Colombia jails death squad general over massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Source: BBC News

Page last updated at 08:10 GMT, Thursday, 26 November 2009
Colombia jails death squad general over massacre

A Colombian court has sentenced a former general to 40 years in jail for his role in the killing of dozens of civilians by right-wing death squads. Jaime Humberto Uscategui's sentence is the longest ever for an army officer in Colombia. The court was told the general had knowingly let far-right paramilitary death squads use his army base.

Some 50 unarmed peasants were killed by the militia in 1997, and their corpses cut open and thrown in a river. The killings happened during a five-day period in the remote village of Mapiripan in the eastern province of Meta. Pleas for assistance from the villagers and local officials were reportedly ignored by Gen Uscategui. The court found him guilty of murder, kidnapping and falsifying public documents.

National crusade

Gen Uscategui continues to maintain his innocence and says he will appeal the ruling.

The Mapiripan massacre heralded a bloody national crusade by the AUC - the right-wing United Self Defence Forces of Colombia - against Marxist rebels, which took the lives of tens of thousands of Colombians, the BBC's Jeremy McDermott reports from Medellin. The paramilitaries often worked alongside the security forces against the powerful left-wing rebels, our correspondent says.



Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8380025.stm

[Judi Lynn]

1. Mapiripán Massacre

Mapiripán Massacre
Wikipedia:

The Mapiripán Massacre was a massacre of civilians that took place in Mapiripán, Meta Department, Colombia. The massacre was carried out from July 15 to July 20, 1997 by Colombian paramilitaries, specifically the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

On July 12, 1997 two planeloads of paramilitaries arrived at the airport of San José del Guaviare, which also served as a base for anti-narcotics police. The paramilitaries then traveled through territories where the Colombian National Army manned checkpoints.

On July 15, 1997, the paramilitiaries arrived at Mapiripán. They used chainsaws and machetes to murder, behead, dismember, and disembowel a number of civilians. Because the bodies were thrown into a river, it is unknown exactly how many people died.

In proceedings before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the government of Colombia has admitted that members of its military forces also played a role in the massacre, through omission.<1> General Jaime Uscátegui allegedly ordered local troops under his command to stay away from the area in which the murders were taking place until the paramilitaries finished the massacre and left. Retired General Uscátegui was later prosecuted, put on trial, and subsequently acquitted.<2><3>

