RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: When Terror Wears a Uniform

[Judi Lynn]

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: When Terror Wears a Uniform
By Constanza Vieira

Senate human rights hearing in Soacha.

SOACHA, Colombia, Nov 21 (IPS) - Herminia Lizarazo did not know what to respond when her seven-year-old grandson told her "Grandma, I want to know what the army is for." The boy, whose two uncles belong to the army in Colombia, wanted to wear a military costume for Halloween.

"My uncles dress like that, and they look really good," he commented to her, arguing in favour of the costume he had chosen for the Oct. 31 holiday, which originated in the United States and has spread to many Latin American countries.

Lizarazo gave a brief personal account of her life, which she called "a mother’s story," at a special hearing on human rights in Ciudad Bolívar, Altos de Cazucá and Soacha -- vast slum neighbourhoods that line the hills on the southern edge of Bogotá -- held Thursday by the Senate Human Rights Commission.

In 1984, she fled the southern department (province) of Huila because of the leftist guerrillas. "I had four little ones, and we came to Bogotá to try our luck," she said. "But four months later, my husband died, and I became a widow."

She said that although her family was very poor, "I gave my kids strength." Lizarazo said she knows all about the difficulties faced by those who are forcibly "displaced, and about suffering hunger with your children, and I know the courage you have to have as a mother, as a person."

Her son-in-law, 27-year-old smelting company worker Joaquín Castro, went missing from Altos de Cazucá on Jan. 13, and two days later the military turned his body in to the morgue in the remote town of Ocaña, 700 km northeast of Bogotá. He was reported as a battlefield casualty in Colombia’s decades-old civil war.

Castro was one of the dozens of young men whose cases sparked a scandal over extrajudicial executions by the army, when the discovery of their bodies was reported by the press in late September.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44812