MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Human Rights Watch blasts Colombia and US

Colombia, the largest recipient of United States aid in the Western Hemisphere, “presents the most serious human rights and humanitarian situation” in Latin America, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2006.

HRW identifies Colombia as second only to Sudan in the number of internally displaced people, saying that more than 3 million people have been forced from their homes in the last three years by Colombia's decades-old civil armed conflict.

The watchdog group's report on Colombia also addresses President Alvaro Uribe's peace talks with the AUC right wing militias, which are in the process of demobilizing under the terms of the Justice and Peace Bill, enacted last summer.

Among other concessions, the measure provides that paramilitaries who lay down their arms will serve no more than eight years in jail, regardless of the severity of the offenses. The law, according to HRW, "fails to include effective mechanisms to dismantle the country's mafia-like armed groups, which are largely financed through drug trafficking. It also utterly fails to satisfy international standards on truth, justice, and reparation for victims".

The New York-based organization said that armed irregulars of left and right were "responsible for the bulk of the human rights violations" in Colombia in 2005, including massacres, killings, forced disappearances, kidnappings, torture, and extortion.

At the same time, the report highlights the involvement of military personnel in human rights abuses and said that the Uribe administration "has yet to take credible action to break" persistent links between some armed forces units and the paramilitary.

As to Colombia's largest insurgency (in the EU terrorist group list), HRW said that after an extended lull in armed activity, "guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) once again increased their level of violent activity in 2005. FARC attacks on government forces were accompanied by numerous and serious abuses, including massacres of civilians and targeted killings".

HRW researchers likewise decried frequent threats and attacks on human rights observers, journalists and others involved in highlighting abuses. The group reported that at least one in every four irregular combatants in Colombia is a minor, including several thousand under the age of 15.

HRW said the FARC and a smaller leftist band, the ELN, account for 80% of the underage fighters, with the rest linked to the militias.

"The United States remains the most influential foreign actor in Colombia" HRW said stressing that Washington provided almost 800 million US dollars to the Uribe administration in 2005, mainly in the form of military aid. Colombia trails only Israel and Egypt as a major recipient of U.S. aid.