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TITLE: COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES, 1994
AUTHOR: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
DATE: FEBRUARY 1995

                            COLOMBIA


Colombia is a constitutional, multiparty democracy in which the
Liberal and Conservative parties have long dominated the
political scene.  Relatively peaceful national congressional
and presidential elections were held in June with the Liberal
Party candidate, Ernesto Samper, winning the Presidency by a
very slight margin in a runoff election against Conservative
Party contender Andres Pastrana.

Internal security is the primary responsibility of the Ministry
of Defense, which in addition to the armed forces, includes the
National Police.  The Department of Administrative Security,
which is responsible for national security intelligence,
reports directly to the President.  The police and the armed
forces remained responsible for widespread human rights abuse.

Colombia has a mixed private/public sector economy.  The
Government continued an economic liberalization program and the
privatization of selected public industries.  Crude petroleum
rivals coffee as the principal export and, after the August
discovery of immense natural gas reserves, petroleum and gas
exports will play an even greater role.  Narcotics traffickers
continued to control extensive illicit and licit enterprises.

For 35 of the past 43 years, the Government has operated under
declared states of emergency which enable the executive to rule
by "temporary" decree to deal with civil unrest associated with
the high degree of internal violence.  These decrees frequently
set aside fundamental judicial guarantees of due process and
sometimes have been incorporated into permanent law by
subsequent legislative action.  Several violent guerrilla
organizations continued to operate, despite regular attempts to
negotiate settlements.  Military cooperation with narcotics and
landowner paramilitary groups in remote regions of the country
continued.  The Government continued to allow the military to
assert jurisdiction over, and in almost all cases to fail to
prosecute, abuses by military personnel.  This rampant impunity
from justice underlies Colombia's human rights problems; 97
percent of all crimes go unpunished.

The overall human rights situation in Colombia remained
critical, with a variety of violent actors--including the
police and security forces--continuing to commit abuses such as
political and extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture,
and other physical mistreatment.  In addition to official
forces, other perpetrators of human rights abuses include
antigovernment guerrilla groups, narcotics traffickers, and
paramilitary groups.  While violence by narcotics traffickers
was drastically reduced from previous years, internecine
violence among the trafficking organizations still accounted
for substantial numbers of homicides, kidnapings, cases of
torture, and attacks against the military and the police.
Guerrillas and narcotics traffickers continued to work
cooperatively, especially in rural regions of the country.  The
victims of these abuses most commonly included politicians,
labor organizers, human rights monitors,and--overwhelmingly--
peasant farmers.  Violence directed against women and children
also remained commonplace.  Vigilante groups, often supported
or condoned by the police and military, engaged in "social
cleansing"--the killing of street children, prostitutes,
homosexuals, and others deemed socially undesirable.

The human rights situation dominated much of the new
administration's agenda during its first few months in office.
President Samper created a ministerial-level Human Rights
Commission in August, and his Government revived a military
justice reform commission intended to address the question of
impunity for police and military violators.  The Government
reopened investigations into several important human rights
cases and brought charges against policemen in another case.
At year's end, however, despite positive actions by the new
Minister of Defense, the Government had yet to establish
effective judicial control over military abusers of human
rights and thereby begin to end the long reign of impunity.

RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Section 1  Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including
           Freedom from:

     a.  Political and Other Extrajudicial Killing

The total number of murders in Colombia appeared to decline
slightly during the first quarter of 1994; however, it remained
cause for grave concern.  According to a report by the
Government's Department of Planning, between 1987 and 1992
there were 77 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, by far the
highest murder rate in the world.  Due to insufficient police
and judicial resources to investigate and prosecute most
killings and the frequently overlapping violent forces at work
in the country, it is often difficult to separate political
from nonpolitical murders.  According to the Bogota-based
nongovernmental organization (NGO) "Justice and Peace", there
were 1,268 political and presumably politically motivated
murders between January and September.  The Andean Commission
of Jurists (CAJSC) estimated that in approximately 77 percent
of all reported violent deaths from March 1993 to March 1994,
no perpetrator could be established.  Ten candidates for
political office were assassinated before the October 30 local
elections.

The police and military forces continued to be implicated in
cases of extrajudicial killings in 1994.  Members of the army's
Tarqui battalion in Sogamoso attacked a civilian home with a
grenade in an attempt to kill local community organizer Paulino
Velandia.  Velandia survived the attack, which killed two
others and injured two children.  The Procuraduria investigated
the incident, and a separate military criminal investigation
was also under way.  No motive was given for the attack.  The
authorities brought one officer in question before a court-
martial, but it had made no ruling by the end of the year.

