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* At the protest last year, Colombian TV journalist, Richard Velez, described how he was beaten in1996 by military troops under the command of an SOA graduate. "I saw soldiers, shooting their rifles (at demonstrating workers) and as they passed in front of me, they began to beat me with the butts of their weapons and tips of their boots. I held tight to my camera, still running, until the blow from a rifle butt broke the camera gear.I gave a colleague the tape and that night everyone saw those images while I recovered in a hospital with a perforated liver and testicles destroyed by the blows. One year later I sought political asylum in the United States due to threats." Richard Velez describing 1996 incident involving troops commanded by an SOA graduate
* Paramilitaries committed 78% of violations in 1999. The army, though directly responsible for fewer violations, has extensive links with paramilitary forces at a local and regional level. Some army officers facilitate the work of paramilitaries or look the other way as violence occurs.
Colombia has sent more troops to train at the SOA than any other Latin American country, with chilling results. The 1993 human rights report State Terrorism in Colombia cites 247 Colombian officers for human rights violations. Fully one half of those cited were SOA graduates. Some were even featured as SOA guest speakers or instructors or included in the "Hall of Fame" after their involvement in such crimes. For example, Gen. Farouk Yanine Diaz was a guest speaker at the School in 1990 and 1991 after his involvement in the 1988 Uraba massacre of 20 banana workers, the assassination of the mayor of Sabana de Torres, and the massacre of 19 businessmen. According to a U.S. State Department Report, he was also accused of "establishing and expanding paramilitary death squads, as well as ordering dozens of disappearances, and the killing of judges and court personnel sent to investigate previous crimes."
* SOA graduates have been linked to some of Colombia's most heinous massacres, including the 1988 massacre in Segovia in which 43 people were killed, the Trujillo chainsaw massacres, which took place between 1988 and 1991, and the 1993 Riofrio massacre. In one instance, the Colombian legislature asserted that a military officer was sent to the SOA to avoid having to answer questions about the Fusagauga massacre of a peasant family.
* A 1998 U.S. State Department Report on Colombia states that the 20th military brigade was disbanded for its involvement in human rights abuses, including the targeted killing of civilians. The commander of that brigade was SOA graduate Paucelino Latorre Gamboa. The report also links SOA graduates to an illegal raid on the offices of a non-governmental human rights group, and implicates an SOA graduate for his complicity in a 1997 massacre. More recently, Colombian General Rito Alejo del Rio was dismissed in April 1999 for allegedly fomenting paramilitary violence.
* Despite a 17-fold increase in US drug war spending since 1980, illicit drugs are now cheaper, more potent and more easily available than when the "war on drugs" began.
from www.soaw.org (SOA Watch website)
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