Scandal of vulnerable Colombian citizens killed for €1,500 bonus

Source: Irish Times

The Irish Times - Saturday, June 19, 2010
Scandal of vulnerable Colombian citizens killed for €1,500 bonus

TOM HENNIGAN in Bogotá
Many men have been disappearing – only for families to find out the army had shot them


WHEN Luz Marina Bernal’s 26-year old son went missing in February 2008, she immediately raised the alarm. Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal had a mental age of nine, could not read or write, and never strayed too far from his home in Soacha, a gritty satellite town of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia.

“He would never go off on his own. He would only go out with someone from the family. We searched hospitals, refuges, jails and filed a missing person report with the police, but there was no news until that August,” remembers Ms Bernal.

The news, when it came, stunned her. Fair Leonardo was dead, and had been buried in a common grave hundreds of kilometres away in the far north of the country. The army said they had killed him during combat with a group of guerrillas just four days after he went missing.

For Ms Bernal, it made no sense. How had her mentally disabled son transformed himself into a uniformed, armed guerrilla ready to take on South America’s most battle-hardened military, just four days after suddenly disappearing from home?

Read more: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0619/1224272868802.html

Oh, and he also ran the company which counts the votes.

They got a measly 1500 to murder a man, end an innocent human life, do they really think that it was worth it?

When we invaded Afghanistan we had locals inform on or point out "insurgents" for pay. What they in fact did was point out anyone who was disliked or competition to themselves. The military never bothered to vette these individuals (either of them) and simply rounded up people and sent them to Abu Ghraib where many were tortured.
We spend money like water in Columbia under a failed drug policy and the idea that we can control that countries politics. We're wasting money there that we desperately need here at home. Just as our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan help Al-Qaeda and the Taliban recruit insurgents so to does the Columbian government's brutal actions on it's own people help the FARC recruit fearful and outraged citizens to its ramks.
This idiotic idea of dumping money on everything we want to control may not end in my lifetime but it has to end at some point because the U.S. is going broke and the American people are starting to get angrier by the day about paying taxes to support the brutal regimes of other countries.

why do you choose for an avatar a person who was a war criminal, who murdered war prisoners?

Surely there is a limit to how many countries we can buy off.

Welcome.

:hi:

to counter what truth we can extract, usually very hard to find, thanks to our corporate news filterers, or to shut down real information altogether.

Hope sufficient numbers of us learn the truth before we're all lost again in a total information void, as people were in the 1950's, '60's, and onward. Many STILL are there.

Welcome to D.U., papadog. :hi:

This is wide-spread murder, committed under color of law for money towards political ends, connived at and contrived by a government which is in the hands of a right-wing killer, Uribe....

by a minority is more important than human rights.

Not even wholesale murder seems to open their eyes....