One of the paramilitary leaders allegedly responsible for the massacre, Dumas de Jesús Castillo Guerrero, alias ‘Carecuchillo’, surrendered to authorities on May 20, 2008. after having been considered dead for half a year.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapirip%C3%A1n_Massacre

~~~~~~~~~~~

From Human Rights Watch:

IV. PARAMILITARY VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW

Each night they kill groups of five to six defenseless people, who are cruelly and monstrously massacred after being tortured. The screams of humble people are audible, begging for mercy and asking for help.

– Judge Leonardo Iván Cortés, Mapiripán, Meta

July 1997

Mapiripán, Meta: From July 15 through July 20, 1997, the ACCU seized the town of Mapiripán, Meta, killed at least thirteen people, and threatened others with death. An investigation by human rights groups concluded that paramilitaries had arrived in the region via chartered airplane, which landed at the San José del Guaviare airport days before the massacre. This case also illustrates the deadly results of the army and police policy of acquiescence in paramilitary killings. Local army and police units ignored repeated phone calls from a civilian judge in the area asking for help to stop the slayings. At dawn on July 15, an estimated 200 heavily-armed ACCU members arrived and began rounding up local authorities and forcing them to accompany them. Among those they searched for were peasants who had taken part in a 1996 department-wide protest against coca eradication and the government’s failure to provide viable economic alternatives for the region. ACCU men detained residents and people arriving by boat, took them to the local slaughterhouse, then bound, tortured, and executed them by slitting their throats. The first person killed, Antonio María Herrera, known as “Catumare,” was hung from a hook, and ACCU members quartered his body, throwing the pieces into the Guaviare River. At least two bodies — those of Sinaí Blanco, a boatman, and Ronald Valencia, the airstrip manager — were decapitated.103 Judge Leonardo Iván Cortés reported hearing the screams of the people they brought to the slaughterhouse to interrogate, torture, and kill throughout the five days the ACCU remained in the area. In one of the missives he sent to various regional authorities during the massacre, he wrote: “Each night they kill groups of five to six defenseless people, who are cruelly and monstrously massacred after being tortured. The screams of humble people are audible, begging for mercy and asking for help.”104 ACCU leader Carlos Castaño took responsibility for the massacre, and told reporters that an ACCU “shock front” of seventy men executed thirteen people, and threw some bodies in the Guaviare River. Arriving only days after the ACCU left, authorities located five bodies, though the ICRC estimated to reporters that as many as twenty more may have been killed and thrown into the Guaviare River.105 Castaño denied reports of torture, yet promised “many more Mapiripans” for Colombia in subsequent press interviews.106 Hundreds of people fled the region, including Judge Cortés, who was forced to leave Colombia with his family because of threats on his life. The Attorney General’s Office is currently investigating the ACCU’s involvement in the massacre and hasissued arrest warrants for Castaño and two of his men for planning and carrying out the killings.107 The Internal Affairs continues to investigate official involvement.108

Despite Judge Cortés’s eight telephone pleas for help along with the calls of at least two others, neither the police nor the army’s “Joaquín París” Battalion in nearby San José reacted until the ACCU had left town. As a result of their internal investigation, the army put Seventh Brigade Commander Gen. Jaime Humberto Uscátegui on administrative duty for failing to act promptly to stop the massacre and detain those responsible. The armed forces also claimed to be investigating Maj. Hernán Orozco Castro, acting commander of the “Joaquín París Battalion, Maj. Horacio Galeano, and Capt. Luis Carlos López. In an interview, General Bonett told Human Rights Watch that General Uscátegui would not be promoted and that his career was over. However, Human Rights Watch subsequently learned that General Uscátegui was returned to active duty without any apparent punishment. It is also noteworthy that the army, which controls the San José airport, claimed that it had not registered the arrival of the ACCU’s chartered airplane despite a policy of registering every arriving plane and passenger, including Human Rights Watch representatives during a May 1997 visit.109

http://www.hrw.org/reports98/colombia/Colom989-04.htm

http://colombia.indymedia.org.nyud.net:8090/uploads/2009/07/49_asesinados_en_mapiripan.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_f_EHFh5U-4A/R64nA5YTOzI/AAAAAAAADY8/9rJ7bYUSBM4/s1600/Paramilitares.+Masacre-de-mapiripan%5B1%5D.gif
Dan Gardner • Chainsaws in Colombia

The victims were dragged into the town slaughterhouse. Amid chains and meat hooks, they were bound, suspended and interrogated. Where are the guerrillas? Are you a guerrilla? The men had machetes and chainsaws. Whatever the victims said, however they pleaded, they lost a hand. An arm. A leg. Finally, almost mercifully, they were decapitated.

By The Ottawa Citizen
July 20, 2007

The victims were dragged into the town slaughterhouse. Amid chains and meat hooks, they were bound, suspended and interrogated. Where are the guerrillas? Are you a guerrilla? The men had machetes and chainsaws. Whatever the victims said, however they pleaded, they lost a hand. An arm. A leg. Finally, almost mercifully, they were decapitated.

When Stephen Harper flew to Bogota earlier this week, the news stories mentioned "human rights concerns." They didn't say much more than that, which is a pity because in Colombia "human rights concerns" are not vague abstractions. They involve men who torture and murder with chainsaws: A few have been caught and punished; some have walked away whistling; and many are still at it.

Mr. Harper acknowledged that all is not well in Colombia, but he defended his decision to launch free trade talks. "We are not going to say fix all your social, political and human rights problems and only then will we engage in trade relations with you," the prime minister said. "That's ridiculous." That sounds pretty reasonable. But things get a little murkier when you know that growing evidence suggests the president whose hand Mr. Harper shook leads a government with deep connections to men who torture and murder with chainsaws.

The timing of Mr. Harper's trip was strangely apt. Almost precisely 10 years earlier -- on July 15, 1997 -- paramilitary thugs entered a village in the southeastern jungles of Colombia. What followed was a four-day orgy of rape, torture and murder that came to be known as the Mapiripan massacre. It is believed that 49 people died, although only three, headless, bodies were found. All the others were dismembered in the slaughterhouse and the body parts dumped in the Guaviare River.

Colombian history is riddled with massacres. But two things set Mapiripan apart.

One was the use of chainsaws. After Mapiripan, it became the paramilitaries' signature.

More:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/politics/story.html?id=f746a53a-adee-4953-9199-3e8f6a65f0d2

