Columbia's death-squad scandal

[Friday]

As if merely having death-squads weren't bad enough... they've got death-squad scandals.        But GDI, don't let any of these little buggers cross the U.S. border; pay no attention to that death-squad behind the curtain, they just want to come here and collect welfare!  Plus, they look like Mexicans!!   

Orwellian phrase for the day: "extrajudicial executions"

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12522940&fsrc=nwl

Upping the body count

Oct 30th 2008 | BOGOTÁ
From The Economist print edition
Not that hard, when any body will do

IT IS the kind of outrage that Colombians hoped belonged to the past rather than the present. Over the course of this year, a score of unemployed young men disappeared from their homes in Soacha, a poor suburb of Bogotá, only to turn up dead, apparently killed in combat by the army, several hundred miles farther north. There was speculation that they had been offered jobs by paramilitary groups. But as investigations have proceeded, the truth turns out to be even worse. The young men appear to have been kidnapped, turned over to army units and then murdered in order to inflate the body count of dead guerrillas.

After three army colonels were dismissed over the case, President Álvaro Uribe and his defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, took more drastic action on October 29th. They announced the firing of three generals and 24 other officers or NCOs, in the biggest purge of the army for a decade. A military investigation had found that "in some parts of the army there has been negligence", Mr Uribe said. "There may be members of the armed forces involved in murder." The government has ordered the attorney-general's office to investigate, and officials say that any officers who are charged will be tried by civilian, not military, courts.

Worryingly, the case of the Soacha youths may not be an isolated one. There have been reports of similar disappearances of young men in two other parts of the country. In a report released this week, Amnesty International, a human-rights group, says that the security forces were responsible for 330 "extrajudicial executions" last year, up from an average of 220 a year in 2004-06. Amnesty says paramilitaries killed around 300 civilians last year and guerrillas about 260. The government's own watchdog is investigating 930 suspected killings by the army.

Officials argue that overall levels of violence have fallen steadily over the past decade, as a result of the demobilisation of many of the right-wing paramilitary groups and the army's success against the FARC guerrillas of the left. The government has been shaken by previous reports of army units killing civilians and passing them off as dead guerrillas. Last year the defence ministry adopted a new policy that measures the army's success by the number of guerrilla captures or desertions, rather than the body count. In firing the generals commanding two divisions where abuses occurred, the defence ministry appears to be sending a message that it will hold commanders responsible for ensuring that the new policy is carried out.

The purge follows two other recent cases in which Mr Uribe has been embarrassed by the actions of his subordinates. The government was forced to order an investigation over a video aired on CNN which showed that, contrary to their denials, police opened fire on thousands of Indian marchers demanding land, killing two protesters. And the director of intelligence resigned after it was revealed that a mid-level official in her agency had spied on Gustavo Petro, an opposition senator.

The only good news for the security forces was the escape of Óscar Tulio Lizcano, a former senator who had been held as a hostage for eight years by the FARC. Several months ago the army identified the camp in the jungles of western Colombia where he was held. Troops surrounded the camp, cutting off supplies. The guerrilla commander guarding Mr Lizcano opted to desert, taking his hostage with him. The military operations which achieved this happy ending were "an honour for the Colombian armed forces", Mr Uribe declared. Sadly, that honour appears to have been tarnished by the murder of innocent civilians elsewhere in the country.

[Pat K]

Jeez it's so hard to get decent,
upright, god fearing Death Squads
these days.

[Kat Kanning]

Feh, you make me spit on my monitor, PatK.