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Human Rights Developments Defending Human Rights The Role of the International Community Defending human rights remained a dangerous profession in Colombia. In the first nine months of 1998, at least six human rights defenders were murdered, among them government investigators, officials charged with investigating complaints about rights abuses. Among the most dangerous departments for human rights work was Antioquia. On February 27, 1998, three assassins gunned down human rights lawyer Jesús María Valle Jaramillo, president of the Héctor Abad Gómez Permanent Committee for Human Rights in Antioquia, in his Medellín office. He was the fourth president of the committee killed since 1987. As of this writing, two men with links to the AUC were under arrest in connection with the murder. Less than two months after Valles murder, three assassins killed human rights lawyer Eduardo Umaña in his Bogotá apartment. Umañas murder came only a short time after the U.N. passed a declaration supporting the work of human rights defenders in Colombia. During a strike of state employees on October 19, Jorge Ortega, vice-president of one of Colombias largest unions and a human rights defender, was killed. Ortega had been the target of many death threats and had made a final request for government protection the day before his murder. Nevertheless, the government had delayed providing him with a bodyguard, and Ortega was alone when he was shot by a gunman outside his Bogotá apartment. The Colombian armys Twentieth Brigade continued threatening human rights defenders until shortly before the unit was suspended and later reorganized and renamed the Military Intelligence Center (Centro de Inteligencia Militar, CIME). After Human Rights Watch stated, correctly, that government investigators believed the killings of Valle and Umaña may have been linked to the Twentieth Brigade, the army commander singled out the Human Rights Watch director for the Americas for attack as an enemy of Colombia. When a retired general and former defense minister was assassinated in Santafé de Bogotá the next day, May 12, 1998, the army again accused Human Rights Watch, this time of engaging in a campaign of defamation and calumny against the military forces that led to the assassination. Subsequently, the Twentieth Brigade supplied fraudulent information to the Attorney Generals Office linking the crime to Justice and Peace, a respected human rights group. On May 13, soldiers seized the groups offices. Soldiers concentrated their search on the office of Nunca Más, a research project sponsored by Justice and Peace that documents crimes against humanity. Soldiers forced employees to kneel at gunpoint, in order, they claimed, to take their pictures, an act more likely intended to inspire terror and evoke a summary execution. During the search, soldiers addressed employees as guerrillas and filmed them and documents in the office. At one point, soldiers told the employees they wanted precise details of the office in order to later construct a scale model, apparently to plan further incursions. Soldiers also set up a camera to film human rights defenders gathered outside to show concern. The governments own investigators also were targeted. In September, judicial investigators Edilbrando Roa López and Jhon Alejandro Morales Patiño, assigned to the Attorney Generals Human Rights Unit to investigate a series of massacres linked to paramilitaries in Sonsón, Antioquia, were abducted at a roadblock and later murdered. After the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney Generals Office issued arrest warrants for Carlos Castaño and his elder brother, Fidel, as the alleged intellectual authors of the 1997 killings of CINEP employees Mario Calderón and Elsa Alvarado and her father, Carlos Alvarado, the unit received death threats from Castaño. Four of the suspected gunmen were under arrest. In July, the Santander and Southern Cesar Self-Defense Group circulated a threat naming Osiris Bayther, president of the Regional Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (Comité Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, CREDHOS), a Colombian human rights group that covers the Middle Magdalena region, and Heriberto Hernández, president of the Oil Workers Union (Unión Sindical Obrera, USO) as military targets for allegedly working in coordination with guerrillas. Also threatened was Father Javier Giraldo, the director of Justice and Peace and a long-time advocate for an end to impunity for the security forces. In the wake of the Valle and Umaña murders, the Samper administration allocated almost U.S. $1 million in emergency funds to protect threatened human rights defenders with bullet proof glass, security cameras, and reinforced office doors, measures recommended by the National Police. In addition, the Internal Affairs office (the government agency that investigates reports of official misconduct) had agreed to review government intelligence files in order to purge them of information criminalizing legitimate human rights work. However, as of this writing, not a single measure had been taken and the head of Internal Affairs had yet to begin a review of intelligence files. |
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