FARC formally admits responsibility for victims of Colombia conflict

[Judi Lynn]

3. It has been known everywhere for ages the military and paramilitaries did the vast murdering.

Everyone knows it. Everyone also knows if they can get the FARC to jump through these hoops it's because the FARC really, really wants peace more than anything, even at the expense of lying to get it, if, indeed, the government does go ahead and honors the peace agreement.

Looking for a quick reference from material already posted here, found one very quickly which would supply already known and discussed information years ago:

From a post by tremendous DU poster, Say_What, on a thread by Arcos:

<clips>

The War on Human Rights in Colombia
Three Variations on a Theme from Uribe

By PHIILIP CRYAN

Bogota.

...His choice of the term "private justice groups" plays into an unfolding story, the historical dimensions of which make his attacks on NGOs look inconsequential. The Uribe administration proposed in August a peace deal with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country's largest federation of right-wing paramilitaries. If the proposal passes Colombia's Congress, AUC troops would give up their weapons and offer symbolic reparations (primarily in the form of cash payments and social work); in exchange, they would receive amnesties from the President and not be required to serve jail time. After ten years, their criminal records would be clean and they would be eligible to hold public office. Impunity would extend even to those leaders already convicted on multiple counts of crimes against humanity.

The proposal has been pilloried by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, European governments, dozens of NGOs, members of the U.S. Congress and numerous newspapers. Reuters, for example, posed the question of whether the government's "conditional freedom" offer for the paramilitaries amounts to "allowing some of Colombia's most feared criminals to literally get away with murder." The Chicago Tribune titled their house editorial on the matter "Colombia's pact with the devils." Human Rights Watch calls Uribe's proposal "the impunity law."

Colombian Senator Rafael Pardo, one of Uribe's most devoted allies until the law was proposed, commented to El Tiempo (Colombia's largest newspaper): "You turn in a farm and that compensates for a massacre?"

...Traveling in southern Colombia's conflict regions, I have heard countless stories of AUC massacres carried out with chainsaws and machetes--slow, public decapitations designed for their spectacular effects: as lessons to those watching. On two occasions I've been told of paramilitaries playing soccer with decapitated heads. In some urban areas they institute a "social control" system: miniskirts for women and long hair for men are prohibited; adulterers are made to wear Scarlet Letter-like marks of shame and homosexuals are run out of town or executed. Anyone suspected of collaborating with guerrillas--anyone in a trade union, doing human rights work, or trying to be a serious journalist or priest or mayor would fall in this category--is murdered, often after prolonged torture. The paramilitaries tell civilians not to move or bury the cadavers of their victims: "leave the bodies to rot in public, so the dogs can get at them," they instruct. On a trip to the southern province of Putumayo--the region where U.S. military aid has been most focused over the first three years of Plan Colombia--last December, I happened to arrive in the city of Mocoa the same day that the bodies of Giovanni and John, two brothers killed by the AUC, were discovered by their mother, who was just returning from a vacation. There were no bullet-wounds. The skin of their faces had been disintegrated by some kind of acid, likely applied while they were still alive.

...Yet "there is 98% impunity" for paramilitary actions, according to a government human rights official from another Putumayo city. "The police refuse to collaborate ." "The military and paramilitaries play volleyball and soccer together," says another civilian government official. Within a day of arriving in a Putumayo city, one can find out--even as an outsider--where the paramilitaries live, their names and ranks, even their military specialties. Whenever asked about collusion, however, military and police officers provide an unvarying response: "Prove it." "We can't act without evidence, without an official complaint being filed," a military commander recently told me. The military insists that civilians' claims of regular paramilitary killings are greatly exaggerated and deny outright the presence of paramilitaries in many cities they in fact control. This just to take one region of Colombia as an example.

The history of military-paramilitary collusion in Colombia is a long one--and it is within this history, finally, that Uribe's amnesty proposal (and other recent offensives against human rights and international humanitarian law) must be understood. This history, in turn, cannot be understood without analysis of the U.S. government's role in Colombia.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cryan10112003.html

http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2692204

For years and years, the human rights organizations have all claimed it has been the combination of military and paramilitaries which has provided "the lion's share" of the murders, deaths, atrocities in Colombia. It had never been a secret among the sane people of the world. It has been named as more than 90% of the deaths. Everyone knows that. Nothing any right-wing liars can say will convince anyone otherwise who already knows the truth. Nothing! They only need to do the research needed to learn for themselves.

Much more worth taking a long, hard squint on the thread, and there is a ton of material already discussed right here at D.U., a place for progressives.

Right-wingers should already know this is NOT the place for them. No room for right-wing yammering here.

Try Discussionist.