Take Action for Colombia

At the end of July, the State Department again certified that the Colombian military has been meeting the basic benchmarks set forth by Congress on respecting human rights and breaking ties to paramilitaries.

While progress has indeed been made in a few high-profile human rights cases, and some important arrests have been made, the sad truth is that the Colombian military continues to commit human rights abuses with near total impunity.

The Latin American Working Group (LAWG) is asking people to send a simple, but strong, message to the State Department - wrong decision, wrong time, wrong message.
Click here for an on-line form to take action and make sure your voice is heard!

A big human rights concern that we have seen in our work is extrajudicial killings by the Colombian military. We wrote in an earlier blog post about this phenomena, and The LA Times recently published an updated story on these illegal killings by the military which are common (329 last year), but rarely result in prosecutions, or even thorough investigations of the soldiers involved. There are also some photos on the CPT website from a recent accompaniment CPT did to support the investigation of one of these extrajudicial killings.