State and paramilitaries responsible for 16,000 forced disappearances: UN

[Judi Lynn]

State and paramilitaries responsible for 16,000 forced disappearances: UN
Monday, 23 May 2011 17:02
Tom Heyden

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that the Colombian state and paramilitaries are culpable for 16,000 forced disappearances in the country over the last three decades, Spanish news agency EFE reported Monday.

Christian Salazar, at a forced disappearance seminar in the Colombian capital of Bogota, stated that the current total figure stands at over 57,000 recorded disappearance cases, with 15,600 of these being forced disappearances.
He clarified that these figures are taken from NGOs and that the Prosecutor General's Office has seen "probably more than 26,500 cases of alleged forced disappearances."

These incidents of forced disappearance were mainly "committed by state agents and paramilitary forces who collaborated with them," while "there are more than 3,000 women and 3,000 people under 20 years old" included in the estimates.

The high figures regarding "one of the most serious human rights violations," according to the official, make Colombia "one of the countries in South America and the world with the most disappeared."

More:
http://www.colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/16462-state-and-paramilitaries-most-responsible-for-forced-disappearances-un.html

On edit:
It's important to add Colombia is the 3rd largest recipient of US taxpayers' annual foreign aid gifts.

[naaman fletcher]

1. sounds low...

I thought it was a lot more than that.

[Judi Lynn]

2. New US Report Reveals Shocking Number of Disappeared

New US Report Reveals Shocking Number of Disappeared
News from Colombia | on: Saturday, 11 December 2010

On 10th December - International Human Rights Day - the Latin America Working Group and the US Office on Colombia launched “Breaking the Silence”, a report detailing the tragedy of the thousands of disappeared in Colombia.

The report notes that the setting up of a new database has led to a re-examination of the numbers of Colombians who have been disappeared. The official Colombian government figure is of over 51 thousand people missing or disappeared, of whom the Colombian Attorney General’s Office estimates 32 thousand were forcibly disappeared. This figure may well be higher since many cases have not yet been included in the new database, and many have not been registered at all. Furthermore new cases are constantly being recorded, with the army being a prime suspect. In the last 3 years 1130 new cases of forcible disappearance have been reported, and between January and May 2010 over 150 were reported in the province of Antioquia alone.

The authors state that Paramilitary forces were to blame for the vast majority of cases. However, the report also underlines that many cases have also been carried out by the armed forces and security services. It notes that by 2010 over 3000 people had been killed by the army or police in extrajudicial executions and the notorious ‘false positives’ scandal, in which Colombian army troops killed innocent civilians, reporting them as guerrillas killed in combat in order to claim bodycount bonuses. Many of those murdered in this way were impoverished young men lured to their deaths by false promises of paid employment.

The increase in the number of disappearances is also linked to the provision of military aid by the United States to the Colombian armed forces. The report states that the number of extrajudicial executions grew during the first years of Plan Colombia, the US plan to strengthen the Colombian armed forces. This was the same period during which the UK also provided military aid to the Colombian regime.

More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/news/article/855/new-us-report-reveals-shocking-number-of-disappeared

[gbscar]

3. Excerpts from the actual report that the so-called "Justice for Colombia" did not find interesting.

In Colombia, victims of forced disappearances
include human rights defenders, trade unionists,
Afro-Colombian and indigenous people, and
young men and teenage girls in rural conflict
zones, amongst others. In the 1970s and
1980s, many victims disappeared following
detentions by the police or military. Left-wing
guerrillas also killed and disappeared people.

As the paramilitary phenomenon expanded
in the 1990s, so too did the cases of those
disappeared by paramilitary forces, the rightwing
insurgent groups that were aided by
members of Colombia’s official security forces.

<...>

Colombia’s armed forces and police and all
illegal armed groups have been responsible
for disappearances. Left-wing guerrillas killed
and disappeared people, and kidnapping and
forced recruitment, including of children, by
the guerrillas were also sometimes classified as
disappearances.

<...>

Consuelo de Jesus David’s weathered face is overcome by
tears as she tells of how guerrilla soldiers disappeared her
son and husband 13 years ago. Consuelo’s son, Giraldo,
25, was finishing high school in Mutata municipality in
Urabá province when he and his father, a poor farmer, were
disappeared in December 1997. Consuelo reported the
disappearances to the army and government authorities,
but they offered no help. So, Consuelo set out by herself
to look for her loved ones.

