A new and long-awaited report on civilian killings by the Colombian military from 2002 to 2010 argues convincingly that the spike of state violence during those years grew directly from the policies of “Democratic Security” that attempted to militarize all Colombian society. The study was produced by the Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Observatory of the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination (known by its acronym in Spanish, CCEEU), a coalition of more than 200 Colombian human rights organizations and their counterparts in Europe and the US. The coalition has painstakingly compiled records of 3,512 reported extrajudicial killings by security forces from 2002 to 2010, during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. CCEEU claims that a majority of these civilian killings were “false positives”—victims of state forces’ fictitious claims of combat.
Photo: Fellowship of Reconciliation
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