This was mentioned at BoRev over the weekend, this is the regime Uribe runs and is enthusiastically backed by the US and UK governments (and Alex James of Blur bass playing fame, he now lives in a house a very big house in the etc.)-
The number of civilians killed by the Colombian armed forces has soared, activist groups allege, with many of the abuses committed by army units that had been vetted by the State Department. There were 329 so-called extrajudicial killings by the Colombian military and police last year, a coalition of Colombian rights groups asserts in a report, a 48% increase from the 223 reported in 2006.
There is a correction in the LA Times article which is-
Colombia abuses: An article in Thursday’s Section A on human rights abuses by Colombia’s armed forces said that a report by rights advocates alleged that as of June 2007, Colombian military courts had won only four convictions in more than 900 cases of alleged murder involving uniformed soldiers and police. The article should have included the following sentence: “A Colombian Defense Ministry official said that since the formation of a special prosecutor’s office in mid-2007 to investigate alleged killings of civilians, 14 soldiers and police officers have been convicted in connection with those killings.”
Woohoo 14! Well that’s virtually solved then!
The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogota-based civil society group that is responsible for verifying many of the deaths, said last week that a significant number of killings of civilians by the armed forces had been reported so far in 2008 in five Colombian states, but provided no precise numbers. A separate analysis of last year’s killings by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a New York-based peace group, alleges that 47% of the homicides were committed by army units that had been scrutinized in 2006 or 2007 by the State Department, which determined that they had complied with human rights requirements, making them eligible for U.S. military aid and training.
I’m guessing those human rights requirements are-
- Don’t get caught.
- The End.
BoRev crunches the figures-
the body count is roughly half the size of the Tienanmen Square massacre, which froze relations between China and the U.S. for a decade. It’s about on par with My Lai, and larger than Wounded Knee, Tlatelolco, or the Madrid train bombings. We’re talking 13 Bloody Sundays, 36 Manson families, or 82 Kent States. It’s more than double the death count at Dujail, which is what Saddam Hussein was tried and executed for. In other words…let’s see how did the New York Times put it?…”he will be remembered as the leader who brought Colombia back from the brink and onto a path toward peace.”
Which really takes us back to the previous Dominion post:– An interesting thought experiment I suggest doing is- look at the present day status, look at the countries with no or very low US military presence (like ‘advisers’) then think about how those countries are portrayed in the media…