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June 22, 2009
Relocation Updates and the UN's Take on 'False Positives'
Saturday's relocation, from what I saw, went very smoothly. I was really only in Moravia for less than an hour, standing alongside some project coordinators in an unpaved, smelly intersection watching families load their belongings onto city administration trucks. From what I saw, they were happy and eager to leave.
We then left Moravia and went to Pajarito, an area far up on a hill above Comuna 13 and Robledo, a neighboring sector. The area is home to a school, a hospital, a police station and at least forty public housing buildings, some built under Fajardo and some under Salazar.
There are obvious problems with the living situation there. Pajarito is somewhat close to the last MetroCable station in Comuna 13, but it must be at least a 15 minute walk. The station itself is very very far from the city. There are virtually no commercial establishments in the area, at least not yet. People living there are used to having everything they need in their neighborhood: family, friends, stores, transportation, etc.
Further, many of the buidlings have some plubming and sewage problems and, despite being only months old, have smelly puddles in hte hallways. My understanding is that the criminal violence that plagues Moravia and Comuna 13 is becoming a larger problem in Pajarito as well.
Nevertheless, once we saw the families arriving, I realized what a great project this was. Nearly every family was in disbelief: they could not belive that the city was simply giving them such a respectable apartment. All the arriving families, for now, seemed ecstatic and extremely thankful.
In other news, I just read an interesting article on the 'false positives' scandal I've mentioned a few times in this blog.
The UN sent an official, Philip Alston, to investigate the issue last week, and Semana, a Colombian news magazine, recently published an analysis of his investigation. Basically, Alston's report has three fundamental points:
First, the term 'false positives' does not accurately and fairly describe the scale and brutality of the scandal. According to Alston, the term sounds technical. Instead, he implied, the scandal should be understood as large-scale cold blooded murder of innocent civilians by government security forces for political and financial gain.
Second, he found that the family members of false positive victims face persistent harrassment and even death threats, presumably by security forces. Indeed, while the state has been murdering civilians for many years, virtually nobody spoke out against security forces until very recently.
Third, he found that the false positives were not simply isolated cases or 'bad apples' in the military. Instead, Alston found that such murders were carried out more or less systematically by many members of the military with implicit and explicit encouragement from the state.
For more UN views on Colombia, check out the following quotation and link from ColombiaReports:
Christian Salazar, who has just started as director of the UNHCR in Colombia, said extra judicial execution committed by the army, illegal wire-tappings, forced displacements and paramilitary violence are of primary concern to his office.
He said that Colombia was "divided and polarized" over key issues such as peace and human rights.
The Colombian government is at odds with NGOs over the country's human rights record.
Prosecution investigators have revealed that Colombia's intelligence service DAS was wiretapping Latin America director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), José Miguel Vivanco.
Vivanco has clashed regularly with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe about human rights violations in Colombia. Uribe has accused the HRW executive of being a FARC ally.
from: http://www.colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/4663-un-concerned-over-polarization-in-colombia.html
Posted by Pablo Rojas at June 22, 2009 01:04 PM