But then the guerrillas threatened her and she was forced
to abandon the family farm and flee with three of her young
children to Medellín.

<...>

One of the serious limitations of the SIRDEC
system is that it is set up solely for the purpose
of identifying disappeared persons. It cannot
be easily used to produce key information
and statistics on crimes, perpetrators, dates,
and other demographic information which
could help lead to the public policies and
prevention campaigns that could address
forced disappearances. Even questions as
essential as: Is the problem getting better or
worse in a specific region? Are paramilitaries,
guerrillas, criminal gangs or members of the
police or military primarily responsible? are not
easily answered by the publicly available data.
As a result, while the database performs an
important mission, it continues to obscure the
dimensions of this tragic problem.

Comment:

Let's get a couple of things straight. None of this changes the fact that state agents and paramilitary forces are responsible for tens of thousands of forced disappearances in Colombia over the last 30 years. This is a shameful and repugnant reality that has been denounced quite strongly by numerous organizations and individuals, some of them paying with their lives for daring to do so.

It is, however, both intellectually disappointing and morally insulting to see how easily the victims of disappearances carried out by the guerrillas, as opposed to kidnappings(*), are often ignored not just by the Colombian state and international media in general but also by those who consider themselves to be progressives or who claim to be seeking "justice" on behalf of an entire country while not living up to their pretentious moniker. Yes, I'm definitely referring to the UK-based organization "Justice for Colombia" in particular, which has been cited in the previous post.

But let's try something else. Let's briefly assume, just for the sake of argument since current estimates are not comprehensive and fail to provide enough information to make a scientific comparison, the Colombian state and the paramilitaries have hypothetically disappeared a definitive total of 30,000 or 40,000 people while the guerrillas have only disappeared 5,000 or 10,000 throughout the duration of this conflict. Should we completely ignore the "lesser" brutalities and atrocities committed in the name of liberation and revolution? Are those victims somehow worth less or, no pun intended, worthless?

What's more, kidnapping someone and never hearing from him or her again has little or no practical distinction from executing a forced disappearance. Another report from 2001 is quite explicit about it:

In the Zone and areas in dispute with other parties to the conflict, the FARC-EP has established a pattern of abducting civilians suspected of supporting paramilitary groups, many of whom are later killed. Unlike abductions carried out for financial reasons, these abductions are often kept hidden. The FARC-EP generally does not disclose the victims' fate or even acknowledge custody. Relatives of those who are seized by the FARC-EP in these circumstances frequently are unable to obtain any information from the FARC-EP about the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones, causing enormous suffering. The victims of these abductions have no protection under the law, let alone legal remedy against false accusations and abuse, nor can their relatives invoke legal remedies on their behalf.

These violations would qualify as forced disappearances under international human rights law if carried out by government officials or organized groups and private individuals acting on behalf of or with the support of a government. The fact that these actions do not qualify at the moment (2001) as a violation of specific human rights treaties should not, however, lead to any confusion about their nature. Abductions are serious human rights abuses independent of legal or linguistic niceties. They also constitute blatant violations of the FARC-EP's obligations under international humanitarian law and in particular key provisions of article 4 of Protocol II, which protects against violence to the life, physical, and mental well-being of persons, torture, and ill-treatment.

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,COL,,3bd540ba6,0.html

That may not have been formally classified under what was supposed to be the technical legal definition of "forced disappearence" as something only a state agent or state-supported group could do, at least when said report was written almost ten years ago (I'm not an expert on the new legislation regarding the subject), but the resulting description actually leaves no room for discussion as to what any sort of disappearance implies. Someone takes you away by force and your fate is left unknown, possibly forever.

What does this mean? It means we should be aware of the entire picture here. Not to excuse or somehow justify any of these abuses but, on the contrary, to put pressure on everyone involved and, in my humble opinion, support efforts (like those of Piedad Córdoba) that seek to end this orgy of violence instead of alternatively endorsing reactionary or revolutionary thugs and failing to strictly scrutinize their behavior.

(*) Even then, there's also a marked sense of indifference and discrimination involved, contrary to popular belief, considering few kidnapping cases are actually publicly reported or given specific attention and not all of them are necessarily resolved by the authorities either, let alone reach a humanitarian conclusion. Thus the idea that only rich oligarchs are kidnapped and automatically receive the full support of mainstream Colombian and American society is rather inaccurate and cynical.