Colombia fires 19 army officers in civilian deaths

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post/AP

Colombia fires 19 army officers in civilian deaths
By FRANK BAJAK
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 29, 2008; 12:43 PM

BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe on Wednesday fired 19 army officers, including three generals and four colonels, over the killing of civilians. His government said at least some of the murders were aimed to falsely boost combat body counts.

An internal military probe determined the officers, including two division commanders, were guilty at least of negligence that included permitting soldiers to conspire with criminals in what Uribe called "the murder of innocents." It was the Colombian military's biggest shakeup in years over human rights abuses and comes as civilian prosecutors investigate a rise in alleged army killings of noncombatants with the aim of exaggerating unit performance against leftist rebels.

~snip~
"Innocent people in urban slums were apparently tricked, abducted, and killed" in "a gruesome trafficking in cadavers allowing officers to claim high body counts," said Colombia analyst Adam Isacson of the Washington-based Center for International Policy.

One of the generals fired on Wednesday, 30th Brigade commander Paulino Coronado, told The Associated Press after nine of the Soacha men's bodies were found that they had been killed in combat with rebels of the leftist National Liberation Army.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102901304.html

[hunter]

1. We better send more money to Columbia right away...

They're our good friends and trading partners.

My God. :cry:

[Peace Patriot]

2. Oh, yeah, "free trade" for those guys! Hey, the FIRED 19 of the thousands of murdering

fascists in the $6 BILLION-Bushwhack-larded Colombian military. One guess as to why: maybe they are part of a rival drug mafia (rival to Santos and the Bush Cartel).

It's the Associated Pukes. Every word, every quote, every allegation, every insinuation, every bit of "framing" and every fact is in question. They lie; they disinform; they leave black holes in the 'news' where information and context should be; and I swear to God they're doing psyops for the Bushwhacks' oil war on South America.

Don't. Believe. A. Word. They. Say.

Or maybe next we'll see these nineteen running for Congress in Miami.

The rot in Colombia is AT THE TOP, just as it is here.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Miami Herald: Colombia fires 27 army officers in probe of civilian deaths

Posted on Thursday, 10.30.08
Colombia fires 27 army officers in probe of civilian deaths

By SIBYLLA BRODZINSKY
Special to The Miami Herald

BOGOTA -- In one of its widest military purges in recent history, the Colombian government on Wednesday dismissed 27 army officers -- including three generals -- in connection with the recent disappearance of civilians who were later presented as guerrilla fighters killed in combat.

~snip~
Maria McFarland, a Colombia expert for Human Rights Watch, said the Soacha cases highlight a broader problem. Rights groups have warned that the killing of civilians who are then presented as dead guerrillas or paramilitary fighters has been on the rise in recent years. ''This is a serious problem that goes well beyond the most recent, widely publicized, case,'' McFarland said.

The Inspector General's office is investigating more than 930 such extrajudicial executions since 2002. A federation of human rights groups known as the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordinator said in a report Wednesday that at least 535 have occurred between January 2007 and July 2008.

Although the military last year issued a directive saying success in this country's 40-year-old conflict with leftist rebels would no longer be measured by body bags, some repentant soldiers have told local media they were offered extra R&R time for enemy casualties.

Most times the victims in reported cases are residents of rural towns who are dragged from their homes, shot, then dressed in fatigues, with a weapon or radio put in their hands, and presented as rebel fighters.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/747595.html

On edit: emphasis added.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Colombian troops killed homeless

Colombian troops killed homeless
Published: Wednesday 29 October 2008 15:58 UTC
Last updated: Thursday 30 October 2008 09:19 UTC

The Colombian government has dismissed three generals and 22 soldiers of various ranks for the killing of 11 young men. The youths were lured from a Bogota slum with the promise of work; later their bodies were found in mass graves near the Venezuelan border. Human rights groups say that soldiers sometimes kill homeless people so that they can inflate their claims of success on the battlefield and receive promotion.

