When our guys are doing it, that's different. Somehow.

if somehow something similar happened in Venezuela, or Bolivia, or Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, etc?

They bark themselves hoarse over Venezuela now, over any ort anyone can concoct.

This is an article certainly worth keeping.

Thank you for the link.

Why it hasn't been publicized far more is a deep, deep mystery which should have been illuminated long ago.

like we were paying them to kill people to get the money we promised to pay, if they killed people.

That sounds like a recipe for killing unarmed people, as they are easier then armed people.

Kinda obvious the better armed troops would be in the fight.

as in beggars, street vendors, "slow" people, prostitutes, drunks, etc., etc., etc. in the special "social cleansing" murders.

They offer jobs to poor young Colombian men, gather them in one place with the young men assuming they are there for a job, they murder them all, and dump them in mass graves after counting them as dead FARC.

At times they have even had to resort to using crematoria to handle the excessive traffic they created of piles of dead Colombian citizens, just to get them out of sight after their bogus use as "FARC." This was uncovered during testimony at trials of (AUC) death squad members.

...who committed war crimes to justice on both sides.

They are considered Latin America's most unequal country, and this feudal state has been steadily supported by the US Government from the first.

You need to see far more deeply into Colombia's history to have any grasp of what has been happening there, in order to be able to speak on even footing with DU posters who have taken the time to find out.

The paramilitaries (death squads) have worked in tandem during massacres, etc. with the US supported Colombian military. This has been acknowledged in testimonies by both paramilitaries and by Colombian soldiers and Colombian officers. Very little has EVER been done to prevent astonishing, horrific, hellish atrocities committed by both the paras, and the military. In the present, campesinos, indigenous Colombians, African Colombians, union workers, human rights workers, etc., etc. are STILL being murdered, and not because they are low-lifes who get into a lot of fights, as some right-wing troll suggested.

The paramilitaries pretended to surrender their arms, and disband several years ago, although the world found out in almost no time at all it was just a hoax. Some paramilitaries even hired ordinary people to stand in for them and hand in guns, pretending to officially quit.

Human rights groups grasped the reality almost immediately and made statements that the paras had simply shifted, and created new organizations with new names, and have continued business as usual. One of the things which they do to excess, is TERRORISM.

Here's an example of their behavior:

Neo-paramilitaries announce ‘the end of communist, homosexual students’ in Bogota
Feb 27, 2014 posted by Mimi Yagoub

This is the time for social cleansing,” reads the most recent pamphlet by Colombian neo-paramilitaries, which threatens to take the lives of the “communist, homosexual, immoral and rapist” schoolchildren of Bogota.

A neo-paramilitary group known as the “Aguilas Negras” has issued a “social cleansing” pamphlet to schoolchildren in Colombian capital, Bogota, Colombia’s human rights agency, ombudsman’s office, announced on Wednesday.

“For the schools of Ciudad Bolivar, Kenedi, Bosa, Usme and others, fathers take care of you children, those who are crooked we’re going to straighten out by bullet or knife, either they’re with us or the c**** disappear,” the pamphlet reads, referring to the students of various localities in Bogota.

“This is the end of communist, homosexual students, immoral swines and rapists.”

The ombudsman’s office has called for authorities to put in place the necessary evacuation and security measures.

Read more: http://colombiareports.co/end-communist-homosexual-students-social-cleansers-threaten-colombia-schools/

....and such attitude on your part must make you a delight at dinner parties.

Where's your condemnation of FARC or were they just a bunch of fluffy bunnies hunted by the big bad wolf known as the Fuerzas Militares de Colombia?

No matter what some people seem to think, it's NOT O.K. to commit terrorism
We agree there at least but differ on who was doing the majority of the terrorizing I bet.

FARC:

Financing:
Drug trade
Kidnappings

Human rights concerns:
Child soldiers
Extrajudicial executions
Use of gas cylinder mortars and landmines
Violence against indigenous people
Sexual abuse and forced abortions

Maybe YOU should do some reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARC

The War on Human Rights in Colombia
Three Variations on a Theme from Uribe

By PHIILIP CRYAN

Bogota.

...His choice of the term "private justice groups" plays into an unfolding story, the historical dimensions of which make his attacks on NGOs look inconsequential. The Uribe administration proposed in August a peace deal with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country's largest federation of right-wing paramilitaries. If the proposal passes Colombia's Congress, AUC troops would give up their weapons and offer symbolic reparations (primarily in the form of cash payments and social work); in exchange, they would receive amnesties from the President and not be required to serve jail time. After ten years, their criminal records would be clean and they would be eligible to hold public office. Impunity would extend even to those leaders already convicted on multiple counts of crimes against humanity.

