Bush Administration Fails to Acknowledge Existence of New Paramilitary Groups in Colombia

[Joanne98]

The US State Department released its annual human rights report last week and one of its implications with regard to Colombia is particularly startling: There are no new paramilitary groups in Colombia! The politicization of the latest edition of the report is most apparent in its de-politicization of Colombia’s new armed groups by denying that they are actually “paramilitary groups.” This is a political strategy on the part of the Bush administration that allows it to blame virtually all of Colombia’s political violence on the guerrillas and makes it easier to refute allegations of links between the Colombian military and paramilitaries—after all, there can be no such links if the paramilitaries do not exist.

The US State Department’s annual human rights report does not refer to Colombia’s new paramilitary groups as “paramilitaries,” but rather as “illegal” or “criminal” groups. The report states that the last United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) bloc demobilized in August 2006 and suggests that the only remaining paramilitaries in Colombia are those individual members of the AUC that refused to demobilize. This strategy seeks to legitimize the Colombian government’s demobilization process by implying that, besides a handful of AUC holdouts, there are no longer any paramilitaries in Colombia.

In reality, there is a wealth of evidence showing that there are dozens of new paramilitary groups waging a dirty war in Colombia. Numerous human rights groups have shown that new paramilitary groups operating under names such as the New Generation or the Black Eagles do indeed exist and that they are responsible for a significant percentage of the country’s political violence. In 2006, the Colombian NGO Indepaz reported that 43 new paramilitary groups totaling almost 4,000 fighters had been formed in 23 of the country’s 32 departments. Last year, the OAS estimated that there were 20 new paramilitary groups with 3,000 fighters operating in Colombia. According to Alirio Uribe, a leading Colombian human rights lawyer with the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective:

There are forty-three new paramilitary groups but, according to the Ministry of Defense, these new paramilitary groups have nothing to do with the old ones. But the truth is, they are the same. Before they were the AUC, now they are called the New Generation AUC. They have the same collusion with the army and the police. It is a farce.
http://colombiajournal.org/colombia279.htm

[Doctor_J]

1. Many of them are probably in our employ

:shrug: