by CYRIL MYCHALEJKO
White House Drug Policy Director Richard Gil Kerlikowske, while meeting with Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón in Bogotá on January 18, said that Colombia “serves as a beacon of hope for other nations struggling with the threat to democracy posed by drug trafficking and related crime.”
A Beacon of Hope?
Kerlikowske’s deceptively rosy assessment of Colombia and the effectiveness of Plan Colombia is severely undermined by the facts on the ground.
Earlier this month, Colombian military judge Alexander Cortes and his family were granted asylum by Switzerland. They were forced to flee the country after receiving death threats as a result of Cortes’s ruling that the Colombian Army had been guilty of 55 instances of “false-positives”, during which soldiers killed innocent young men and dressed them up as rebels in the military district of Urabá, Antioquia Department, in March of 2007.
A February 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá released by WikiLeaks last year revealed that, despite thousands of extrajudicial murders committed by soldiers in the ‘false-positives scandal’, Colombian Army Inspector General Maj. Gen. Carlos Suarez, in charge of investigating the scandal, told an embassy official that then-President Álvaro Uribe continued “to view military success in terms of kills.” In addition, military policy rewarded soldiers with “bonuses, promotions and vacation days.” According to Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) annual human rights report released on Monday, “As of May 2010, the Attorney General’s Office was investigating 1,366 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings committed by state agents involving more than 2,300 victims. There have only been convictions in 63 cases.”
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