The proposal has been pilloried by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, European governments, dozens of NGOs, members of the U.S. Congress and numerous newspapers. Reuters, for example, posed the question of whether the government's "conditional freedom" offer for the paramilitaries amounts to "allowing some of Colombia's most feared criminals to literally get away with murder." The Chicago Tribune titled their house editorial on the matter "Colombia's pact with the devils." Human Rights Watch calls Uribe's proposal "the impunity law."

Colombian Senator Rafael Pardo, one of Uribe's most devoted allies until the law was proposed, commented to El Tiempo (Colombia's largest newspaper): "You turn in a farm and that compensates for a massacre?"

...Traveling in southern Colombia's conflict regions, I have heard countless stories of AUC massacres carried out with chainsaws and machetes--slow, public decapitations designed for their spectacular effects: as lessons to those watching. On two occasions I've been told of paramilitaries playing soccer with decapitated heads. In some urban areas they institute a "social control" system: miniskirts for women and long hair for men are prohibited; adulterers are made to wear Scarlet Letter-like marks of shame and homosexuals are run out of town or executed. Anyone suspected of collaborating with guerrillas--anyone in a trade union, doing human rights work, or trying to be a serious journalist or priest or mayor would fall in this category--is murdered, often after prolonged torture. The paramilitaries tell civilians not to move or bury the cadavers of their victims: "leave the bodies to rot in public, so the dogs can get at them," they instruct. On a trip to the southern province of Putumayo--the region where U.S. military aid has been most focused over the first three years of Plan Colombia--last December, I happened to arrive in the city of Mocoa the same day that the bodies of Giovanni and John, two brothers killed by the AUC, were discovered by their mother, who was just returning from a vacation. There were no bullet-wounds. The skin of their faces had been disintegrated by some kind of acid, likely applied while they were still alive.

...Yet "there is 98% impunity" for paramilitary actions, according to a government human rights official from another Putumayo city. "The police refuse to collaborate ." "The military and paramilitaries play volleyball and soccer together," says another civilian government official. Within a day of arriving in a Putumayo city, one can find out--even as an outsider--where the paramilitaries live, their names and ranks, even their military specialties. Whenever asked about collusion, however, military and police officers provide an unvarying response: "Prove it." "We can't act without evidence, without an official complaint being filed," a military commander recently told me. The military insists that civilians' claims of regular paramilitary killings are greatly exaggerated and deny outright the presence of paramilitaries in many cities they in fact control. This just to take one region of Colombia as an example.

The history of military-paramilitary collusion in Colombia is a long one--and it is within this history, finally, that Uribe's amnesty proposal (and other recent offensives against human rights and international humanitarian law) must be understood. This history, in turn, cannot be understood without analysis of the U.S. government's role in Colombia.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cryan10112003.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2692204#2694900

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Previous posting:

Colombian Indigenous people still being massacred

Debora Barros is a Colombian indigenous leader, lawyer and member and representative of the Wayuu community, which is the largest indigenous nation in Colombia.

She is a survivor of a massacre which occurred in April 2004 when a group of paramilitaries arrived in the lands where the earth where the indigenous community of Debora's family is located. In front of the community they assassinated and butchered 12 people (children and adults) and took away another 30. Altogether, 42 people died in that massacre. Amongst those butchered was the Debora's family. She was able to survive.

After the murders, the paramilitaries threatened the rest of the indigenous community telling them that if did not leave that land immediately, they would kill them in the same way. The tribe was completely displaced and they are now hiding in Venezuela.

Colombia's mining union, SINTRAMINERCOL is investigating this massacre, as the lands of the Wayuu nation are precisely located in territory which has the richest coal deposits in the whole of Latin America, that are operated and exploited by BHP Billiton and two other multinationals. What is happening to the Wayuu people is typical of what has been happening to indigenous and rural communities in Colombia. Their lands are of interest to multinationals; they are 'moved off' their land often by violent means by paramilitary groups - and then a couple of years later, the multinationals can expand their activities in those lands.

At the moment there are more than 3 million Colombians (farming, indigenous and black communities) who are internally displaced. After these displacements, a great part of the lands they were forced to abandon were soon occupied by diverse multinationals for the operation and export of natural resources, like gold, oil, coal, etc.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4864456
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Same Paramilitary Abuses; New Faces, New Names
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Feb 4, 2010 (IPS) - A leading international rights group urged the Colombian government to take action against what it called the "successors" to the far-right paramilitary militias, which continue attacking civilians and human rights defenders. In its new report, "Paramilitaries’ Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia", Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the 2003-2006 demobilisation of the "brutal, mafia-like, paramilitary coalition known as the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia)" was a failure, despite repeated government claims that the paramilitaries no longer exist.

