31.05.2002 (By Alfredo Castro, ANNCOL Bogotá) The human rights group Amnesty International blames the army and their paramilitary allies for abusing thousands of civilians in their recently released assessment of the situation in Colombia. According to the new document "Paramilitary groups acting with the active or tacit support of the security forces were responsible for the vast majority of extrajudicial executions and 'disappearances' [and] many of their victims were tortured before being killed."

The report goes on to say that "hundreds of massacres, the majority by army-backed paramilitaries, were reported in different parts of the country and over 300,000 civilians were forcibly displaced" while there was also "direct security force complicity in human rights violations."

Amnesty says that high ranking military officers were implicated in paramilitary death squad activity and that impunity remained so widespread that even though "no decisive effort was made to arrest national paramilitary leaders" those low ranking paramilitaries that were detained "were reportedly released or escaped from security force bases."

According to Colombian human rights organisations these detentions of alleged paramilitary members are all part of a public relations offensive by the Colombian government to imply a crack down on the death squads. Amnesty appeared to confirm this view by noting that those cases in which any arrests at all actually took place were extremely rare "exceptions".

The report gives numerous examples of the joint operations between the death squads and the Colombian security forces including the assassination of Sister Yolanda Ceron, the director of a human rights organisation linked to the Catholic Church, and the attempted assassination of senior trade union leader Wilson Borja.

Amnesty also provides several specific cases of the alliance in the rural departments of Cauca and Nariño in southern Colombia. In Nariño "paramilitary forces managed to establish several bases in the region, despite the heavy presence of the armed forces, and carried out a series of incursions into several communities unhindered" while in Cauca there was a massacre of civilians "by paramilitaries who were able to enter the region despite the heavy presence of the III Brigade of the Colombian Army and despite repeated warnings, including precautionary measures issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, to the authorities of an imminent paramilitary incursion."

With regards to US military aid and 'Plan Colombia' the report says that this "was contributing to the escalating human rights crisis" and that "paramilitary activity intensified in several regions where… US-funded units were operating." It went on to say that at least 15,000 people have been displaced in the department of Putumayo alone as a result of Plan Colombia.

Amnesty also states that recent Colombian government legislation "threatened to strengthen the impunity of members of the security forces implicated in human rights violations".