Reply #3: A paramilitary primer on how to dismember people [View All]

[rabs]

Sorry did not see yr post of last night. But see you inserted Intl. Trib. article on another thread in LBN. Good.

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Here is an email I got yesterday from our Colombian friend from the CNN days. He gets his information directly from his friends and family in Colombia.

First, a little background: Francisco Villalba, a former paramilitary, was convicted and sentenced to 33 years in prison for his role in campesino massacres at Ituango and El Aro. In testimony he gave at his trial, he stated that Alvaro Uribe had been implicated in the El Aro massacre and described in detail how paramilitary recurits were taught how to kill people -- by killing real people.

Three weeks ago, Villalba was shot to death in Medellin. It has not been explained why he was free in his home city when he had been sentenced to 33 years in a maximum-security prison in Bogota. Suspicion is that he was ordered released by the Uribe government and eliminated so he could not provide any more information on paramilitary crimes. Translation is by our friend. "Lesa humanity" means "crimes against humanity."

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The following article, is a real tale of horror, a macabre relate about how the narco-paramilitaries in Colombia trained their people. It is not a secret in Colombia the friendly link and high level of collaboration existing between the bloodthirsty paramilitaries and Alvaro Uribe's government.

Mostly those crimes against the humanity happened during the Alvaro Uribe´s regime since he was Governor of Antioquia in the 90´s and the bathblood has continued without interruption during his 7 years as President.



'Bravery' tests. This is the words used for the paramilitaries to describe the trainings that they imparted to their recruits so they could learn how to dismember alive people. Initially, the authorities distrusted the versions of peasants that denounced this practice and they attributed to these teachings the disappearing of people. But when the own paramilitaries began to admit it in their declaration before the General Prosecutor Office, the myth became awfully real, a sadistic crime of " lesa humanity".

Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernandez (aka ' Cristian Barreto'), one of the authors of the massacre of Ituango and El Aro in Antioquia, received this type of training in the same place in which he learned manage weapons and to manufacture homemade bombs. Today, prisoner in the jail La Picota of Bogotá, Villalba has described detailed, during long interrogations about how he applied this instruction.

"By the middle of 1994 they sent me to a training in the farm "The 35", in El Tomato, Antioquia, where it was located the main field of instruction", he says in his story to the Attorney General Office. In the farm, the "working" day began to 5 in the morning and the instructions that he had to carry out was coming directly from top paramilitaries commander, as ' Double cero' (Carlos Garcia, murdered by another paramilitaries of the Cacique Nutibara, a rival group).

Showing a diabolical coldblood, Villalba described the teachings of cutting in pieces alive persons, usually poor and innocent peasants that paramilitaries captured during the take over of neighboring peasant towns. "They were old people (men and women) that took them in trucks, alive, tied", he describes. The victims arrived to the farm in covered trucks. They got them off the vehicle with the tied hands and paramilitaries took them to a room. There, the victims remained several days awaiting that the training began.

"Now it's ready to start the instruction": Paramilitaries distributed the victims in four or five groups and there they dismembered them", Villalba says in the inquest. "The instructor told to paramilitary prospects: “You stop here and so-and-so there. He gives support to the novices that are learning to cut an alive human body. This is important, because whenever paramilitaries takes a town and they decide to cut in pieces somebody, it is necessary to offer top support to those that are making that work."

The victims, women and the men, were kept in small dirty rooms and when the new roocky paramilitaries arrived, then the victims were taken out in underwear with hands tied. Then the commanders took them to the place where the instructors waited to begin the first recommendations:

"The instructions were to mutilate first an arm, after a leg and lately the head. They came out crying and begging that we don't hurt them because they had family."

Villalba describes the process: "They were opened alive from the chest until the belly to take out the guts and viscera. They were removed legs, arms and head with machete or with knife. The viscera should be removed with the hand. The prospects in instruction had to do it themselves.

The training demanded it, according to him, to prove the anger and to learn how to disappear to the person." During the month and half that Francisco Villalba says that it remained in the course, he participated several times dismembering people.

"They choice the paramilitary prospects ready to participate in the training. One time, one of the "students" refused to participate. Immediately paramilitary commander ' Double cero' stand up and told him: ' Bring me the machete, I'm able to do it". Then he dismembered the prospect as a lesson for the rest. Paramilitary commanders ordered to me to mutilate the arm of a young woman. Then the Commander removed the head and a leg of her. Previously, she had begged for her life asking them not to kill her because she had two little children."

It was normal that many times the instructors cut the yugular of the victims, picking the blood in small bowls and giving to drink to the new paramilitaries.

The bodies were taken there to graves inside the farm The 35, where according the Attorney General, paramilitaries buried more than 800 corpses in small pieces.

"They were old and young people that took in trucks, tied. The instruction was to remove arms, head, legs. The order was to dismember them alive."

(Related by Francisco Villalba, in a questioning procedure before the Attorney General in Colombia)

ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE COLOMBIAN NEWSPAPER EL TIEMPO ON APRIL 21/07.

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Graves in ponds and wells, filled up with crocodiles and caimans_
At the end of last year, an informant contacted to a group of investigators to narrate him how before Alvaro Uribe pushes the approval of the Law of Justice and Peace, several paramilitaries commanders of Cordoba and Sucre began to make, in some of their properties, artificial ponds, supposedly for breeding of fish. According to the informant, people of the area told to the engineers building the ponds that they were contributing to the concealment of graves. " It's just a supposition, an investigator says but we will have to dry a couple of those ponds to see what we find". Such fact, it would explain why in farms as The Palmar, a well-known pond of paramilitary extermination -field in the State of Sucre - there were full of caimans and crocodile. In this respect, Ivan Cepeda, investigator of human right violations, assures in one of his writings that witnesses have manifested him that crocodiles devoured several cadavers. The same version circulates in Mompox regarding the ponds of a property of ' Chepe Barrera', another paramilitary.