In January members of the General Gabriel Reveiz Pizarro
battalion based in Arauca department killed nine peasants from
the town of Puerto Lleras claiming that the attack occurred in
the context of a counterinsurgency sweep.  The Procuraduria
filed charges against nine officers and soldiers based on its
investigation that determined that the army sealed off the
town, illegally detained approximately 500 townspeople, read
off the nine names from a list, and summarily executed them as
suspected guerrilla collaborators.

According to the Procuraduria's annual human rights report that
covered the 1-year period preceding April 1994, the National
Police had the worst human rights record among state security
agencies.  The Procuraduria linked 80 percent of its
disciplinary decisions that involved violations of human rights
to police actions.  In June two off-duty Bogota policemen
stopped a bus on which they were traveling in order to
intervene in a street scuffle.  They fired indiscriminately
into the crowd, killing one person and forcing a 9-year-old
street vendor to board the bus with them.  One of the agents
then shot the child and threw the body out the window.  Taxi
drivers initially apprehended the agents; police and
Procuraduria investigators later determined that they were
inebriated at the time of the crime.  In December a court
sentenced one of the police officers involved in the killing to
60 years, or two maximum sentences.

Human rights monitors also implicated the police in incidents
of social cleansing, involving attacks and killings of
individuals deemed socially undesirable such as drug addicts,
prostitutes, transvestites, beggars, and street children.  The
Center for Investigations and Popular Research (CINEP) reported
that between January and October there were 291 homicides, 57
injuries, and 22 threats that it considered social cleansing.
This activity was particularly notable in Cali, where there
were persistent reports of murders of indigent youths on or
around construction sites.  According to the local human rights
ombudsman, 20 such murders occurred in Cali in just the first 2
months of the year.  In July a group of masked armed men gunned
down six individuals in a northern Medellin neighborhood
frequented by drug vendors and prostitutes.  The killers
arrived in a taxi, lined the victims up against a wall and
executed them gangland-style.  In this and other cases, human
rights groups persistently alleged implicit police cooperation
with the "clean-up squads."  The Government opened an
investigation, but it produced no leads by the end of the year.

Paramilitary groups also perpetrated scores of extrajudicial
killings in 1994, often with the alleged complicity of military
units or individuals.  Indigenous community and labor leaders
frequently were the victims of this violence.  In March unknown
gunmen murdered four Zenu Indian leaders in San Andres de
Sotavento in Cordoba department.  A new paramilitary group
"Colombia Without Guerrillas" (Colsingue) claimed
responsibility for the August assassination of Communist Party
Senator Manuel Vargas Cepeda and openly threatened other
members of the Patriotic Union (UP) Communist Party.  Although
most paramilitary killings go unresolved, in January police
arrested William Infante, the paramilitary assassin of UP
leader Jaime Pardo Leal in 1986.  Both the Gaviria and Samper
administrations regularly condemned extrajudicial killings, but
rarely punished police or military personnel implicated in such
cases.

Soldiers and police continued to be the victims of violence
perpetrated by drug traffickers, guerrillas, and common
criminals on a daily basis.  For example, Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas murdered army 4th Division
commander General Gil Colorado near Villavicencio in July.
Guerrillas also killed noncombatants on a regular basis and
assassinated several prominent politicians.  FARC operatives
executed the highly popular mayor of Fusagasuga after
guerrillas accidentally trapped him during an attack on a
highway toll station.  Operatives of the Army of National
Liberation (ELN) unsuccessfully attempted to kill the Treasury
Minister with a car bomb in Bogota in January.  There were
strong indications that urban operatives of the ELN
assassinated Senatorial candidate Francisco Alejandro Gonzalo
Jaramillo in Medellin in January and Antioquia Congressman
Arlem Uribe in September.

     b.  Disappearance

Colombia continued to suffer from extremely high overall rates
of disappearance and kidnaping.  According to a joint report by
the Government and a human rights group, there were a total of
1,378 reported kidnapings in 1994, an increase of 35 percent
over the previous year.  Given the complexity of the internal
disorder and the variety of perpetrators, both among the state
security forces and illegal groups involved in this conflict,
the disappearances for political motives and kidnaping for
profit is often unclear; guerrillas were responsible for
approximately half the cases.  There were rarely arrests or
prosecutions in any of the cases.

In October the Senate passed a bill which, while narrower than
the administration had wanted, codified the act of forced
disappearance as a crime.  However, in doing so, it stripped
from the bill a proposal to transfer jurisdiction in such cases
from military to civilian courts.  The Senate also deleted a
section which stipulated that such an act could never be
considered in the line of duty for police and military service
members.  In June President Gaviria had vetoed an earlier bill
which contained the additional provisions.  Many observers
perceived his veto as an administration concession to the
military high command, who claimed that such legislation would
provoke a rash of false accusations by the guerrillas against
military officials.  The Samper administration reiterated
objections to the proposed bill but attempted to address the
issue by proposing language that clearly stipulated that
service members were not obliged to obey illegal or immoral
orders, such as an order to make someone "disappear."  However,
this section was also deleted from the final bill.  At year's
end, the lower House had not passed the bill.

