US indicts neo-paramilitary, drug gang leaders

Source: Colombia Reports

US indicts neo-paramilitary, drug gang leaders
Wednesday, 09 February 2011 21:43
Adriaan Alsema

The United States has indicted several leaders of Colombian neo-paramilitary and drug gangs, a Florida U.S. attorney announced Wednesday.

The most prominent and recent indictment is that of Diego Perez Henao, alias "Diego Rastrojo," one of the three alleged leaders of the "Rastrojos" drug gang that operates from the south west of Colombia and is considered the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the country.

Apart from the Rastrojos leader, prosecutors previously indicted seven other Colombians involved in gangs that emerged from the now-defunt Norte del Valle cartel and demobilized paramilitary organization AUC.

According to U.S. Attorney Wilfredo Ferrer, the unit formed by the Southern District of Florida, the DEA, the U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and the Miami Field Office will work together with Colombian authorities and focus specifically on drug trafficking and neo-paramilitary organizations that took control of Colombia's drug trade after the demise of the old cartels and the AUC.

Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/14232-us-indicts-neo-paramilitary-drug-gang-leaders.html

because I don't think there has been a quantum change in what constitutes plain ol' 'paramilitary'.

tight fitting leather or synthetic outfits and wear shades all the time.

Also they can dodge bullets.

Page last updated at 08:10 GMT, Thursday, 26 November 2009
Colombia jails death squad general over massacre

A Colombian court has sentenced a former general to 40 years in jail for his role in the killing of dozens of civilians by right-wing death squads. Jaime Humberto Uscategui's sentence is the longest ever for an army officer in Colombia. The court was told the general had knowingly let far-right paramilitary death squads use his army base.

Some 50 unarmed peasants were killed by the militia in 1997, and their corpses cut open and thrown in a river. The killings happened during a five-day period in the remote village of Mapiripan in the eastern province of Meta. Pleas for assistance from the villagers and local officials were reportedly ignored by Gen Uscategui. The court found him guilty of murder, kidnapping and falsifying public documents.

National crusade

Gen Uscategui continues to maintain his innocence and says he will appeal the ruling.

The Mapiripan massacre heralded a bloody national crusade by the AUC - the right-wing United Self Defence Forces of Colombia - against Marxist rebels, which took the lives of tens of thousands of Colombians, the BBC's Jeremy McDermott reports from Medellin. The paramilitaries often worked alongside the security forces against the powerful left-wing rebels, our correspondent says.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8380025.stm

~~~~~
Mapiripán Massacre
Wikipedia:

The Mapiripán Massacre was a massacre of civilians that took place in Mapiripán, Meta Department, Colombia. The massacre was carried out from July 15 to July 20, 1997 by Colombian paramilitaries, specifically the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

On July 12, 1997 two planeloads of paramilitaries arrived at the airport of San José del Guaviare, which also served as a base for anti-narcotics police. The paramilitaries then traveled through territories where the Colombian National Army manned checkpoints.

On July 15, 1997, the paramilitiaries arrived at Mapiripán. They used chainsaws and machetes to murder, behead, dismember, and disembowel a number of civilians. Because the bodies were thrown into a river, it is unknown exactly how many people died.

In proceedings before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the government of Colombia has admitted that members of its military forces also played a role in the massacre, through omission.<1> General Jaime Uscátegui allegedly ordered local troops under his command to stay away from the area in which the murders were taking place until the paramilitaries finished the massacre and left. Retired General Uscátegui was later prosecuted, put on trial, and subsequently acquitted.<2><3>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapirip%C3%A1n_Massacre

~~~~~
From Human Rights Watch:

IV. PARAMILITARY VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW

Each night they kill groups of five to six defenseless people, who are cruelly and monstrously massacred after being tortured. The screams of humble people are audible, begging for mercy and asking for help.

