State and paramilitaries responsible for 16,000 forced disappearances: UN

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

State and paramilitaries responsible for 16,000 forced disappearances: UN
Monday, 23 May 2011 17:02
Tom Heyden

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that the Colombian state and paramilitaries are culpable for 16,000 forced disappearances in the country over the last three decades, Spanish news agency EFE reported Monday.

Christian Salazar, at a forced disappearance seminar in the Colombian capital of Bogota, stated that the current total figure stands at over 57,000 recorded disappearance cases, with 15,600 of these being forced disappearances.
He clarified that these figures are taken from NGOs and that the Prosecutor General's Office has seen "probably more than 26,500 cases of alleged forced disappearances."

These incidents of forced disappearance were mainly "committed by state agents and paramilitary forces who collaborated with them," while "there are more than 3,000 women and 3,000 people under 20 years old" included in the estimates.

The high figures regarding "one of the most serious human rights violations," according to the official, make Colombia "one of the countries in South America and the world with the most disappeared."

Read more: http://www.colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/16462-state-and-paramilitaries-most-responsible-for-forced-disappearances-un.html

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On edit:
It's important to add Colombia is the 3rd largest recipient of US taxpayers' annual foreign aid gifts.

[Judi Lynn]

1. New US Report Reveals Shocking Number of Disappeared

New US Report Reveals Shocking Number of Disappeared
News from Colombia | on: Saturday, 11 December 2010

On 10th December - International Human Rights Day - the Latin America Working Group and the US Office on Colombia launched “Breaking the Silence”, a report detailing the tragedy of the thousands of disappeared in Colombia.

The report notes that the setting up of a new database has led to a re-examination of the numbers of Colombians who have been disappeared. The official Colombian government figure is of over 51 thousand people missing or disappeared, of whom the Colombian Attorney General’s Office estimates 32 thousand were forcibly disappeared. This figure may well be higher since many cases have not yet been included in the new database, and many have not been registered at all. Furthermore new cases are constantly being recorded, with the army being a prime suspect. In the last 3 years 1130 new cases of forcible disappearance have been reported, and between January and May 2010 over 150 were reported in the province of Antioquia alone.

The authors state that Paramilitary forces were to blame for the vast majority of cases. However, the report also underlines that many cases have also been carried out by the armed forces and security services. It notes that by 2010 over 3000 people had been killed by the army or police in extrajudicial executions and the notorious ‘false positives’ scandal, in which Colombian army troops killed innocent civilians, reporting them as guerrillas killed in combat in order to claim bodycount bonuses. Many of those murdered in this way were impoverished young men lured to their deaths by false promises of paid employment.

The increase in the number of disappearances is also linked to the provision of military aid by the United States to the Colombian armed forces. The report states that the number of extrajudicial executions grew during the first years of Plan Colombia, the US plan to strengthen the Colombian armed forces. This was the same period during which the UK also provided military aid to the Colombian regime.

More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/news/article/855/new-us-report-reveals-shocking-number-of-disappeared

[OwnedByFerrets]

2. Where's the report on forced disappearances by American interests over the

last 3 decades? Are we Number One on that chart too? Go Number One!!!! Or does it not count if they are not from your home country?:puke: