Torture widespread in Columbia — Amnesty

Press, 23 September 1980, Page 8

Torture widespread in Columbia — Amnesty

NZPA London The British-based humanrights group, Amnesty International, has said that it has sent the Colombian Government a list of 35 military centres in Colombia where political prisoners have been tortured. . The Nobel Prizewinning human-rights body charged that systematic methods of torture included rape, neardrownings, electric shock, drugs, burnings, and beatings. ? “A quasi-permanent. state of siege, in effect in Colombia almost continuously for 30 years, together with the nation’s special security laws, facilitated widespread ■violations of human rights,” it said in releasing a report by .an Amnesty International mission which visited the country early this year and which included a doctor who examined some of the torture victims.

The victims were peasants, Indians, and trade unionists in particular. But doctors, * lawyers, and “others who tried to uphold professional codes of conduct” were also seized and tortured, Amnesty said. Twenty-seven of _ the examples of torture cited in the report to the Colombian Government were accounts given by the victims to the Amnesty International doctor who was able to examine them. In most of these cases, he concluded “there was clear evidence that the alleged torture had in fact taken place,” the report said. The. 258-page report cited 600 individual cases of arbitrary arrest or torture. It said that peasants in zones' under military control were “subjected to rigorous control of their entire private, and social lives” in an “atmosphere of permanent

threat and terror” with' “continual searches, detention and use of torture, and the highly arbitrary manner in which trials are eventually conducted.” Indian areas were subject not only to the abuses of soldiers, but to those of armed men called “pajaros” “who serve as a kind of private police for landowners and who are said to be responsible for a large number of killings,” the report said. It stated that a number of Indian leaders officially held on criminal charges, were in fact imprisoned for taking part in the Indians’ Indigenous Council and for defending the Indian position in land disputes. The report said authorities tended “to equate the legitimate activities of trade unions with various forms of subversion : .or: disturbance of public order’’ and to presume a link with'Colombia’s armed revolutionary groups.