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player ready...The number of civilians killed by the Colombian armed forces has soared, activist groups say, with many of the abuses committed by army units that had been vetted by the U.S. State Department.
There were 329 so-called extrajudicial killings by the Colombian military and police last year, a coalition of Colombian rights groups asserts in a report, a 48 percent increase from the 223 reported in 2006.
The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogota-based civil society group that is responsible for verifying many of the deaths, said last week that a “significant” number of killings of civilians by armed forces had been reported so far in 2008 in five Colombian states but provided no precise numbers.
A separate analysis of last year’s killings by Fellowship of Reconciliation, a New York-based peace group, alleges that 47 percent of the homicides were committed by army units that had been scrutinized in 2006 or 2007 by the State Department, which ruled that they had complied with human-rights requirements, making them eligible for U.S. military aid and training.
Backed by more than $4 billion in U.S. military aid since 2000, the Colombian military recently has shown dramatic progress in its decades-long struggle against leftist rebels and right-wing militias. A 40 percent increase in uniformed forces, tactical training by U.S. advisers and improved communications have been important factors.
Colombia’s popular president, Alvaro Uribe, has become the United States’ No. 1 Latin American ally in its war on terrorism and drugs, and a political counterweight to anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
But the Colombian military has been plagued by accusations of human-rights atrocities, including extrajudicial killings called “false positives” in which army armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.
The continuing allegations have led Congress to criticize U.S. military aid under Plan Colombia and have been an obstacle to approval of a binational free-trade agreement.
Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on State Department and Foreign Operations and author of the 1996 law that makes foreign military aid conditional on human-rights compliance, expressed dismay.
“After providing billions of dollars in training and equipment to the Colombian army, we should expect better, including vigorous investigations and prosecutions of these crimes,” Leahy said.
In a recent interview, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged that human rights were the “Achilles’ heel” of his military forces. Since taking office two years ago, he said, he has made improving that record a priority. Santos unveiled a comprehensive human-rights policy in January.
Without challenging the figures, a U.S. government official in the embassy in Bogota, the capital, said numbers are only “examples among a wide variety of statistics” gathered by various civil society groups that monitor human rights in Colombia.