The extradition of key paramilitary leaders to the U.S. was "a fatal blow to investigations into parapolitics" and was done in order hide the truth, according to Americas Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Jose Manuel Vivanco.
Vivanco said in an interview with El Espectador that he believed that extradited leaders such as Salvatore Mancuso and Don Berna were prepared to cooperate with justice and that their extradition was unnecessary.
Their extradition "gives the impression that the idea was precisely to silence them," Vivanco said. "To silence them is the only explanation that I can come up with [as to why they were extradited]."
"The worst thing is that up until this point there is no mechanism that ensures the effective and trustworthy collaboration of those responsible for the worst atrocities in Colombian history," he added.
Vivanco also expressed HRW's concern that the potential second re-election of President Alvaro Uribe would threaten democratic institutions because of the constitutional changes that would have to occur to make him eligible to run again.
HRW is due to release a report on the state of human rights in Colombia. Among the themes it will cover are paramilitarism and the rise of new paramilitary groups, the false positives cases, the increase in violence in cities such as Medellin, and the DAS wire-tapping scandal.
tomtom33
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... I just don't buy this argument. The US has always been interested in human rights and would go to any lengths to insure collaboration. And it would be easy enough to have as many video depositions as anyone deems necessary. The US legal system while far from perfect functions pretty well. |
gringomedellin
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... we will have to wait and see how fair and balancved their report will be, but I am not holding my breathe based on this mans words so far. |
Adriaan
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... HRW did their annual report on Colombia a few weeks ago and it was terribly weak if you ask me. The report could not really highlight any increase in or new human rights violations in 2009. They mostly were rerunning scandals from the year before (false positives, etc). Either they were just in a really bad mood when writing it, as in, they couldn't admit that the situation improved after 2008 or they just weren't looking good enough. http://www.hrw.org/en/world-report-2010/colombia |
Bernie
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... Come on Adriaan, do you really think the 'false positives' scandal is old? Just in the past month numerous reports have been coming out of La Macarena in Meta of a mass grave there managed by the Army with up to 2,000 (two thousand) more bodies in it. The people in the region have been reporting disappearances for months but nobody is investigating. And this is completely seperate to the nearly 2,000 cases of extra judicial executions that the Fiscalia is already looking into. Plus some are saying that there are further mass graves, again run by the Army, to be found in other parts of Meta, near Puerto Toledo and Vista Hermosa for example. I can't think of many other places in the world, with the possible exceptions of the Congo and Sudan, where this level of killing is being carried out. And the worst thing is that this is clearly state forces perpetrating the murder. Human Rights Watch, and everyone else, need to pile the pressure on Uribe and make sure that he deals with this - releaseing the Soacha suspects and treating them to a day at the spa is not exactly a good first step. Nor is appointing Montoya, the man behind a lot of this, as Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Gringomedellin, I wouldn't hold your breath for the killings to stop just yet either. Tomtom, do you seriously think that the US respects human rights! |
tomtom33
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... Yes, I do seriously think that the US respects human rights. My guess is that you disagree. Feel free to cite any examples that illustrate your point of view. |
Adriaan
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... @ Bernie, the mass grave you're referring to was discovered almost a year ago already and consists mostly of bodies dumped there by the guerrilla from the time they ruled the area. This comes from Fiscalia investigators from the Justice and Peace unit, not from the army. I am not saying there are no false positives being committed, I just don't see any concrete examples of them in the HRW report. They only repeat things we already knew from their 2008 report. |
And.
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... @Adriaan, Are you sure about the bodies in La Macarena? I thought it was being used as a dumping site up until this year, long after the guerrilla were forced out. (I don't have a citation - I just asking you a question). I'm not putting anything on the state forces...it just wouldn't surprise me if some of the bodies that were dumped could have been easily identified. |
Adriaan
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... @ And, The article I published on it dates February 25 last year: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/3022-investigators-find-mass-graves-with-possibly-1150-corpses.html Here's another one on the same mass grave by a colleague mentioning some 900 more corpses: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/6971-attorney-general-asks-for-the-creation-of-lab-to-identify-bodies-found-in-communal-grave.html It's waiting for forensics to know from what year these bodies are. I am assuming a lot of them will be victims of illegal armed forces, but obviously there can be some false positives in there too, you just don't know until after examiniation. |