– Judge Leonardo Iván Cortés, Mapiripán, Meta

July 1997

Mapiripán, Meta: From July 15 through July 20, 1997, the ACCU seized the town of Mapiripán, Meta, killed at least thirteen people, and threatened others with death. An investigation by human rights groups concluded that paramilitaries had arrived in the region via chartered airplane, which landed at the San José del Guaviare airport days before the massacre. This case also illustrates the deadly results of the army and police policy of acquiescence in paramilitary killings. Local army and police units ignored repeated phone calls from a civilian judge in the area asking for help to stop the slayings. At dawn on July 15, an estimated 200 heavily-armed ACCU members arrived and began rounding up local authorities and forcing them to accompany them. Among those they searched for were peasants who had taken part in a 1996 department-wide protest against coca eradication and the government’s failure to provide viable economic alternatives for the region. ACCU men detained residents and people arriving by boat, took them to the local slaughterhouse, then bound, tortured, and executed them by slitting their throats. The first person killed, Antonio María Herrera, known as “Catumare,” was hung from a hook, and ACCU members quartered his body, throwing the pieces into the Guaviare River. At least two bodies — those of Sinaí Blanco, a boatman, and Ronald Valencia, the airstrip manager — were decapitated.103 Judge Leonardo Iván Cortés reported hearing the screams of the people they brought to the slaughterhouse to interrogate, torture, and kill throughout the five days the ACCU remained in the area. In one of the missives he sent to various regional authorities during the massacre, he wrote: “Each night they kill groups of five to six defenseless people, who are cruelly and monstrously massacred after being tortured. The screams of humble people are audible, begging for mercy and asking for help.”104 ACCU leader Carlos Castaño took responsibility for the massacre, and told reporters that an ACCU “shock front” of seventy men executed thirteen people, and threw some bodies in the Guaviare River. Arriving only days after the ACCU left, authorities located five bodies, though the ICRC estimated to reporters that as many as twenty more may have been killed and thrown into the Guaviare River.105 Castaño denied reports of torture, yet promised “many more Mapiripans” for Colombia in subsequent press interviews.106 Hundreds of people fled the region, including Judge Cortés, who was forced to leave Colombia with his family because of threats on his life. The Attorney General’s Office is currently investigating the ACCU’s involvement in the massacre and hasissued arrest warrants for Castaño and two of his men for planning and carrying out the killings.107 The Internal Affairs continues to investigate official involvement.108

Despite Judge Cortés’s eight telephone pleas for help along with the calls of at least two others, neither the police nor the army’s “Joaquín París” Battalion in nearby San José reacted until the ACCU had left town. As a result of their internal investigation, the army put Seventh Brigade Commander Gen. Jaime Humberto Uscátegui on administrative duty for failing to act promptly to stop the massacre and detain those responsible. The armed forces also claimed to be investigating Maj. Hernán Orozco Castro, acting commander of the “Joaquín París Battalion, Maj. Horacio Galeano, and Capt. Luis Carlos López. In an interview, General Bonett told Human Rights Watch that General Uscátegui would not be promoted and that his career was over. However, Human Rights Watch subsequently learned that General Uscátegui was returned to active duty without any apparent punishment. It is also noteworthy that the army, which controls the San José airport, claimed that it had not registered the arrival of the ACCU’s chartered airplane despite a policy of registering every arriving plane and passenger, including Human Rights Watch representatives during a May 1997 visit.109

http://www.hrw.org/reports98/colombia/Colom989-04.htm

~~~~~

http://colombia.indymedia.org.nyud.net:8090/uploads/2009/07/49_asesinados_en_mapiripan.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_f_EHFh5U-4A/R64nA5YTOzI/AAAAAAAADY8/9rJ7bYUSBM4/s1600/Paramilitares.+Masacre-de-mapiripan%5B1%5D.gif
Dan Gardner • Chainsaws in Colombia

The victims were dragged into the town slaughterhouse. Amid chains and meat hooks, they were bound, suspended and interrogated. Where are the guerrillas? Are you a guerrilla? The men had machetes and chainsaws. Whatever the victims said, however they pleaded, they lost a hand. An arm. A leg. Finally, almost mercifully, they were decapitated.

By The Ottawa Citizen
July 20, 2007

The victims were dragged into the town slaughterhouse. Amid chains and meat hooks, they were bound, suspended and interrogated. Where are the guerrillas? Are you a guerrilla? The men had machetes and chainsaws. Whatever the victims said, however they pleaded, they lost a hand. An arm. A leg. Finally, almost mercifully, they were decapitated.

When Stephen Harper flew to Bogota earlier this week, the news stories mentioned "human rights concerns." They didn't say much more than that, which is a pity because in Colombia "human rights concerns" are not vague abstractions. They involve men who torture and murder with chainsaws: A few have been caught and punished; some have walked away whistling; and many are still at it.

Mr. Harper acknowledged that all is not well in Colombia, but he defended his decision to launch free trade talks. "We are not going to say fix all your social, political and human rights problems and only then will we engage in trade relations with you," the prime minister said. "That's ridiculous." That sounds pretty reasonable. But things get a little murkier when you know that growing evidence suggests the president whose hand Mr. Harper shook leads a government with deep connections to men who torture and murder with chainsaws.

The timing of Mr. Harper's trip was strangely apt. Almost precisely 10 years earlier -- on July 15, 1997 -- paramilitary thugs entered a village in the southeastern jungles of Colombia. What followed was a four-day orgy of rape, torture and murder that came to be known as the Mapiripan massacre. It is believed that 49 people died, although only three, headless, bodies were found. All the others were dismembered in the slaughterhouse and the body parts dumped in the Guaviare River.

Colombian history is riddled with massacres. But two things set Mapiripan apart.

One was the use of chainsaws. After Mapiripan, it became the paramilitaries' signature.

More:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/politics/story.html?i...

