Bishop will take to the skies to exorcise entire Colombian city

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Bishop will take to the skies to exorcise entire Colombian city

Army to provide helicopter for sprinkling of holy water on area beset by violent crime

Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
@harrietsherwood
Wed 10 Jul 2019 11.21 BST Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019 15.13 BST

A Colombian bishop is planning to exorcise an entire city this weekend, sprinkling holy water from a helicopter.

Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya, the bishop of Buenaventura, will say a prayer intended to purge the area of demonic infestation.

The city is beset by violence, drug smuggling and poverty. Montoya disclosed the exorcism shortly after a 10-year-old girl was tortured and murdered.

He told local radio: “We have to drive the devil out of Buenaventura, to see if we can restore the peace and tranquility that our city has lost due to so many crimes, acts of corruption and with so much evil and drug trafficking that invades our port.

“We want to go around the whole of Buenaventura, from the air, and pour holy water on to it to see if we exorcise and get out all those demons that are destroying our port, so that God’s blessing comes and gets rid of all the wickedness that is in our streets.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/10/bishop-take-skies-exorcise-colombian-city-helicopter-buenaventura

[Judi Lynn]

1. First stories to make it to U.S. readers, years ago, seemed impossibly vicious.

Doesn't look as if a thing has been changed to reign in the mind-boggling cruelty.

Here's an article from Human Rights Watch from 5 years ago:

March 20, 2014
The Crisis in Buenaventura
Disappearances, Dismemberment, and Displacement in Colombia’s Main Pacific Port

Years of violence have driven more than 5 million Colombians from their homes, generating the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Nowhere in Colombia is the problem of forced displacement worse today than in Buenaventura, a largely Afro-Colombian port on the country’s Pacific coast. For each of the past three years, Buenaventura has led all Colombian municipalities in the numbers of newly displaced persons, according to government figures. In 2013, more than 13,000 Buenaventura residents fled their homes.

Left-wing guerrillas operate in Buenaventura’s rural areas and have historically been a major cause of displacement in the area. Currently, however, the violence and displacement in Buenaventura is concentrated in its urban center, where guerrillas have virtually no presence, and 90 percent of the municipality’s population lives.

Human Rights Watch visited Buenaventura’s urban center in November 2013 to investigate what was causing massive displacement there. We found a city where entire neighborhoods were dominated by powerful paramilitary successor groups[1]—known as the Urabeños and the Empresa—who restrict residents’ movements, recruit their children, extort their businesses, and routinely engage in horrific acts of violence against anyone who defies their will.

The successor groups have “disappeared” scores—and possibly hundreds—of Buenaventura residents over the past several years. They dismember their victims and dump the body parts in the bay and along its mangrove-covered shores, or bury them in hidden graves, according to residents and officials. In several neighborhoods, residents report the existence of casas de pique—or “chop-up houses”—where the groups slaughter their victims. Several residents we spoke with report having heard people scream and plea for mercy as they were being dismembered alive. In March 2014, after criminal investigators found bloodstains in two suspected “chop-up houses” in the city, the police said they had identified several locations where perpetrators had dismembered victims alive before tossing them in the sea.

More than 150 people who were reported to have gone missing in Buenaventura between January 2010 and December 2013 are presumed by officials to have been abducted and “disappeared,” twice as many as in any other municipality in Colombia. Interviews with authorities and residents, as well as official reports, strongly suggest that the actual number of people who have been abducted and killed by paramilitary successor groups in the city is significantly higher.

One of the main sources of underreporting is the fear of reprisals. For example, one resident told Human Rights Watch he heard the screams of a man he believed was being dismembered, but did not report the crime. “No matter how much screaming you hear, the fear prevents you from doing anything,” he said. “People know where the ‘chop-up houses’ are but do not do anything about it because the fear is absolute.”

More:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/03/20/crisis-buenaventura/disappearances-dismemberment-and-displacement-colombias-main

~ ~ ~

Medellin gangs use ‘horror houses’ to torture and dismember victims
by Emma Rosser October 8, 2015

The center of Medellin is home to “horror houses” used to torture and dismember, the city’s mayor admitted on Wednesday, exposing a bloody threat to society.

These sites where horrific acts of violence occur have of late been denounced by human rights organization amid the appearance of dismembered bodies in city, however the city’s officials previously denied the connection, until now.

“There are places where people are dismembered. When they kill a person and dismember them, it sends a message to society and members of the structures in charge. Without a doubt, there are places where people are dismembered,” said Deputy Mayor for Governance and Security of Medellin, Luis Fernando Suarez.

Four dismembered bodies were discovered in September bound in plastic bags with colored ribbons are now thought to be connected to these slaughter-houses, the handiwork of deadly gangs characterized by such practice.

Luis Fernando Quijano, leader of Human Rights for Medellin said “There are scores settled and obviously actions on the part of the terrorists to silence the people under a cloak of terror.” Additionally connecting bodies discovered in May and June, “bagged, tied, tortured”.

Revelation of bloody slaughter
“Horror houses have existed and continue to exist in Medellin. The houses are near streams, by walls, thick walls where the illegal resolve their problems” said Luis Guillermo Pardo, president of the NGO C3, a consultation group focusing on urban conflict.

Pardo described how victims are kidnapped and taken to these places, in order to obtain information they are tortured until criminals get what they are after, from whence bodies are dismembered, dumped into the river to erase the evidence.

“There are 15 “horror houses” in Comuna 10. They kill the person, dismembered them, the body is wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in streams or in the Medellin River,” said Pardo. The district of Comuna 10 is the center of the city.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/medellin-gangs-use-horror-houses-to-torture-and-dismember-victims/

ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC.

[keithbvadu2]

2. Trump would not believe it.

Trump would not believe it.