Colombia: Thousands Come Out for Anti-Paramilitary March
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Written by Helda Martínez*
Friday, 07 March 2008
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Of the 15,000 victims of forced disappearance reported between 1982 and 2005, at least 3,000 were buried in common graves, some of which have begun to be exhumed. It is impossible to know how many were thrown into rivers, a common paramilitary practice.
"Disappearance is a monstrous crime," former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus told IPS. "That is why…we started this march at the Magdalena river," he said, after accompanying hundreds of mainly indigenous and black people displaced by the war on the three-day march from Flandes.
"We were inspired by an audiovisual testimony by the artist Clemencia Echeverri, who recently showed, in a sophisticated Bogotá art gallery, a night-time recording taken from the two shores of the Cauca river" in the northwestern province of Antioquia, said Mockus. (Antioquia is a paramilitary stronghold.)
"On the recording, you hear the sound of the water flowing, and above that you hear the screams of peasant farmers and chainsaws running, and you can see people with sticks, fishing pieces of clothing out of the river," he added.
According to testimony from numerous survivors and members of paramilitary groups, the latter frequently used chainsaws to cut their victims up alive.
Jusice and Peace also reported that 1,700 indigenous people, 2,550 trade unionists and 5,000 members of the now-defunct leftist political party Patriotic Union were murdered between 1982 and 2005.
"The paramilitaries have perpetrated more than 3,500 massacres and stolen more than six million hectares of land, and since their demobilisation they have killed 600 people a year. They also achieved control over 35 percent of the seats in Congress," said the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), which organised Thursday’s nationwide march.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1170/61/~~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~
Between the 1982 emergence of the far-right paramilitary groups in their present shape and form and 2005, they committed more than 3,500 massacres, and have been blamed by United Nations experts and leading international human rights groups for at least 80 percent of the crimes against humanity committed in Colombia’s civil war.
As a result of negotiations with the government, they declared a unilateral ceasefire in December 2002 and partially demobilised. But since then, they have killed an average of 600 people a year, according to MOVICE.
A multidisciplinary study carried out in 2007 found that since 2002, when an all-out military offensive against the FARC was launched with heavy U.S. support, members of the army have killed more than 950 people, most of whom were reported as guerrillas killed in combat.
That practice should supposedly decline as a result of a recent government measure which stipulates that an expert on international humanitarian law must accompany all military units on the ground.
The paramilitary chiefs themselves, many of whom are drug lords, have themselves boasted that at one point they controlled a full 35 percent of parliament.
In addition, the civil intelligence service (DAS) was heavily infiltrated by paramilitaries during Uribe’s first term (2002-2006).
Around 75 legislators and other politicians allied with Uribe - including the president’s cousin Mario Uribe, who resigned from the Senate - have been arrested or are under investigation for their links with the paramilitaries in the so-called "parapolitics" scandal that broke out in late 2006.
"Everyone investigating the scandal has received threats," said Luz Marina Hache, vice president of the National Association of Judicial Branch Employees (Asonal Judicial), which will take part in the Mar. 6 demonstration.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41298~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~After the anti-paramilitary march discussed above, the organizers of this protest were murdered.
RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Paramilitarism Alive and Well
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Apr 1 (IPS) - "If their slogan was land, dignity and peace, this time it will be terror, murder and hell," said a threat sent to human rights defenders and trade unionists who took part in a Mar. 6 march in homage to the victims of Colombia’s far-right paramilitary groups.
Since the march, four of the organisers have been murdered and another survived an attempt on her life. In addition, more than 50 people and organisations have been named in written threats distributed by a group calling themselves the "Black Eagles", who say they will be "implacable" with those who organised the demonstration.
The Mar. 6 protest was convened by the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), made up of hundreds of associations, and was backed by trade union federations and a number of other social movements.
"Land, dignity and peace" was the theme of a two-day march by people displaced by Colombia’s four-decade civil war, who reached Bogotá to take part in the larger Mar. 6 demonstration.