A CAJSC report highlighted the impunity that surrounds forced
disappearances in Colombia when it attributed at least 2,000
cases of forced disappearance in the last 15 years to state
security forces, yet recorded only 1 case of a military criminal
sanction for such activity.  The Office of the Defender of the
People received 110 reports of forced disappearances between
January and June.  In 234 such incidents for all of 1993, the
Procuraduria reported that the authorities brought only 2 sets
of charges.

In Cali disappearances perpetrated by state security members
and organized criminals reached epidemic proportions, according
to the local prosecutor's office, with an average of one
disappearance per day.  Many of these were women and children,
who according to the same source, often end up being forced to
work as prostitutes.

     c.  Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading
         Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits torture, but incidents of police and military
beatings and torture of detainees continued to be reported
throughout the year.  These abuses often occurred in connection
with illegal detentions in the context of counterinsurgency or
counternarcotics operations.  Paramilitary groups that operated
in rural areas of the country were also responsible for
instances of torture and sometimes took credit for their
macabre work with menacing notes left on the bodies of their
victims.  In many cases, however, it was difficult to establish
the perpetrators of torture since cadavers found bearing the
traces of physical torture were rarely subject to extensive
forensic investigations.

Justice and Peace reported an incident that occurred in June in
Barrancabermeja in which members of the Nueva Granada Battalion
detained the son of a local labor leader in an effort to exact
information about local guerrilla activity.  They tied the
person naked to a stake on an anthill, threatened him with rape
and then almost suffocated him with a plastic bag.  Military
officials originally denied holding the individual when family
members questioned them but later admitted to local human
rights officials that they had detained him.  Police also
allegedly tortured the same victim in January by electric
shocks and beatings during an interrogation.

Overcrowding and dangerous sanitary and health conditions in
the prisons remained a serious problem.  In May the Bureau of
Prisons, the Office of the Defender of the People, and the
Procuraduria established a pilot project in Bogota's La Picota
prison, convoking a prisoners' human rights committee to work
with prison and government authorities to address perceived
violations of basic human rights.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported
that it continued to have access to most prisons and police and
military detention centers.  However, it noted that local or
regional commanders did not always prepare mandatory detention
registers and follow notification procedures, resulting in a
poor accounting of actual detainees.

     d.  Arbitrary Arrest, Detention or Exile

The Constitution includes several mechanisms designed to
prevent illegal detention.  The authorities must bring a
detainee before a judge within 36 hours and the person has the
right to seek, before any judge, a petition of habeas corpus
that must be acted upon within 36 hours.  Despite these legal
protections, instances of arbitrary detention continued, and a
large percentage of the prison population remained in an
undetermined pretrial status.  The Procuraduria singled out the
police and others conducting the late-1993 search for narcotics
kingpin Pablo Escobar as having engaged in more arbitrary
detentions than previously believed and stated that the police
violated constitutional and procedural norms during this
operation.

Exile is not practiced.

     e.  Denial of Fair Public Trial

The Constitution specifically provides for the right to due
process.  The accused has the right to representation by
counsel, but historically representation for the indigenous and
the indigent has been inadequate.  The Government continues to
battle staffing and funding inadequacies to develop a credible
public defender system.

The judiciary remained overburdened and often in a state of
chaos during 1994.  The system is largely independent of the
executive and legislative branches, both in theory and
practice.  It continued to experience growing pains as the
various courts, prosecutorial entities, and ministries
attempted to define their roles and streamline their operations
in the wake of the judicial reorganization brought about under
the 1991 Constitution.  The judiciary has long been subject to
threats and intimidation when dealing with narcotics and
paramilitary cases.  With the decline in drug terrorism, there
was a corresponding drop in the incidence of attacks on members
of the judiciary, but this violence did not disappear
altogether.  In June unknown gunmen assassinated Luis Guillermo
Lopez, head of the Medellin prosecutor's office.  Several
months earlier, gunmen also murdered the director of that
office's technical investigative unit, Luis Fernando Correa.
The police suspect narcotics trafficking organizations are
involved in both incidents, which continued under investigation
at year's end.

The 1991 Constitution formalized the "regional" or "public
order" jurisdictions, in which anonymous judges and prosecutors
handle narcotics and terrorism cases.  Human rights groups
continued to charge that the system infringed on basic
procedural legal rights.

As in past years, the regional jurisdiction system continued to
be overwhelmed with staggering caseloads that it was unable to
process expeditiously.  In May President Gaviria invoked a
state of internal emergency in order to proscribe portions of
the Criminal Procedures Code that would have mandated the
release of many of the public order detainees whose cases had
not been processed.  The Constitutional Court, however, found
the President's action unconstitutional and struck down the
state of emergency, facilitating the release of many of these
suspects 1 month later.