~~~~~
Why is this man crying?



The man in the picture is retired general Jaime Uscátegui, one of the highest-ranking Colombian military officers ever to face indictment and a criminal trial (as opposed to a dropped investigation or a dismissal) for a human rights case. Uscátegui could get up to 40 years in jail if a Bogotá civilian court finds that he knew about, and did nothing to prevent, a grisly July 1997 paramilitary massacre in the hamlet of Mapiripán, deep inside FARC-controlled territory in south-central Colombia.

In this image from nearly two weeks ago, Uscátegui has just been asked for the name of the paramilitary leader who ordered the massacre. The general tearfully responds, “I’d rather my children have a father in jail than a father in a tomb.” Later, he indicated that the massacre’s mastermind was among three paramilitary leaders who, amid much controversy, addressed Colombia’s congress in July. Everyone understood this to mean Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC leader who has been a prominent presence in the current negotiations with the Colombian government, and who is accused of planning the massacre from a ranch in San Pedro de Urabá, hundreds of miles away from Mapiripán in Colombia’s far northwest.

That Mancuso may have coordinated Mapiripán is not exactly earth-shaking news. Far more interesting – especially to those of us whose government has donated billions to Colombia’s security forces – is the nature of the military-paramilitary cooperation that made it possible.

Uscátegui claims to know a lot about that relationship. In July 2003 recordings that were revealed last March in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio, Uscátegui threatened to tell all unless the high command helps to keep him out of jail.

If I go to court, it will be a much more serious case than number 8,000 (the term used for the mid-90s narco-money scandal that almost took down President Ernesto Samper). In fact, it will be more serious than everything that has happened in Colombia. With this issue I discovered what is really happening. It is very serious, very grave, because it proves an allegation that we have denied for all our lives, the one about the military’s links with paramilitaries. … It seems that in the attorney-general’s office, in the inspector-general’s office, in the presidency, they know that terrible things happened there, very grave things for the army and for the country. And that these things could even bring down Plan Colombia.

