Colombia military atrocities alleged

This article by the LA Times’ Chris Kraul suggests that policy changes by Colombia have begun to rein in human rights abuses by that nation’s armed forces. Yet its real meat is the revelation that extra-judicial killings have soared in the past year. Moreover, in the past five years, under the close watch of the Bush administration, “the number of extrajudicial killings by the Colombian military and police over a five-year period ending June 2006 was 50% higher than during the preceding comparable period.”

It’s not wise to give men like Alvaro Uribe or Bush the benefit of the doubt when dealing with human rights. This is evidence of a systematic and devastating assault on (mainly) rural Colombians.

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.

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 number.

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.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.