From June:UN envoy: Colombia army kills many innocents

[Judi Lynn]

You'd think this story would get more coverage than what we've seen. Very clearly it's being downplayed. Don't even bother to think what would happen if this occured in Venezuela!

UN envoy: Colombia army kills many innocents
By FRANK BAJAK – Jun 18, 2009

BOGOTA (AP) — Hundreds of innocent civilians have been slain by soldiers and falsely identified as guerrillas killed in combat as part of a "more or less" systematic practice by significant elements of Colombia's military, a U.N. human rights investigator said Thursday.

After a 10-day visit interviewing more than 100 witnesses and survivors, special envoy Philip Alston told reporters he found nothing to indicate that such extra-judicial killings were state policy or that President Alvaro Uribe and his defense ministers knew of them.

However, the Australian investigator said it was "unsustainable" for officials in Uribe's government to argue that the killings were carried out "on a small scale by a few bad apples." The vast majority of the slayings occurred after Uribe's 2002 election.

Under Uribe, Colombia's government has put leftist rebels on the defensive and seriously curbed kidnapping and murder with the help of more than $4 billion in U.S. aid.

Deputy Defense Minister Sergio Jaramillo told reporters the government was taking Alston's preliminary report very seriously and was pleased he recognized "the seriousness of the measures we've taken" to halt the killings and punish those responsible.

Alston said he would issue a full report in four to five months.

Criticizing what he called too few successful prosecutions of extrajudicial killings, Alston said Colombia needs more human rights prosecutors and complained that military judges have tried to "thwart the transfer of clear human rights cases" to the ordinary justice system.

He characterized as "blatant and obscene" the most highly publicized case — at least 11 young men lured from the poor Bogota suburb of Soacha early last year with promises of work only to be found dead hundreds of miles away depicted as dead rebels.

Alston called that case the "tip of the iceberg" in a practice of "cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit" that involved "a significant number of military units" in nearly half of Colombia's states.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1916/68/

[Peace Patriot]

1. It IS occurring in Venezuela, with RW death squads in league with the fascist secessionists

deliberately creating terror in the form of random "social cleansing" murders--a destabilization tactic.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1916/68
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x18712

The "false positives" in Colombia--murdering civilians and dressing their corpses up like FARC guerillas--is primarily to up their 'kill rate,' to impress US Senators (the US has larded $6 BILLION in military aid upon Colombia--the worst human rights abuser in the hemisphere), but it also has the effect of simply terrorizing people, so that they remain quiescent politically (are too afraid to raise their heads in a social justice cause, are too afraid to organize a union, etc.). In Venezuela--since there is no US largesse to be gained by killing peasants and leftists, in the short run--the motives are terror and destabilization, in order to topple a good government. But the methods and goals are very similar. The RW--as we have seen it manifested since the Reagan era--prefers a society run by murderous pigs. They claim to want "law and order" but what they really want is torture, death, terror and chaos, because it's easier to steal from people who are afraid.