Rights violations hang over new Colombian president

Source: Washington Post

Rights violations hang over new Colombian president
Monday, June 28, 2010
By Juan Forero, The Washington Post

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The verdict last week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.

A lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. But the 16-year-old case is no anomaly in a country suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict. Hundreds of cases of murder and massacres, old and new, are coursing through the inter-American justice system.

As President Alvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a firestorm in Colombia and as far away as Europe: the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Mr. Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.

"If you put all of this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it's all really a constant over the years," Santiago Canton, an Argentine who has headed the rights commission for nine years, said by phone from Washington. "That's very dangerous."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10179/1068840-82.stm

June 29, 2010

Fundamental Change in Colombia Unlikely with President-elect Santos
by Moira Birss
-Colombia/USA-

Fulfilling expectations after a solid showing in May’s first round, former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos handily won Colombia's June 20th presidential run-off election. Though Santos and his contender, Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of the capital city Bogota, had been neck-in-neck in opinion polls leading up to the first round of elections, the May 30th results gave Santos a substantial lead that he never lost. On June 20th Santos won 69% of the vote.

Mockus’ defeat may be seen as a combination of several factors. For one, opinion polls are unreliable in Colombia. Pollsters tend to reach only middle and upper class urban residents. Poor and rural Colombians, who tend to not have access to landlines or other standard survey methods, are rarely surveyed.

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Santos’ win and the support that is rallying behind him raise concerns, however, about the lack of attention to the multiple scandals marring former President Uribe’s tenure. Though during his campaign Santos promised greater attention to human rights, his political history and dirty tricks during the campaign do not inspire much confidence. While serving as Uribe’s Defense Minister, Santos presided over a macabre practice in which poor young men were kidnapped from cities, taken to the countryside, shot, dressed up in guerrilla uniforms, and later claimed as combat kills. Euphemistically known as the “false positives” scandal, in late 2008 it became public that the Colombian army was employing this practice deemed “systematic” by the UN. During the election, the Election Observation Mission denounced vote buying in favor of Santos, and a delegation of U.S.-based NGOs found evidence of the use of government subsidies to poor families who favored Santos’ candidacy.

Santos represents the establishment that seeks to enrich the country’s elite without a real interest in ending the war or respecting human rights. That is not to say that a Mockus victory would have fixed Colombia. Much of Mockus’ proposed platform did not differ all that much from Santos’. From a human rights perspective, the election ended up being a “vote for the lesser of two evils.” Having recently returned from Colombia after working for two years as a human rights observer, I can’t help but agree with 25-year-old Miguel*, an artist from Medellin who believes Santos’ election “will mean more war as a business, more narcotrafficking as a business.” As Miguel says, “It seems to me that Santos only wants power without caring about what happens in Colombia. If Uribe supposedly had gotten rid of the guerrillas then what can we expect of his successor?”

More:
http://thewip.net/contributors/2010/06/fundamental_change_in_colombia.html