[Judi Lynn]

2. Why is this man crying?

Why is this man crying?



The man in the picture is retired general Jaime Uscátegui, one of the highest-ranking Colombian military officers ever to face indictment and a criminal trial (as opposed to a dropped investigation or a dismissal) for a human rights case. Uscátegui could get up to 40 years in jail if a Bogotá civilian court finds that he knew about, and did nothing to prevent, a grisly July 1997 paramilitary massacre in the hamlet of Mapiripán, deep inside FARC-controlled territory in south-central Colombia.

In this image from nearly two weeks ago, Uscátegui has just been asked for the name of the paramilitary leader who ordered the massacre. The general tearfully responds, “I’d rather my children have a father in jail than a father in a tomb.” Later, he indicated that the massacre’s mastermind was among three paramilitary leaders who, amid much controversy, addressed Colombia’s congress in July. Everyone understood this to mean Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC leader who has been a prominent presence in the current negotiations with the Colombian government, and who is accused of planning the massacre from a ranch in San Pedro de Urabá, hundreds of miles away from Mapiripán in Colombia’s far northwest.

That Mancuso may have coordinated Mapiripán is not exactly earth-shaking news. Far more interesting – especially to those of us whose government has donated billions to Colombia’s security forces – is the nature of the military-paramilitary cooperation that made it possible.

Uscátegui claims to know a lot about that relationship. In July 2003 recordings that were revealed last March in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio, Uscátegui threatened to tell all unless the high command helps to keep him out of jail.

If I go to court, it will be a much more serious case than number 8,000 (the term used for the mid-90s narco-money scandal that almost took down President Ernesto Samper). In fact, it will be more serious than everything that has happened in Colombia. With this issue I discovered what is really happening. It is very serious, very grave, because it proves an allegation that we have denied for all our lives, the one about the military’s links with paramilitaries. … It seems that in the attorney-general’s office, in the inspector-general’s office, in the presidency, they know that terrible things happened there, very grave things for the army and for the country. And that these things could even bring down Plan Colombia.

More:
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=50

(My emphasis.)

[Vidar]

3. Good for a start.

[Flaneur]

4. Nevermind this; I'm sure Chavez said something outrageous somewhere.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Death threats an everyday reality in Colombia, unionists say

Death threats an everyday reality in Colombia, unionists say
26 November 2009

Trade unionists in Colombia have expressed their commitment to stand up for labour rights in the face of persistent threats to their lives, delegates attending a seminar in the country heard last week.

The transport workers from Colombia highlighted the “fear factor” as the main obstacle to union organising at a SASK-sponsored ITF seminar in Bogotá from 17 – 19 November. Many delegates outlined their own personal experiences of threats to their lives or those of their families. As a result, workers were reluctant to join a union, they reported. Figures from the Colombian ITF-affiliated transport union Sindicato National de los Trabajadores del Transporte (SNTT) indicate that 2,600 unionists have been assassinated in the past eight years; Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Colombia, one of the key trade union centres, reports 4,800 murders over the past 23 years.

Esteban Barboza, president of SNTT explained: “We know many workers organising unions in other countries face victimisation, imprisonment and sometimes death, but in Colombia death threats against many trade union leaders are a constant reality. I too have been threatened by the paramilitaries and was forced to spend five months in exile in Spain as a result of my trade union activities.”

In a bid to defend labour rights, the unions stressed the importance of working to amalgamate the many small unions into national unions or federations. This they believed would help to build union power to combat problems facing workers, including the impact of privatisation, behind which lay, in many instances, corruption and violence.

http://www.itfglobal.org/news-online/index.cfm/newsdetail/3983?frmSessionLanguage=ENG

[Judi Lynn]

6. If you are concerned about the absolutely evil torture perpetrated in Colombia,

often by men who attended the School of the Americas for additional training, in Ft. Benning, Georgia, you may want to look at this information which amazingly was carried in Colombia's largest newspaper, El Tiempo.

"Colombia Searches for 10,000 Missing"
Investigation: El Tiempo, Bogota, Colombia
Photography Stephen Ferry / Alicia Patterson Foundation

http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF_Stories/Ferry/Ferry01/Missing.pdf

If you would wish to read more info. given by former death squad (paramilitary) member who was involved in massacres, Francisco Villalba, please take the time to look at post #3 by rabs, from an earlier thread. You may not find it easy to forget his story:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x14640



Former paramilitary, the late Francisco Villalba, man who testified
about what they had done to innocent Colombian citizens. He was
murdered after he gave his testimony.

Written by an editor at "El Tiempo" regarding the article they did on Colombian massacres:

~snip~
They Gave Quartering Classes

When we decided at El Tiempo to do a special report on the phenomenon of common graves a scene began to repeat itself in our newsroom: one by one, reporters coming back from the field, returned mortified.

Few discoveries have shaken us so deeply and few are as difficult to write about: from the scale of the horror, to the way they died, and by the insatiable pain of the families, as well as—perhaps most unsettling—realizing the magnitude of the work that remains to be done throughout the country. Will a significant number of the dead be unearthed and identified to alleviate their families? Will we be able to mourn, as we should, to prevent a third chapter of extreme violence from enrapturing Colombia?

Paramilitary testimonies and the results of forensic teams lead us to conclude that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary umbrella group, not only designed a method to quarter human beings, they also took the extra step of actually giving classes on the subject, using live people taken to their training camps.

Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary commander that directed the barbarism of the Aro massacre in the department (province) of Antioquia in which 15 people were tortured and butchered over five days, has revealed previously unknown details of those acts. “They were elderly people and were taken in trucks, alive, with their hands tied…. They were divvied up in groups of five … the instructions were to take off their arms, their heads … quartering them alive,” reads the testimony in his file.

More:
https://nacla.org/node/1467