Reply #11: How many Americans have known the Colombian soldiers often frame the peasants they kill? [View All]

COLOMBIA: The ‘Other’ Death Penalty
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Oct 12 (IPS) - "It was you yourselves who killed my daddy," snapped the 12-year-old campesino girl before walking away, leaving the soldier talking to himself. He had just entered the family’s small farmhouse in southern Colombia while the rest of the troops waited outside, and asked after "the owner."

The incident, which occurred in the last week of September, left the girl’s mother full of fear. Martha Liliana González, 35, was out back tending to the livestock when the soldier showed up and talked to her daughter.

"Since I told them I'm going to press charges, I'm scared that someone will kill me. I don't know if I should go back to the farm," González told IPS in Bogota, where she attended the presentation Wednesday of the preliminary report on extrajudicial executions and impunity in Colombia by an international mission of human rights observers.

"You people are very impudent. You don't even care if you kill him," González had said to an officer by the name of Arévalo, who she believes was a lieutenant, when she still thought her husband was being held alive by the army after he was seized on Sept. 13.

Because "that's what they do when they go to the rural villages. They kill a campesino (peasant farmer), put a grenade and a gun in his hand and say he was a guerrilla fighter, and that’s it, he’s passed off as a guerrilla, and that's how things remain, since we re too afraid to speak out…," she said.
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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39635

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Anyone who spends the time researching will realize this topic surfaces again, and again, and again. U.S. taxpayers' money is being sent in huge chunks to Colombia yearly, now, as Colombia has become the third largest recipient of foreign aid, almost ALL of it going to the military effort against the Colombian rebels.