More:
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=50

(My emphasis.)
~~~~~
If you would wish to read more info. given by former death squad (paramilitary) member who was involved in massacres, Francisco Villalba, please take the time to look at post #3 by rabs, from an earlier thread. You may not find it easy to forget his story:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x14640

Another horror story out of Colombia; the first mention I have seen of crematoria set up by rightwing paramilitaries (who have been linked to President Uribe) to burn the bodies of their victims. The irony is that today Uribe met with the pope, the former Hitler Youth pontiff, in Rome.

-------------------

Mancuso said the burning of the bodies “was a favor that (now-deceased AUC founder) Carlos Castaño was doing for the authorities.”

He said the decision came after a meeting where politicians, senior military officers and other notables asked the AUC to dispose of victims’ bodies as a way of holding down the number of deaths that could be attributed to the militias.

That discussion took place at a time when evidence of militia massacres was coming to light, according to Mancuso, who said the militias dug up their buried victims and cremated them in ovens set up near the Venezuelan border.

Another former AUC member, Jorge Ivan Laverde, testified last October that the first of the ovens was built in 2001 in Norte de Santander province to incinerate 98 bodies.

http://static.canalcaracol.com.nyud.net:8090/sites/caracoltv.com/files/images/ae2c68f047904ed9f814a691e6b426ca.jpg

Former paramilitary, the late Francisco Villalba, man who testified
about what they had done to innocent Colombian citizens. He was
murdered after he gave his testimony.Written by an editor at El Tiempo regarding the article they did on Colombian massacres:

~snip~
They Gave Quartering Classes

When we decided at El Tiempo to do a special report on the phenomenon of common graves a scene began to repeat itself in our newsroom: one by one, reporters coming back from the field, returned mortified.

Few discoveries have shaken us so deeply and few are as difficult to write about: from the scale of the horror, to the way they died, and by the insatiable pain of the families, as well as—perhaps most unsettling—realizing the magnitude of the work that remains to be done throughout the country. Will a significant number of the dead be unearthed and identified to alleviate their families? Will we be able to mourn, as we should, to prevent a third chapter of extreme violence from enrapturing Colombia?

Paramilitary testimonies and the results of forensic teams lead us to conclude that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary umbrella group, not only designed a method to quarter human beings, they also took the extra step of actually giving classes on the subject, using live people taken to their training camps.

Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary commander that directed the barbarism of the Aro massacre in the department (province) of Antioquia in which 15 people were tortured and butchered over five days, has revealed previously unknown details of those acts. “They were elderly people and were taken in trucks, alive, with their hands tied…. They were divvied up in groups of five … the instructions were to take off their arms, their heads … quartering them alive,” reads the testimony in his file.

More:
https://nacla.org/node/1467

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy

And I wasn't being flippant about the murders, but about the silly name the author gave them "neo-paramilitary" doesn't make much sense.

connected to the same right-wing Colombian politicians, still connected to the same Colombian military which uses them to assassinate the same kinds of people, mass murder the same kinds of small villages, to prey upon the same helpless people who stand in the road of multi-nationals who want to take their land, and plunder it for their own benefit, using the same desperately poor Colombian work force which ran out of options long ago.

has them labeled as neo para-militaries.

It doesn't make sense.

That was what the joke was about.

for the Colombian government, under Uribe, which claimed for several years that it had completely demobilized the paras, and everything was A-OK, as long as the U.S. gov't continued sending over half a billion dollars to them annually so they could keep fighting all those terrifying leftist guerrilas, even if they had to keep killing peasants and dressing them as FARCs to prove there was a mighty battle going on, deserving of full funding by the U.S. workers, through their annual required tax dollars.

Of course the U.S. gets something FROM the investment of U.S. workers' tax-dollars: the ability to use Colombia as a "lily pad," as Rumsfeld calls places like that, from which "full spectrum" military action can be taken in the region.

The only disgruntled people are the victims' grieving families, the future victims and their loved ones, the people living in a state of terror and trauma in Colombia, and the US taxpayers who are being used as witless piggybanks in US military/industrial adventures.

Sane, free people wouldn't approve of this crap. That's why they do their best to keep the public completely unaware of the facts.

(See how I snuck a cocaine reference in there?)

More of a 'people who want money and lack scruples' thing. And that population cuts across all political groups.

For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farc

to shut down these networks and use their assets to help people that they've harmed in the various names of whatever "cause" they supported by any and all available means. Yes that sounds idealistic and impossible to those afraid of tptb. It's a plan being followed now by others that don't worship $$$. We, the wee small people.

