Just got this from an important human rights group in Colombia, the ‘Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyer’s Collective’. Apparently on March 30, a ‘technical commission’ from the Attorney General’s office made what amounts to a raid on the Colombian Senate’s Human Rights offices. The ‘technical commission’ looked up information on individuals — basically activists, unionists, human rights defenders, very sensitive information about people under threat that you’d find in a government human rights office; and took the information on them away…
Remember that this is in a context where, under Uribe, thousands of people have been rounded up all over Colombia, most on quite bogus charges of ‘terrorism’. Remember too that this is a context where the government and paramilitary death squads work hand-in-hand; the real danger is that this information will fall into the hands of killers.
This is all doubly ironic for another reason. An article in the Colombian magazine CAMBIO presented a transcription of a recording of a Colombian general named Jaime Alberto Uscategui who reveals links between the army and paramilitaries and talks about the Mapiripan massacre. The recording talks about an archive of 300 documents that are in the general’s possession. He says that the pamphlets taken by the paramilitaries to Mapiripan, where they murdered peasants, were created on a computer at the Paris Battalion of the Colombian army. That same computer had documents on the paramilitary organization (AUC) pay schedules, the names of the entire Guaviare front of AUC…
Small wonder that very battalion, posted 8 kilometers from the massacre’s site, ‘failed to act’ when the massacre was underway.
THAT archive of documents is safely sealed away from public view. Meanwhile information on human rights defenders that could get them killed is raided by ‘technical commissions’ of the Fiscalia…
