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.
~snip~
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".
More:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15551
A.U.C. death squad leader, Carlos Mario Jimenez ("Macaco")
Some of his troops, after arrest.