la corbata in Colombia, meaning ‘the tie.’ By the time we found Jorge Estaban Legado, his body was scavenged by animals. I picked him up with a single hand because there was so little left of him. Alexander Quejima was so destroyed by animals and mud that I could retrieve only a few bones, just to have him present with the rest of the dead.”

Witnesses said the paramilitaries detained Cayetano Cruz, an indigenous governor, and cut his body in half with a chainsaw. Seventeen-year-old Gladys Ipia’s head and hand were amputated with a chainsaw. It is said that one paramilitary carried the head of a victim in his backpack for a week. Naya residents believe 140 lives were lost in that paramilitary operation. However, the government has acknowledged the deaths of only 23. Another 6,000 people fled during the massacre. And while some 5,500 returned without any guarantees for their safety, 540 people are still displaced.

More:
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia178.htm