Vigils, demonstrations and marches were held that day in 78 cities around the world and 24 in Colombia, in honour of the victims of the paramilitaries, which partially demobilised as a result of negotiations with the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe.
But the event went unreported by the mainstream media, by contrast with the heavy international coverage of the global Feb. 4 march against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
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On Mar. 26, the Attorney General’s Office issued an arrest warrant for 15 noncommissioned officers for the 2005 murder of 11 members of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in northwestern Colombia. The victims included three children.
A former paramilitary, Jorge Luis Salgado, told prosecutors that the killings were committed by the army in conjunction with the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).
The slayings took place after the AUC had declared a unilateral ceasefire to pave the way for the demobilisation talks with the government.
Uribe had publicly stated at the time that the members of the peace community, which had declared itself neutral in the armed conflict, were "collaborators" of the FARC, who the president describes as "terrorists."
"You are either with Colombia or with terrorism": this recent statement by Uribe that has been put up on billboards in Bogotá and other cities defines the government’s view with respect to neutrality in the armed conflict.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41817~~~~~~~~~~~Washington's death squad democracy in Colombia
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It would be hard to exaggerate the atrocities the AUC committed. One of its commanders, Ever Veloza, who confessed to killing almost a thousand people and provided details about the killing of 6,000 people by his militias alone, in coordination with the army, said that 90 percent of the victims had no ties to guerrillas. (Washington Post, 19 August) In Mapiripan, in Meta department, in 1997, AUC members came to town with a list of names provided by informants. They went house to house, took people to the town centre, and tortured them to death – hacking them to pieces with machetes or chainsaws and throwing the remains (and sometimes the dismembered still-living) in the river. They killed approximately ten people a day for five days. Local officials called the army repeatedly during this period, but the army didn't come until after the AUC left. The general later accused of planning the massacre had just finished his training by U.S. Army Green Berets working in Colombia. In Alto Naya, in Cauca, in 2001, 90 AUC members killed about 120 people, also with chainsaws and machetes. An Army unit nearby refused to intervene. In Betoyes, in the same department, in 2003, they attacked an indigenous community, raping and killing girls and women in the most horrible manner. Amnesty International reported that the Army supported the massacre. (Various human rights and other publications, cited in the Wikipedia article) These paramilitaries were also active in the slums of Medellin, where they carried out what some people consider to be a genocidal campaign against youth, in Bogota and other cities, assassinating political activists, lawyers, academics, union organizers and others and creating a climate of political terror.
More:
http://rwor.org/a/146/AWTW_columbia-en.html~~~~~~~~~~~Published on Thursday, April 19, 2001 by Agence France Presse
"The Chainsaw Massacre" Is Not a Movie in Colombia: Witness
by Jacques Thomet
BOGOTÁ -- "The Chainsaw Massacre is not a film in Colombia," said government ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes, referring to the April 12 paramilitary massacre in Alto Naya, 650 kilometers (404 miles) southeast of here.
He was revealing details of the massacres of civilians which occurred during Easter week in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country in a wave of right-wing paramilitary and leftist guerrilla violence.
It left some 128 people dead, including 40 in Alto Naya, according to official reports quoted by Cifuentes in an interview with AFP.
The former Constitutional Tribunal president visited the massacre sites Monday at a remote jungle area in the Western Andes mountains, in the Cauca department.
Around 400 paramilitaries took part in this "caravan of death" against civilians accused of supporting leftist guerrillas, Cifuentes said in his Bogota office.
"The remains of a woman were exhumed. Her abdomen was cut open with a chainsaw. A 17-year-old girl had her throat cut and both hands also amputated," said the ombudsman, providing details of "the cruelty and extreme abuse of the paramilitaries."
"They carried a list of names around. The would kill many for insignificant reasons, like not explaining where they got their cellular phone," he said.
