Buried clothes, bones and DNA help identify Colombia's missing
YESTERDAY 12:42
Across Colombia, efforts have intensified to find, exhume, and identify those who have gone missing during the country's six decades of armed conflict.
Two decades after her son went missing, Soledad Ruiz was handed a small coffin containing his remains, identified using DNA and the sweater he was wearing when he disappeared.
Her face worn by grief and time, Ruiz wipes away tears as she clutches a composite sketch of her son, Apolinar, who was 25 when he left for work on a farm in San Onofre in northern Colombia in 1999, never to be seen again.
The Caribbean region of Sucre was then a hotspot for paramilitary groups, brutal far-right squads that formed to combat leftist guerrilla groups but also became involved in drug trafficking, extortion and atrocities.
Ruiz long thought her son had been killed by a paramilitary leader who was known for throwing the bodies of his victims in a caiman-infested river.
More:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/buried-clothes-bones-and-dna-help-identify-colombias-missing.phtml
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Amnesty International
AI Index: AMR 23/01/94
Colombia
Political violence in Colombia: myth and reality
In Colombia the military literally get away with murder. Army counter-insurgency
strategy, honed in 40 years of conflict with guerrillas, is the backdrop to massacre
upon massacre. Widespread human rights violations go unpunished.
Since 1986, over 20,000 people have died in political violence. Many died in
confrontations between guerrillas and government forces. But most were peasant
farmers in conflict zones.
The government blames most political violence on drug-trafficking organizations
and guerrilla forces. Drug-traffickers and guerrillas have committed grave abuses.
But evidence drawn from thousands of cases, and the chilling statistics of political
murder, shows that the security forces and their paramilitary allies are responsible
for most killings.
In this report, Amnesty International describes the human rights violations carried
out with impunity. The report also traces the development of the paramilitary forces
from the army's network of village `self-defence' groups to a powerful killing
machine.
Successive governments have promised to restore respect for human rights. These
promises have been broken. Until the government finds the political will to fulfil
past promises, human rights violations will continue.
More:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr230011994en.pdf
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“The very concept of ‘revolutionary violence’ is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the
violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform.
By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater
repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo,
including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of
opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the
extermination of whole villages, and the like.”
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of
Communism
“…Colombia has had accessories in crime, primary among them the government of the United
States, though Britain, Israel, Germany, and others have also helped to train and arm the
assassins and torturers of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains “stability” in a
country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for many of its people.”
- Father Javier Giraldo, Colombia: The
Genocidal Democracy
“The guerrilla was not the cause of the Colombian conflict but rather one of its symptoms, and
simultaneously became a contributing factor in the sense that its very existence has provided the
ideological substance for the pretext and justification behind state-sanctioned violence and
militarization.”
- Jasmin Hristov
, Paramilitarism and
Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of
Capital Accumulation in Colombia and
Beyond
More:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt6t83b9gg/qt6t83b9gg_noSplash_3803233aedd0f27a3f4c9cd07d51c22b.pdf?t=r9wyas
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(Horrendous violence continued to the present from the time of this article's publication) to the recent Presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, 2010 to 2018, former Vice-President of monstrous fascist president Álvaro Uribe)
Colombia: Fifty years of violence
Format Analysis SourceCJ Posted 31 May 1999 Originally published 31 May 1999
Introduction
The civil conflict in Colombia has been epitomized by gross human rights violations that have increased dramatically over the past two decades. International human rights groups have repeatedly singled out right-wing paramilitary organizations as being the principal perpetrators of human rights abuses.
The paramilitaries are closely allied with the Colombian Armed Forces as they wage war against, not only the guerrillas, but also anyone suspected of being a guerrilla sympathizer, such as union members, peasant organizers, human rights workers and religious activists. Some paramilitary leaders have even extended the parameters of the war against the guerrillas and they're suspected sympathizers to include drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, petty criminals and the homeless in an attempt to "cleanse" Colombian society.
Over the years several Colombian presidents have attempted to address the issues--social, political and economic injustices--that the guerrillas claim to be the principal cause of the conflict. However, these efforts have been repeatedly thwarted by the United States and its war on drugs, and by the Colombian political, economic and military elite who are desperately trying to preserve a "democracy" that has marginalized much of the population.
Many contemporary news accounts label the conflict a "thirty-five year-old civil war," basing its origin on the official formation of several guerrilla groups in the mid-1960's. However, the roots of Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), date back to the peasant armed self-defense movements formed between 1948 and 1958 during the period known as La Violencia.
La Violencia and the National Front
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Liberal and Conservative parties, whose influence reached from Bogotá to virtually every village in the settled regions of the country, dominated Colombian politics. Ideological differences between the Liberal and Conservative elite reverberated throughout Colombian society often resulting in outbreaks of violence that repeatedly pitted loyal Liberal and Conservative factions, both peasant and elite, against each other.
In the late 1940's dissident Liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, having emerged from the Liberal and communist led agrarian and labor reform movements, was a leading presidential candidate. But on April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated on a Bogotá street. The Liberal leader's killing triggered the Bogotazo, a popular uprising by the Liberal lower classes that resulted in massive destruction and looting in the capital.
More:
https://reliefweb.int/report/colombia/colombia-fifty-years-violence
