The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn't notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave -- a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.
According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia's own Procuraduria General de la Nacion -- a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption -- approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave. The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially those of guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.
And, given the current "false positive" scandal which has enveloped the government of President Alvaro Uribe and his Defense Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who is now running to succeed Uribe as President, the Colombian Army's claim about the mass grave is especially suspect. This scandal revolves around the Colombian military, most recently under the direction of Juan Manuel Santos, knowingly murdering civilians in cold blood and then dressing them up to look like armed guerillas in order to justify more aid from the United States. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pilay, this practice has been so "systematic and widespread" as to amount to a "crime against humanity." And sadly, when Ms. Pilay made this statement, she literally did not know the half of it.
To date, not factoring in the mass grave, it has been confirmed by Colombian government sources that 2,000 civilians have fallen victim to the "false positive" scheme since President Uribe took office in 2002. If, as suspected by Colombian human rights groups, such as the "Comision de Derechos Humanos del Bajo Ariari" and the "Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda," the mass grave in La Macarena contains 2,000 more civilian victims of this scheme, then this would bring the total of those victimized by the "false positive" scandal to at least 4,000 --much worse than originally believed.
That this grave was discovered just outside a Colombian military base overseen by U.S. military advisers -- the U.S. having around 600 military advisers in that country -- is especially troubling, and raises serious questions about the U.S.'s own conduct in that country. In addition, this calls into even greater question the propriety of President Obama's agreement with President Alvaro Uribe last summer to grant the U.S. access to 7 military bases in that country.
The Colombian government and military are scrambling to contain this most recent scandal, and possibly through violence. Thus, on March 15, 2010, Jhonny Hurtado, a former union leader and President of the Human Rights Committee of La Cantina, and an individual who was key in revealing the truth about this mass grave, was assassinated as soldiers from Colombia's 7th Mobile Brigade patrolled the area. Just prior to his murder, Jhonny Hurtado told a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia that he believed the mass grave at La Macarena contained the bodies of innocent people who had been "disappeared."
The discovery of this mass grave by sheer accident raises the prospect that there are more yet to be found. Certainly, it is the consensus of human rights groups in Colombia that this is only be the tip of the iceberg. In any case, the discovery of this grave, on top of the large magnitude of the "false positive" scandal already known, justifies a serious rethinking of U.S. policy toward Colombia -- a policy pursuant to which the U.S. has sent over $7 billion of military aid to Colombia since 2000 and still counting. This policy, which President Obama is only deepening, has continued the U.S.'s long-standing practice of giving the most military aid to the worst human rights abusers. The time is way overdue for this practice to end.
Daniel Kovalik is a human and labor rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh. The information in this article about the mass grave at La Maracena was based on research provided by Justice for Colombia in London and by two brave Colombian human rights leaders, Edinson Cuellar and Carolina Hoyas, who are working tirelessly to spread the truth about this mass grave.
As a side note, I suppose that delegation included people from Justice for Colombia...whose "research" you're so thankful for in spite of their being incapable of including even a single critical description of FARC on the JFC website.
"after 2002...the Colombian government was already in firm control of the region"
This can be disputed by pointing to reports, from NGOs and others, about La Macarena being a FARC stronghold even as late as 2004-2005. Not to mention all the ones, even those critical of the Colombian government, indicating FARC has a strong presence and influence in the area.
"As late as 2004-2005, the FARC’s control was reportedly so complete that people not only had guerrilla-issued ID cards, even their horses were required to have a carnet de caballo"
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=880
"The delegation met with leaders of the Colombian Army in Meta, including Colonel Yunda, who admitted that the Army was responsible for the mass grave. "
With all due respect, in light of how much of the other information has been ignored, an Army acceptance of responsibility for recently burying bodies is not the same thing as automatically assuming that nobody else has dumped bodies there over the years.
Amazing. So, I gather your Plan Colombia whitewash expresses a forward looking desire to determine the winner of a race to the bottom, a race most certainly sponsored by my government, the US.
Plan Colombia has financed the very opposite of what is taking place in neighboring Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, where progressive movements are struggling to "refound" their respective societies along more inclusive lines. In place of the left's "participatory democracy," Colombia's Uribe offers "democratic security," a social contract whereby those who submit to the "Plan" are promised safe cities and secure roads, while oppositional civil society (with NO links to FARC) is promised intimidation or murder.
Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America. More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and NOT ONE arrest has been made for the killings.
So, the horse my government is betting on is the one on the right. It's the same horse race that's been played out countless times in virtually every country in Latin America for the past 170 years or so. Why am I not surprised ??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Cambio, a magazine was just shut down because its revelations of the U.S./Colombia base deals agreement as well as large government agricultural funds are going to the oligarchs and the Santos family who own the mag, and a member is also Uribe's vice-president. http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_58497.shtml
Thank you! Keep writing, and cant you stop ommadon the apologist from littering your whole comment thread?
Why hasn't the author taken into consideration at least some of the information that can be found inthe articles / sources below?
Information that, to say the least, paints a more complex and detailed picture than what the author wrote.