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/news/international/6030555/Colombian-troops-killed-homeless

Short, sweet, easy to grasp. Very ugly people.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Incentivizing Murder: Plan Colombia and the Bitter Fruits of Empire

Incentivizing Murder: Plan Colombia and the Bitter Fruits of Empire
Written by Chris Floyd

Thu
30
Oct
2008

The War on Drugs meets the War on Terror, and the result, inevitably, is stone-cold murder: Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents (NYT):

Colombia’s government, the Bush administration’s top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the disappearance of ...dozens of young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light in recent weeks. Some were vagrants, others street vendors and manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: being catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces.

Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia’s security forces are increasingly murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing the corpses in guerrilla fatigues.

With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a grisly facet of Colombia’s long internal war against leftist insurgencies.

The wave of recent killings has also heightened focus on the American Embassy here, which is responsible for vetting Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive aid. A study of civilian killings by Amnesty International and Fellowship of Reconciliation, two human rights groups, found that 47 percent of the reported cases in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States.

....Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in American security aid.

More:
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1638-incentivizing-murder-plan-colombia-and-the-bitter-fruits-of-empire.html

[Judi Lynn]

6. NY Times: Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents

Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents
Wednesday 29 October 2008

»
by: Simon Romero, The New York Times

~snip~
"If the responsibility of the army is to protect us from harm, how could they have killed my son this way?" asked Blanca Monroy, 49, Mr. Oviedo's mother, in an interview in her cinder-block hovel in Soacha. "The official explanation is absurd, if he was here just a day earlier living a normal life. The irony of it all is that my son dreamed of being a soldier" for the government.

Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in American security aid.

But more than 100 claims of civilian deaths at the hands of security forces have emerged in recent weeks, from nine areas of Colombia. Cases have included the killings of a homeless man, a young man with epilepsy and a veteran who had left the army after his left arm was amputated.

In some cases, victims' families spoke of middlemen who recruited their loved ones and other poor men and women with vague promises of jobs elsewhere, only to deliver them hours or days later to war zones where they were shot dead by soldiers.

"We are witnessing a method of social cleansing in which rogue military units operate beyond the law," said Monica Sanchez, a lawyer at the Judicial Freedom Corporation, a human rights group in Medellin. It says it has documented more than 60 "false positives" - the term for cases of civilians who are killed and then presented as guerrillas, with weapons or fatigues - in Antioquia Department, or province.

Researchers have also obtained thorough descriptions of some killings in the small number of cases - fewer than 50 - that have resulted in convictions this decade.

One April morning in 2004, for instance, soldiers approached the home of Juan de Jesus Rendon, 33, a peasant farmer in Antioquia, and shot him in front of his son, Juan Esteban, then 10. The soldiers placed a two-way radio and a gun near Mr. Rendon's body, court records show, and told his son that his siblings would suffer the same fate unless he said his father had fired at the soldiers.

More:
http://www.truthout.org/103008L

[Judi Lynn]

7. How would you feel if these were your kids?

Excerpted from the New York Times article by Simon Romero, above:

~snip~
One case involves the commander of Colombia's Army, Gen. Mario Montoya. In March 2002, the army's Fourth Brigade, then under his command, killed five people in their vehicle and presented them as guerrillas, their bodies dressed in fatigues.

But the driver, Parmenio de Jesus Usme, testified this year that none were guerrillas. According to a report by Cambio, a news magazine, Mr. Usme, a former member of a paramilitary group that opposed the guerrillas, said that two of the victims were teenagers, Erika Castaneda, 13, and Johana Carmona, 14, and that he had been driving them to a party when they picked up three other people.

Mr. Usme said that they were fired upon and that everyone in the vehicle was killed but him. According to the report, General Montoya called the hospital where the bodies were taken and said that they should be turned over only to someone in his confidence, after which the bodies were presented to the media in fatigues at a nearby building.

As the articles points out, and it's a rare article from the N.Y. Times, which supports the _Bush administration views of Latin America in EVERY case, in that the writer, Simon Romero, who has ALWAYS spun to the right regarding Latin America, actually questions the rightfulness of pumping such a HUGE amount of US taxpayers' hard-earned tax doldlars (third largest foreign aid outpouring in the world) into a government which allows this crap.