U.S. Treasury: Lebanese bank laundering millions to Hezbollah linked group (2-10-11 Reuters via Haaretz)

Money alledgedly laundered to drug trafficking group that provided financial support for Hezbollah
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/u-s-treasury-lebanes-bank-laundering-millions-to-hezbollah-linked-group-1.342550

The money laundering thread: A DU collaborative investigation (started 7-9-10)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8716178

It's not an uncommon practice for the "good guys/ladies" to employ, profit and invest with groups like Hell's Angels, Outlaws, Aryan Brotherhood, KKK, Sons of Confederacy etc (often "good guys/ladies" are linked by membership to such groups) right here in HOMELAND and then also use then in false flag ops-its got to stop. Iran Contra morphed into private intelligence/military networks that handle the security of these criminals while "investigating" them too-that's how screwed up the world is as a direct result of the installation of unelected war criminals that remain unpunished hiding behind the fractured shield of HOMELAND SECURITY INC.

Paramilitarism in Colombia
Paramilitarism in Colombia refers to the origins and activities of right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia during the 20th century.

~snip~
Human rights violationsRight-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.<71> 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.<72> The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported that, in the year 2000, approximately 85% of political murders were committed by the paramilitaries and state forces.<73>

Paramilitary violence is overwhelmingly targeted towards peasants, unionists, teachers, human rights workers, journalists and leftist political activists.<75><76>

Paramilitary abuses in Colombia are often classifed 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.<12><74><75>

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.<27>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitarism_in_Colombia

'Army complicit in Arauca paramilitary crimes'
Thursday, 22 July 2010 08:19 Leo Palmer

http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/paramilitary/miguel_angel_mejia.jpg

Former paramilitary leader Miguel Angel Mejia Munera, alias "El Mezillo," (the Twin) alleged that Colombian politicians, oil companies and the Colombian army had links with the paramilitaries in the eastern Colombian border department Arauca.

~snip~
Collaboration with the Colombia Army

According to Mejia, the Colombian army was involved in the murder of Angel Chaparro, who was gunned down on January 25 in 2002 along with Mario Ruiz Gonzalez Delgado Heliberto in Tame, Arauca only four blocks from the police station. Chaparro was the key witness in the case against the Colombian Air Force and American pilots working for Oxy oil, who were implicated in the 1998 bombing of Santo Domingo in Arauca which left 17 farmers dead. Chaparro died in the shooting but Delgado was kidnapped.

According to the ex paramilitary Samuel Saavedra, the paramilitaries chased after Delgado when he tried to escape. When they encountered a military road block, the Colombian Army gave the paramilitaries five minutes to find and kill Delgado.

"El Mezillo" also said the Colombian Army was involved in the murder of taxi driver Alexis Wilson Pedraza in 2001. Mejia said the paramilitaries got into the taxi and told him to drive to an address near the Naranjitos Army Base. A shoot out started when the vehicle approached an army check point but quickly stopped after the paramilitary "Boris" shouted to the army "It's us."

Allegedly "Boris" then killed the taxi driver by smashing his skull with a large rock. A few months later the paramilitaries contacted Pedraza's widow to apologise after they realised they had mistaken him for a guerrilla collaborator.

~snip~
Collaboration with oil companies

Speaking about the involvement of businesses in paramilitary activity, Mejia said that the oil companies in the region had gone to the paramilitary warlord Vicente Castaño to ask him to ask him for protection from leftist guerrillas.

Mejia said the relationship between oil companies and the paramilitares was so strong that Julio Acosta asked them not to surrender their weapons when the "Vencedores de Arauca" demobilized in 2005.

The former paramilitary leader also said that Alfredo Guzman Ivan Tafur, the former mayor of Tame, told the paramilitary group that the oil companies would pay for the upkeep of 100 men if they did not demobilize.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/10935-army-complicit-in-arauca-paramilitary-crimes-the-twin.html

Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington’s Needs
by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward and Tess Hall
Feb 2 2009

~snip~
Colombia’s ‘appalling’ record . . .

Over the past 40 years, Colombia has been known for its rampant human rights violations, untouchable drug cartels, government-linked death squads and violent guerrilla groups. The principal specialist on Colombia for the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch (HRW), Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, told Congress (4/23/07), “Colombia presents the worst human rights and humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere.” She also noted that government-linked paramilitary groups are largely responsible for Colombia’s grim status.

Though Colombia is not the chaotic state it was in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and violence and repression have not been uniform, HRW’s Americas director José Miguel Vivanco has called Colombia’s current human rights situation “appalling” (Human Rights Watch, 1/22/08).

Killings of civilians by uniformed Colombian military and police totaled 329 in 2007 (Los Angeles Times, 8/21/08), and the country’s unfolding “para-political” scandals have revealed “links between rightist death squads and dozens of officials loyal to President Álvaro Uribe” (Boston Globe, 12/14/06). Everyone from senators to cabinet members to judges have been implicated—even Colombia’s top general, Mario Montoya, whom the Washington Post (9/17/08) described as “a trusted caretaker of the sizable aid package Washington provides Colombia’s army.”

A 2005 report by the Colombian Commission of Jurists (6/21/05) estimated paramilitaries have killed at least 13,000 people since 1996 alone.

More:
http://www.mediaaccuracy.org/node/66

This a new acronym that has emerged in Colombia since Juanma Santos took over. Officially, there no longer are paramilitaries, narco-traffickers, FARC, ELN, AUC, or "neo-paramilitaries" as the OP says.

Now, all of those are contained in one big bag --BACRIM, "Bandas Criminales," as the Santos government calls them. (Bandas = gangs).

--------------

Btw, did I ever tell you the story of William Atencia Coronado? He was a police/army stoolie in the region of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

One day the paramilitaries of the Magdalena and Guajira Bloc (today known as the Tayrona Resistance Bloc), learned that Atencia had testified against some of the bloc's members and had given the police and the army information about the paramilitaries' movements.

The paramilitaries captured Atencia and invited him to a cook out. To his dismay, he was the "meat."

The paramilitaries questioned him, and when he did not respond to what they wanted to hear, chunks of his arms and legs were cut off and thrown into the campfire while telling him "so you can go and squeal."

Atencia died, dismembered.

(Above story is from a report in Semana magazine, published July 29, 2010.)

in the boatloads of U.S. tax dollars headed to Colombia annually to fluff out their budget, under the belief they are under such stress from all the assorted organized meanies.

If they are mere street riff-raff, then it's something he should be able to deal with without plunging the U.S. citizenry up to their eyebrows in taxes, trying to save their asses from these imagined enemies of Colombia. After all, they are simply "Bandas Criminales."

Thanks, so much for sharing this recent material which was published in the Colombian paper, Semana. Absolutely unfathomable, and so sad to know, even as an outsider, there are far more very similar to it, well before the last one from the very same large group of government-connected paras in Colombia.

http://www.asmedasantioquia.org.nyud.net:8090/ws/images/stories/lopeordelaverdad.gif
The worst of the truth

Saturday July 31, 2010 15:07


For five years demobilized paramilitaries have had to prosecutors for Justice and Peace hundreds of killings, massacres and disappearances. But some cases show the level of degradation to which they arrived

From: www.verdadabierta.com and www.semana.com
William Atencio Coronado, an informant for the authorities, who lived in a village in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, he witnessed parts of his body were consumed by fire before dying quartered.

The paramilitaries of Magdalena and Guajira (known today as Bloque Resistencia Tayrona ), they knew they had Atencio said in a lawsuit against members of the organization and provided information to the police and army on the movement of the armed group. He was captured and taken to a camp, where they began to ask questions and if no reply was cut off and body parts thrown into the fire. While they were dismembering, cutting parts of their arms and legs, said: "... to go and tell."

Similar cases, in which the victims were tortured, have known many in the five years of free updates to the fiscal unit of the Justice and Peace. The dismemberment became a common practice because it was the way his victims disappeared and believed that there were no traces of the act. The coordinator of the unit of prosecution for Justice and Peace in Barranquilla, Zeneida López Cuadrado says they have confessed and documented several cases, more appropriate to medieval practices that a semi-irregular warfare between groups and counterinsurgency groups.

Atencio's case, he says, was denied by alias 'The Black', a paramilitary Resistencia Tayrona, who said the group this person was killed and was buried, but before the demobilization were ordered to dig up the remains of all their victims, burned and dumped into rivers to leave no evidence.

Another case, recently told by the son of Hernán Giraldo, one of the most degrading has known Justice and Peace, was a person who lives by his limbs tied to a tree and lower his arms and head to a pickup truck until his body dismembered to start the vehicle.

Attorney Lee believes that with each death or through the way they were murdered people perceived as enemies of the armed group, sent a message. That is, according to the message they wanted to send, so was death. Others post signs or if they were reporting they cut his tongue and tied it around his neck.

~snip~
These events illustrate the truth the hard way that the prosecution has made known through the versions of the postulates. In some cases, it is inconceivable that has reached such a level of degradation and contempt for human life of the offenders, but most of the facts have been confirmed with the families of the victims.

More:
http://www.asmedasantioquia.org/ws/noticias/derechos-humanos/523-lo-peor-de-la-verdad

Anyone not speaking Spanish can take the link to google translate and paste it in the box for the rest of the translation.