On Tuesday, the Colombian Congress ratified United Nations' 2006 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
"Forced Disappearance" implies the kidnapping, torture, murder, and cover up by a state or sub-state organization, like the army, paramilitaries, or guerrillas.
Colombia has the most cases of disappeared persons in the world, with over 27,000 official registered cases. Even at the epoch of the Pinochet regime's brutality in Chile, often offered as a paragon of authoritarian brutality in Latin American,only 1,987 people were 'disappeared' .
Scholar Willian Aviles argues that between the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, the latter are much more vicious perpetrators of human rights violations. They act with tacit state approval and are enabled to eliminate alleged subversives, usually left wing activists,trade unionists, and demobilized guerrillas, while the army turns a blind eye.
The Democratic Security Strategy of former president Alvaro Uribe has been extended by the Santos administration. This policies prioritizes the military defeat of the FARC over a negotiated peace deal. This militarized approach continues to justify the existence of the neo-paramilitaries, who reappeared after the demobilization process of 2003 and often had ties with the drug trade.
While the Colombian state has recently charged and convicted criminal army officers involved in a "False Positives" case, more needs to be done to effectively demobilize these new paramilitaries if the conflict in Colombia can ever be brought to an end. The Colombian state needs to withdraw its support for the paramilitaries, tacit or otherwise, if ever it is to monopolize the legitimate use of violence within its territory and bring and end to the guerrilla and drug conflicts.
The Colombia Reports article can be found here:
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