First jail sentence for environmental crime in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

First jail sentence for environmental crime in Colombia
Irish Sun
Sunday 12th December, 2010
(IANS)

A peasant who took his cows to a national park of snowcapped mountains in western Colombia was sentenced to 32 months in prison, the first jail sentence to be handed down here for an environmental crime, a media report said.

The decision was taken by a criminal court in Manizales as part of a process promoted by the Management of Natural National Parks, the daily El Tiempo said, identifying the farmworker as Gilberto Ruiz Pachon.

Ruiz was charged with grazing 31 cows in the Alfombrales area of Los Nevados Park, a Andean natural reserve spanning the shared borders of the provinces of Caldas, Quindio and Tolima.

According to the daily, 'the animals destroyed the vegetation, contaminated the water and damaged the soil in a part of this protected area'.

More:
http://story.irishsun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/2411cd3571b4f088/id/718554/cs/1/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Speaking of contamination, what's worse than run-off from mass graves poisoning the water?

Colombian Mass Grave Of More Than 2000 May Be Civilian Trade Unionists, Not Military Casualties
Colombia is currently the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, and the U.S. is likely implicated in the murders.

August 5, 2010 | If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.

According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.

“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.

The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/world/147728/colombian_mass_grave_of_more_than_2000_may_be_civilian_trade_unionists,_not_military_casualties