COLOMBIA: Secret Documents Show US Aware of Army Killings in 1990s

COLOMBIA: Secret Documents Show US Aware of Army Killings in 1990s
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jan 12 (IPS) - Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA and former U.S. ambassadors were fully aware, as far back as 1990, that the military in Colombia -- the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt -- were committing extrajudicial killings as part of "death squad tactics."

They also knew that senior Colombian officers encouraged a "body count" mentality to demonstrate progress in the fight against left-wing guerrillas. In an undetermined number of cases, the bodies presented as casualties in the counterinsurgency war were actually civilians who had nothing to do with the country’s decades-old armed conflict.

Since at least 1990, U.S. diplomats were reporting a connection between the Colombian security forces and far-right drug-running paramilitary groups, according to the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).

In the meantime, the U.S. State Department continued to regularly certify Colombia’s human rights record and to heavily finance its "war on drugs."

The declassified documents were published Jan. 7 by the NSA, a non-governmental research and archival institution located at the George Washington University that collects, archives and publishes declassified U.S. government documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

More: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45383

More from the article:

~snip~
Cepeda also maintained that the activities of far-right death squads and the army’s "body count" killings were connected, and that the military used the paramilitaries to show results.

"The paramilitaries delivered to the army the bodies of people who were supposed members of the guerrillas but who were actually people selectively killed by those (paramilitary) groups," he told IPS.

When the killings became more and more widespread, the armed forces themselves asked the paramilitaries to hide the remains, to keep the country’s homicide rate from soaring any further, paramilitaries who took part in a demobilisation process negotiated with the right-wing Uribe administration have confessed.

The declassified documents demonstrate "that the U.S. military as well as U.S. diplomats and governments have taken a complacent stance towards this kind of practice," said Cepeda.

~snip~
The cable, whose subject line reads "human rights in Colombia -- widespread allegations of abuses by the army," cites reports that an army major "personally directed the torture of 11 detainees and their subsequent execution…carried out by cutting of the limbs and heads of the still living victims with a chain saw."

~snip~
McNamara also mentioned "an apparent June 7 incident of extra-judicial executions."

"The military reported to the press that, on that date, it killed 9 guerrillas in combat in El Ramal, Santander department. The investigation by Instruccion Criminal and the Procuraduria (legal authorities) strongly suggests, however, that the nine were executed by the army and then dressed in military fatigues. A military judge who arrived on the scene apparently realised that there were no bullet holes in the military uniforms to match the wounds in the victims’ bodies, and ordered the uniforms burned," said the ambassador.

Damned sad, isn't it? Doesn't seem possible this could ever happen in a real world, but our right-wingers have been supporting this for ages.

How long after the invention of the chainsaw was it before a right-winger decided to use it to destroy another person?

did viewing the Texas Chain Saw Massacre leave an indelible mark??

yeah, how is this possible in the real world. I don't know, how can it be that there are those that use child soldiers.

http://www.unwire.org/unwire/20000201/6985_story.asp


are children's lives as valuable as labor unionists???

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