Posted on Thursday, 02.04.10
Paramilitaries, successors still terrorizing Colombia
A reemergence of the paramilitaries, and their successors, are terrorizing Colombia anew.
By SIBYLLA BRODZINSKY
Special to The Miami Herald
BOGOTA -- For some human rights activists, the new face of violence in Colombia comes with a familiar mask.
While a female activist was providing assistance to a woman victim of the paramilitaries at the victim's home in Antioquia, five men wearing balaclavas broke into the house, raped both women and warned the rights defender to stop doing human rights work.
The men who attacked them -- the rights worker feared having her name used -- were members of what Human Rights Watch calls the ``successor groups'' to Colombia's long-feared right-wing paramilitary groups, most of which demobilized under a deal with the government of President Alvaro Uribe.
In a new report released here Wednesday, called Paramilitaries Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia, the U.S.-based NGO said the successor groups pose a growing threat to human rights and security in Colombia.
6 MAIN GROUPS
By the most conservative estimates, the new groups have at least 4,000 members who regularly commit massacres, killings, and forcibly displace individuals and entire communities. And as their ranks have swelled, the groups have consolidated into six main organizations and are present in 24 of Colombia's 32 provinces.
The groups are committing ``egregious abuses and terrorizing the civilian population in ways all too reminiscent of the AUC,'' the report said referring to the federation of paramilitary groups called the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that demobilized more than 30,000 men between 2003 and 2006.
Defense Minister Gabriel Silva blasted the HRW report, saying it ``did not recognize at all the commitment of security forces in their fight against these criminal groups.''
The new independent groups are known as ``neo-paramilitaries'' groups, gangs, emerging groups or simply paramilitaries, but the government generally refers to them as Bacrim, short for criminal bands.
``Whatever you call these groups, their impact on human rights in Colombia today should not be minimized,'' said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. ``Like the paramilitaries, these successor groups are committing horrific atrocities, and they need to be stopped.''
Local human rights groups and conflict analysts have raised the alarm over the heirs to the paramilitary militias.
The Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, a Bogotá-based think tank that tracks the evolution of Colombia's four-decade conflict, said in its yearly report that violent activity by these successor groups in 2009 topped those of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's main rebel group.
HOMICIDE RATE DOUBLES
In some areas like Medellín, where the homicide rate has nearly doubled in the past year, the groups' operations have resulted in a dramatic increase in violence. Murders jumped 108 percent in the city last year.That has led Uribe to propose a controversial plan to pay students the equivalent of $500 a month to act as informants on the new criminal bands that are fighting for control of the city.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/04/1461762/paramilitaries-successors-still.html#ixzz0oz3et0zJ