The 122-page report, the result of two years of fieldwork, says that after the demobilisation process had come to an end, new groups almost immediately "cropped up all over the country, taking the reins of the criminal operations that the AUC leadership previously ran."

~snip~
"The successor groups are engaged in widespread and serious abuses against civilians in much of the country. They massacre, kill, rape, torture, and forcibly 'disappear' persons who do not follow their orders. They regularly use threats and extortion against members of the communities where they operate, as a way to exert control over local populations," it says.

~snip~
AUC, which emerged in the 1980s and was heavily involved in the drug trade, according to its own leaders, was blamed by United Nations human rights officials for 80 percent of the atrocities committed in Colombia's four-decade civil war. They also worked in close cooperation with the military, as documented by U.N. officials, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the U.S. State Department, and prominent international rights watchdogs like HRW and Amnesty International.

To eliminate evidence of the thousands of murders they committed every year, the paramilitaries sometimes built ovens to burn the bodies. Another frequent practice, to avoid the effort of digging graves, was the use of chainsaws to cut up victims - dead or alive. Rivers were also extensively used, to get rid of entire corpses or dismembered bodies.

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50225

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Wikipedia:

~snip~
Human rights violations[edit]

Right-wing paramilitary groups have been blamed for the vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia. The United Nations has estimated that approximately 80% of all killings in Colombia's civil conflict have been committed by paramilitaries, 12% by leftist guerrillas, and the remaining 8% by government forces.[88] In 2005, Amnesty International stated that The vast majority of non-combat politically-motivated killings, "disappearances", and cases of torture have been carried out by army-backed paramilitaries.[10] In its 1999 report, Human Rights Watch cited estimates from Colombian human rights organizations CINEP and Justice and Peace, which indicated that paramilitary groups were responsible for about 73% of identifiable political murders during the first half of 1998, with guerrillas and state security forces being blamed for 17 and 10 percent respectively.[89] The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported that, in the year 2000, approximately 85% of political murders were committed by the paramilitaries and state forces.[90]

Paramilitary violence is overwhelmingly targeted towards peasants, unionists, teachers, human rights workers, journalists and leftist political activists.[92][93]

Paramilitary abuses in Colombia are often classified as atrocities due to the brutality of their methods, including the torture, rape, incineration, decapitation and mutilation with chainsaws or machetes of dozens of their victims at a time, affecting civilians, women and children.[14][91][92]

Paramilitary forces in Colombia have additionally been charged with the illegal recruitment of children into the armed ranks. Though this is an offense punishable by national law, the prosecution rate for these crimes is less than 2% as of 2008.[94]

Many of these abuses have occurred with the knowledge and support of the Colombian security forces. A 1998 Human Rights Watch report stated:

... where paramilitaries have a pronounced presence, the army fails to move against them and tolerates their activity, including egregious violations of international humanitarian law; provides some paramilitary groups with intelligence used to carry out operations; and in other cases actively promotes and coordinates with paramilitary units, including joint maneuvers in which atrocities are the frequent result. ... In areas where paramilitaries are present, some police officers have been directly implicated in joint army-paramilitary actions or have supplied information to paramilitaries for their death lists. Police have also stood by while paramilitaries selected and killed their victims. On many occasions, police have publicly described whole communities as guerrillas or sympathetic to them and have withdrawn police protection, a violation of their responsibility under Colombian law to protect civilians from harm. Instead of reinforcing the police after guerrilla attacks, police commanders have withdrawn officers, thus encouraging or allowing paramilitaries to move in unimpeded and kill civilians.[34]

A 1999 human rights report from the U.S. State Department said:

At times the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups that committed abuses; in some instances, individual members of the security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups by passing them through roadblocks, sharing intelligence, and providing them with ammunition. Paramilitary forces find a ready support base within the military and police, as well as local civilian elites in many areas.[95]

In 2006, Amnesty International reported that:

The security forces have tried to improve their human rights image by letting their paramilitary allies commit human rights violations and then denying that the paramilitaries are operating with their acquiescence, support or sometimes direct coordination.[71]

[center]&quot The AUC) mutilated bodies with chainsaws. They chained people to burning vehicles. They decapitated and rolled heads like soccer balls. They killed dozens at one time, including women and children. They buried people alive or hung them on meat hooks, carving them ... the victims ... were civilians accused of supporting the guerrillas by supplying them with food, medical supplies, or transportation."

Robin Kirk,[91] Human Rights Watch investigator in Colombia[/center]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitarism_in_Colombia

[font size=6] ETC. [/font]

Thanks for the thread, Judi Lynn.