January Reports Indicate Dismal Times Ahead for Colombia's 7,500 Political Prisoners

January Reports Indicate Dismal Times Ahead for Colombia's 7,500 Political Prisoners
Written by James Jordan
Tuesday, 08 February 2011 22:39

The first month of 2011 has not fared well for political prisoners and prison conditions in Colombia. Already at least two fatalities have occurred under questionable circumstances, along with four arrests of student and labor activists. While the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos speaks about improvements regarding human rights in the country, facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

Following is a partial list of incidents:

January 21, 2011: Leandro Salcedo was found hanged early on a Friday morning after having spent nine months in solitary confinement in the Special Treatment Unit of the La Tramacúa medium and maximum security penitentiary in Valledupar. Some prisoners have been held in the Special Treatment Unit there for as long as two years, in small cells, 24 hours a day, with no access to sunlight and temperatures reaching the upper 90s, with no cooling and severe limitations on access to running water. La Tramacúa is the first of at least 16 Colombian prisons funded and designed by the United States Bureau of Prisons. It is especially infamous for its bad conditions. In the US, the Alliance for Global Justice has begun a campaign demanding better conditions there, and an investigation of the US role at the prison. (To see an online petition connected with the campaign, go to http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/valledupar/ )
January 18, 2011: Jose Albeiro Manjarres Cupitre was wounded and captured March 14, 2008. He was serving his sentence at the Palogordo Penitentiary in Girón--another US designed and funded prison. Starting the beginning of July, 2009, Manjarres Cupitre began to suffer acute abdominal pains. Despite the filing of numerous petitions and legal motions as well as hunger strikes by fellow inmates on his behalf, Manjarres Cupitre was refused adequate diagnostic and treatment services. Instead, he was told by doctors contracting with the prison that he was suffering from "acute gastritis". Finally, on the 17th of December, he was taken for medical consultation, where he learned that he had terminal cancer of the stomach. Prison authorities would not send Manjarres Cupitre to a hospital equipped for the pain relief and hospice care he needed. Instead he was sent to the hospital unit of La Modelo Penitentiary in Bucaramanga. Manjarres Cupitre died on January 18th, under conditions that constitute criminal neglect and torture.

~snip~
These incidents in January represent an escalation of an ongoing problem. Since 2000, Colombia has worked in partnership with the US government to redesign its prisons and increase their capacity by 40%, citing prison overcrowding. However, the prisons are still overcrowded, with the population growing from 63,000, according to government statistics, in 2007 to 106,000, according to a report by the El Tiempo newspaper, in 2010. (The family of President Santos owns El Tiempo.)

This new prison construction accompanied a significant increase in arrests. These included a 300% rise in the number of persons arrested for political reasons whose cases were later thrown out of court for lack of, or falsified, evidence. The accused spend an average of three years of incarceration and are frequently targeted for paramilitary assassination upon release. Once arrested, political prisoners are sent to institutions dominated by paramilitary gangs where they are increasingly mixed into the general population and, thus, targeted for violence. Most new arrests in Colombia, however, are of common criminals, themselves victims of a broken economy that has left at least 45% of the population living in poverty and almost half of Colombia's children unschooled.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2900-january-reports-indicate-dismal-times-ahead-for-colombias-7500-political-prisoners