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1325
http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/ARTICULO-WEB-PLANTILLA_NOTA_INTERIOR-6791807.html
Instead, the author presents a simplified picture that immediately attributes all of the dead to a single party and ignores that the gravesite has a longer history, dating back to the time when FARC was in full control of the region as part of the DMZ that existed from 1999 to 2002.
I suspected as much, but after reading these sources my criticisms of this opinion column have been reinforced.
As you rightly note, this is the tip of the iceberg, and for a president whose administration's battle cry has been greater transparency to back a regime of war criminals needs as much media, and citizen scrutiny as possible. In the end, our tax dollars are going to support this egregious cover-up of the killing of innocent civilians in Colombia, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. This must stop.
I acknowledge that. But the estimate refers to land controlled by narcotraffickers as a whole, not just paramilitaries. They are obviously related but not identical groups. You might say that's splitting hairs, but they are real distinct actors. Most paramilitaries are related to the drug trade, they get most of their income from it, but not all druglords are directly involved in paramilitarism. It's not like there's one big hivemind of perfectly coordinated individuals who live in harmony or have no competing interests.
"As a result, Colombia has the distinction of having the largest population of internally displaced refugees, numbering in the millions""
See, that's not false, but I would argue that displacement has many other causes too, beyond what you've said. The guerrillas themselves and even non-murderous military operations displace people all the time during combat, raids or even patrols. To pretend that doesn't play a role is to be shortsighted.
Standard land grabs and offers from wealthy landowners or corporations are also part of the problem, even without paramilitaries having to push people out of their territory. Not all displacement is openly violent...in fact, that's probably the most dangerous kind since it is much harder to revert, both practically and in theory, than those clearly born out of violence. The process is more than just an unilateral development and has many expressions.
"Peace, security, human rights and the U.S. role in Latin America, from the Center for International Policy."
See, when you llst the role of the U.S. along with human rights, the one word you have to include to be honest is "abuses". That's how we do it. Our country is an empire in the employ of a few rich people to help them get richer, and anyone that gets in the way is grist.
First off, there's no way to tell exactly how many bodies are in that mass grave since there has not been a real judicial examination of its entire contents. It's entirely possible that the grave might have bodies from a wide range of sources, dates and distinct perpetrators, depending on who has had access to it over the years.
The author tacitly admits as much, if you read between the lines, but throws around the number of 2,000 as if it were a proven fact, when it is little more than anestimate right now, and even more irresponsibly assumes that all the bodies in the grave are false positives, when that is not an automatic conclusion.
A real link has to be established between those bodies and falsely reported guerrilla casualties in order to call them false positives. Otherwise, they might be victims of other abuses but not "false positives", as much as some might prefer to throw around buzzwords blindly and pretend that nobody notices the details. A "false positive" is not just a murdered person, civilian or otherwise, it's something very specific.
Finally, it's funny how you selectively quote only part of statements by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, leaving out some of the other things that have also been said. I guess it's better to present an article with as little nuances as possible. God forbid you include anything that reveals the complexity of the problem.
And when the FBI and other International investigative agencies searched the entire province and could only find around 2100 graves scattered all over the province of Kosovo and most of them were Serbs that had been buried there for decades.
Is that what you're talking about in Colombia? Is that what the American advisor's at that base did not see?
In this case, I am not necessarily suggesting no such thing, least of all without previously reading that someone has actually opened those mass graves and confirmed how many bodies are or aren't present in them. That is what we need to know and, by extension, face.
My post is mostly an argument in favor of waiting for facts, instead of throwing large estimates around. Not a denial of the deaths nor of the mass graves themselves.
But even if the total number of bodies was, say, closer to 500 than 2000 I wouldn't be happy about that. I would be horrified and ashamed, but I would at least have some certainty about the figures being used and that, rationally speaking, is important when dealing with these matters in anything resembling seriousness.
"According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia's own Procuraduria General de la Nacion -- a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption -- approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave."
That is an adequate citation at this stage. The purpose of the article was to draw attention to an otherwise under-reported problem, not to be the final word on it.
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1325
"Estimating the number of dead at these gravesites is not possible at this time. Official sources doubt that the number is anywhere near as high as 2,000, and it is unclear how the media reports derived that estimate. If even a fraction of that total were “NN” cadavers, however, it would still be unusually large, as the town center of La Macarena municipality is home to only about 4,000 people."
"The mayor of La Macarena, quoted in one of last week’s articles as saying “we became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” now insists that the cemetery is not a mass grave site. He says that the cemetery contains 1,000 human remains, many from nearby combat incidents, and that 346 are unidentified combat dead buried since 2004. The mayor’s remarks came yesterday at a press conference for reporters brought to La Macarena by Colombia’s minister of defense."
"There is no clarity about the timeframe of the burials. Some sources contend that most of the bodies were buried before 2005, when the FARC had nearly uncontested dominion over La Macarena, which between 1999 and 2002 was part of the demilitarized zone where FARC-government peace talks took place. Bodies buried before 2005 would be considered more likely to have been buried by the FARC. The news reports, however, claim that most bodies are from the post-2005 period."
Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death (earlier title: Massacre at Mazar[1]) is a 2002 documentary by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran and Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi about alleged war crimes committed by Afghan Northern Alliance troops under General Abdul Rashid Dostum against Taliban fighters. The Taliban fighters, who had surrendered to Dostum's troops after the November 2001 siege of Kunduz, were transported to Sheberghan prison in sealed containers.
Human rights groups estimate that hundreds or thousands of them died during and after transit. Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death presents testimony from interviewees stating that American military personnel were present at and complicit in some of the mass killings, known as the Dasht-i-Leili massacre.
A short early version of the documentary was shown to the European and German Parliaments in June 2002, causing widespread concern in Europe.[1][2][3][4] Against protests from the United States government, the completed documentary was shown later that year on many countries' national television channels, including German, British, Italian and Australian television.
The programme was not screened in the U.S. and received no U.S. media coverage.[3][5][6][7] A Newsweek report in August 2002, based on a leaked UN memo, did confirm some of the details in Doran's documentary, as well as the presence of mass graves in the Dasht-i-Leili desert, but made no mention of the documentary.[4][8][9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Massacre_-_the_Convoy_of_Death
Columbia is on the "good guy" list therefore they can do no wrong. This obviously never happened.
Now if it were Venezuela we were talking about, well they're on the "bad guy" list and therefore can do no right.
I should know better. I fly freight out of Bogota sometimes.
Columbia, is for all intents and purposes a fascist government. The small wealthy upper class control everything, one way or another. That is why the mass graves will continue to be found.
The same is happening in Honduras. Any and all opposition is being "dealt with". America is silent, just as they are everywhere this goes on. Why? Because America supports it, pays for it, sends advisers, and para military experts. America also "educates" a chosen few military leaders at Fort Benning, in the skills of "interrogation" and counterinsurgency tactics, and of course, overthrowing governments. The two top generals in charge in Honduras were American trained. Its nice to know where your tax dollars are going isn't it?
This, from Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1915 :
" The United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end. "
This has been the policy of every US administration of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, every one of them, and without exception. Now, let's sit down and enjoy a cheap banana, though it may be a tad bloody. But, that washes off easily enough, doesn't it ?
Colombia is now the world's largest grower and exporter of coca and its distilled product cocaine, followed by Peru. Those socialist guys you wingnuts love to revile? They have dwindled to a trickle. Not that you would know it by the b******t annual reports coming from Hillary's State Department. It would look bad if the reports made Bill look like the sucker he was when he instituted Plan Colombia that has funneled Billions of dollars down the rat-hole that is Alvaro's pockets for no results. Except for his army rounding up innocent young campesinos and blowing their brains out, then dressing them in fatigues and claiming the US-paid bounty on dead "FARC" guerrillas. It would be nice if some newspaper of wide distribution would seriously look into this situation. Don't hold your breath. The New York Times Simon Romero can't bestir himself from hobnobbing with his rich friends and McClatchy's Andres Oppenheimer thinks anything with a whiff of anti-commie about it is grand. It makes me sick!
See, the thing is, when the reality and facts don't suit, you just distort reality and MAKE up facts.
There are times when a village must be destroyed in order to save it, no ??
Second, you should be aware that the history of U.S. aid to Colombia is much older, at least going back to the Andrés Pastrana administration (which tried to negotiate peace with FARC!).
Third, if there are "zero results" it's because the Drug War is useless. Nothing to do with Uribe. You could replace him with an angel and it wouldn't work. The U.S. has spent decades enforcing this useless war around the world.
Fourth, Colombia became the largest producer of coca back towards the mid-1990s, before most of the above developments took place.
Fifth, the horrible practice of dressing people up as guerrillas and killing them isn't new. You can find descriptions in human rights reports from years ago. There was a spike during Uribe's second term, but what it reflects is a rotten military culture that can be traced back to the 1980s-1990s. Yet the spike was terminated after the most recent scandal came up. From late 2008 to 2009, the number of new false positives reported during that period went back down to single digits. The government took measures, including firing over a dozen commanding officers, that have reduced those numbers. Is it enough? No, but it's more than what you're willing to accept.
That grave is evidence of Uribe's success in bringing security to Colombia and preventing a leftist totalitarian takeover such as is happening in Venezuela.
Now, you might not like the fact that that takeover was prevented, but don't point to Uribe's and Santos's successes as evidence of something evil, cruel, or illegal.
It's simply war.
" There is nothing we will not do to one another and no word we will not use to deny it. "
----- Alexander Taylor
At least you've been consistent in your support of any right wing authoritarian government in Latin America, legitimate or otherwise. For example, the systematic and ongoing rape of Honduran resistencia women by the military, police, and paramilitary as a means of political repression has been blithly dismissed by you as "alleged" incidents in spite of numerous documented accounts. You go on to rationalize that these women were "probably breaking the law " anyway. In your world, that makes ANY crime against humanity acceptable as long as imperial imperatives are protected. You are bound and determined to drag us all back for a revisitation of Germany, 1934.
To you, the FARC and Uribe, who was democratically elected, are equal.
That's your problem--you don't think clearly.