"A neighbor pounced upon a paramilitary that was ready to shoot him and took his weapon, but unfortunately he didn't know how to fire a rifle. They dragged him away, cut him open with a chainsaw and chopped him up," a witness of the massacre told El Espectador daily.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0419-04.htm~~~~~~~~~donsu (1000+ posts) Mon Sep-22-03 12:15 PM
Original message
Coco Cola's chainsaw murders in Columbia
it's that trusty bloody hands bushgang BBBT&M at work again (bully, bribe, blackmail, threaten and if all else fails murder policy)
http://www.anncol.org/side/116 Yet another chainsaw massacre in Colombia
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According to their trade union, and to witnesses in the area, a group of paramilitaries ambushed the men and they were forced to dismount their horses. Four paramilitaries subsequently took them away in a grey jeep to an unknown location. Some time later the men were all found in a mass grave in the ‘La Montana’ ranch (owned by a Mr Teodoro Ariza), also in Pondera municipality. All had been cut up with chainsaws.
According to FENSUAGRO both national and regional authorities have ignored all requests to investigate the crime as they have with the recent assassinations of the SINTRAGRICOLAS president Victor Jimenez Fruto and his predecessor Saul Colpas.
In a separate case of anti-union violence on September 10th David Jose Carranza Calle, the 15-year-old son of trade union leader Limberto Carranza, of the food and beverage workers’ union SINALTRAINAL, was kidnapped by six masked men who took him away in a white truck and tortured him, demanding to know where his father was. At the same time as the attack was taking place a telephone call was made to the home of the trade union activist. The caller was recorded as saying, “trade unionist son of a bitch, we are coming to kill you, and if we don’t get you we’ll attack your home”.
According to SINALTRAINAL the attack is almost certainly linked to the current struggle that the union is involved in against the Coca-Cola company.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x382565~~~~~~~~~Dominion of Evil
Colombia's paramilitary terror
by Steven Ambrus
Amnesty International magazine, Spring 2007
In the early 1990s, a butcher named Rodrigo Mercado got fed up with paying protection money to Colombia's leftwing guerrillas. Unable to shake them off, he sought financing from ranchers, politicians and businessmen and raised a 350-man militia. Then he went on the rampage. People accused of leftist sympathies in the state of Sucre were shot. Others were carved to bits with chainsaws, buried in mass graves or fed to alligators. Mercado delighted in the killing, survivors say. Moreover, it provided benefits. As thousands of people fled, Mercado and his men seized control of local governments and acquired vast tracts of farmland and shoreline. Then they used their new possessions to dispatch boats loaded with cocaine to foreign markets.
"They were merciless," said Arnol Gómez, a community leader from the town of San Onofre. "They had so much power that no one could do business or run for office without their approval. Even the police supported them."
Today, after a decade of terror and destruction, an edgy calm has settled over the rolling grasslands and tin-patch towns where Mercado spent his fury. The warlord has been dead for more than a year, a victim of bloodletting in his ranks. His troops have fully demobilized through a 2003 peace deal between the government and a paramilitary umbrella group known as the United Self- Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Local farmers have returned to their tiny plots of plantains and corn. But criminal investigators are only now uncovering graves on Mercado's abandoned farms. And with hundreds of people dead and hundreds more still missing in Sucre, the painful process of uncovering the truth about what happened there and in other areas of paramilitary control is just getting underway. For the first time, Colombians are confronting the immense dimensions of the paramilitary terror that has gripped their country for four decades, and the unholy alliance of military, business and political leaders that propelled it forward.
"Colombia is at a crossroads after years in which the paramilitaries infiltrated the world of legitimate business and the agencies of local and national government," said Iván Cepeda, the son of a left-wing senator who was murdered in 1994 by an alliance of military and paramilitary operatives. "Colombia will either become a nation of laws and democratic institutions or sink further into violence, authoritarianism and the denial of basic rights."
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Colombia/Dominion_Evil.html~~~~~~~~~Murder Training: Colombian Death Squad Used Live Hostages
April 29, 2007 By El Tiempo
El Tiempo, Bogota -- "Proof of courage": that is how the how the paramilitaries would term the training they imparted to their recruits so that they learnt how to carve up people while they were still alive.
Initially, the authorities rejected this version of the farmers who reported the practice... but when the combatants themselves started to admit to it in their testimonies before the prosecutors, the myth became a harsh crime against humanity.
Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández (alias Cristian Barreto), one of the perpetrators of the massacre at El Aro in Ituango, Antioquia, received this type of training in the same place where he learnt to handle arms and manufacture home-made bombs. Today, a prisoner at La Picota in Bogota, Villalba has described in details during lengthy testimonies how he applied the learning.
"Towards the middle of 1994, I was ordered to a course... in El Tomate, Antioquia, where the training camp was located," he says in his testimony. There, his working day started at 5 in the morning and the instructions were received directly from the top commanders such as 'Double Zero' (Carlos Garcia, since assassinated by another paramilitary group).
Villalba claims that in order to learn how to dismember people they would use farmers they gathered together in the course of taking neighbouring settlements. As he describes it, "they were aged people whom we brought in trucks, alive and bound up". The victims arrived at the ranch in covered trucks. They were lowered from the vehicle with their hands tied and taken to a room. There they were locked up for days in the hope that the training would start.
"The instruction of courage" would start later: the people would be divided up in four or five groups "and there they dismembered them", says Villalba in his testimony. "The instructor would say to each of them: 'You stand there, so-and-so over there and provide security to him who is doing the dismembering'. Every time that a settlement is taken and someone is going to be dismembered, security has to be offered to those doing the job".
The women and men were taken out in their underwear from the rooms where they had been locked up. Still with their hands bound, they took them to the place where the instructor was waiting to start the first lessons: "The instructions were to chop off their arms, the head, to dismember them alive. They were usually crying and asked us not to do anything to them, that they had families."
Villalba describes the process: "They were opened up from the chest to the belly and the intestines, the remains, taken out. The feet, arms and head were removed. It was done with machetes or with knives. The rest, the remains, was done by hand. Those of us in training took out the intestines." The training demanded it, according to him, to "prove the courage and to learn how to make people disappear".
During the month and a half that Francisco Villaba says he stayed in the course, he thrice saw the instructions in dismemberment. "I myself cut off the arm of a girl. Her head and a foot had already been cut off. She had asked that they not do it, that she had two brothers". The bodies were carried to graves there itself... where it is calculated that more than 400 people are buried.
Towards the end of last year, an informant contacted a group of investigators to tell them how before the Law of Justice and Peace was approved, heads of the paramilitaries in Cordoba and Sucre (Colombian provinces) had started to make, in some of the farms, artificial lakes for fish farming. According to the informant, people in the area had warned him that engineers who were constructing these were contributing to hiding the graves. "There are only signs," says an investigator, "but we have to dry up a pair of these to see what we find". He added that that would explain why in farms like El Palmar - paramilitary killing field in Sucre - there were caymans and crocodiles. While on the subject, Ivan Cepeda, investigator of human rights violations, says witnesses have shown to him a submission that many of the bodies were eaten up by caymans. (Abridged version of a report in El Tiempo, Bogota, April 24, 2007)
*********** Update: El Tiempo reports (April 27, 2007) that Villalba could be freed for his "valuable contribution" to the justice system. "He has collaborated a lot with us in finding graves to which we would never have had access," a high-ranking source told El Tiempo. It would also count, said the source that it was done voluntarily as he was tormented by the memories of the faces of his victims night after night. Villalba was sentenced to 33 years and 4 months in prison in 2003.
Villalba was a friend of one of the cruellest hit men of Pablo Esobar (drug lord, dead for several years now) - Dandenis Muñoz Moscera, now serving several life terms in the United States. Villalba participated in the massacres of Coloso and Pichilin (16 victims), Segovia (41) and Pueblo Bello (43) as well as El Aro (15, including many children and women), where he insists on having seen a yellow helicopter hovering overhead while the farmers were being killed.
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15551
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