While a late 1993 reform of the Criminal Procedures Code
addressed the lack of certain procedural rights within the
system, problems remained.  It is still extremely difficult for
defense attorneys to impeach or cross-examine anonymous
witnesses, and often they do not have unimpeded access to the
State's evidence.  Human rights groups also took exception with
the Government's surrender policy for major narcotics
traffickers which involved high-level voluntary surrender and
sentence negotiations.  These critics charged that "small-time"
defendants were, in effect, railroaded under the system while
powerful criminals were treated deferentially.  Critics also
charged that the vast majority of cases sent to the regional
jurisdiction involved low-level criminals suspected of
subversive activity, and that the system did not effectively
deter the major guerrilla leaders.  At year's end the Attorney
General began a review of plea-bargain agreements to ensure
that confessed criminals had actually committed the crimes and
that sentence reductions were related to genuine cooperation.

     f.  Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or
         Correspondence

The law generally requires a judicial order for authorities to
enter a private home, except in cases of hot pursuit.  In
remote regions of the country, the military forces have
civilian prosecutorial units delegated to them.  Human rights
groups charged that these delegate units were unconstitutional,
and Congress refused to grant them permanent status.
Nonetheless, there were credible reports that they continued to
function, often facilitating army searches with little regard
for judicious issuance of search warrants.  In one example, the
Nueva Granada battalion carried out over 60 searches and
detentions in the rural areas surrounding Barrancabermeja
between January and March.  Many of the detainees reported that
soldiers mistreated and unjustly interrogated them.

A judge must authorize telephone wiretaps and the interception
of mail.  This protection extends to prisoners incarcerated in
the penal system.

     g.  Use of Excessive Force and Violations of Humanitarian
         Law in Internal Conflicts

The internal subversive conflict received a good deal of
governmental attention in 1994.  Both the Gaviria and Samper
administrations urged the Congress to ratify Protocol II of the
Geneva Convention.  Although a Senate committee initially
expressed reservations as to its internal application, Congress
ratified it without reservations and President Samper signed it
into law on December 16.

The military forces, paramilitary groups, and particularly
guerrilla organizations committed violations of international
humanitarian law in Colombia's internal subversive conflict.

In April members of the army's 2nd Mobile Brigade conducted a
counterinsurgency operation near Barrancabermeja during which
they allegedly took a local youth, Benjamin Santos, from his
home in the Mesa de San Rafael.  Local witnesses later reported
seeing him dressed in an army uniform being marched with a
patrol in the area.  Shortly thereafter his body, showing signs
of extreme torture, was found in a local cemetery.  Military
sources claimed he was an unidentified guerrilla slain in
combat.  Santos' family members reported the incident to the
local human rights ombudsman (personero) and claimed Santos had
no guerrilla ties.  It is not known if the Government is
investigating this incident.

Paramilitary groups, often with the alleged complicity of
military units or individuals, usually carried out their
violent acts with impunity.  In September a military court
issued a detention order for former army Lieutenant Colonel
Luis Becerra, who is widely believed to have cooperated with
paramilitary forces by covering up the October 1993 Rio Frio
massacre.  In September President Samper reiterated the
Government's strong opposition to paramilitary groups and rural
self-defense forces and promised to investigate carefully all
allegations of cooperation with these groups by members and
units of the state security forces.  Little, however, has been
accomplished in ending the climate of impunity.

The loosely organized groups of the Simon Bolivar Coordinating
Board, which include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
and the Army of National Liberation, committed a host of
violations of humanitarian law during 1994.  The most repugnant
of these abuses was a January attack on the town of La Chinita
in Uraba that left 35 agricultural workers dead.  An exhaustive
NGO investigation concluded that the FARC's fifth front
perpetrated the attack in a move to intimidate the Communist
Party stronghold for political purposes.  FARC and ELN
guerrilla regulars ambushed a police convoy in Purace on
November 2, killing 11 police agents and 2 students.  A series
of bombs exploded on city buses in Cartagena on December 21,
killing 10 civilians.  The Government arrested three suspects
linked to the urban ELN.

Guerrillas frequently committed atrocities against indigenous
communities.  Guerrillas murdered four members of the Arzaria
community in September, following a "trial" in which the four
were accused of having participated in the February killing of
two other tribe members allegedly working with the guerrilla
groups.  Guerrillas also violated norms of international
humanitarian law during attacks on military installations.
Eyewitness survivors reported that in attacks on a petroleum
station and military installations in Putamayo in July, FARC
guerrillas summarily executed defenseless wounded soldiers.

Section 2  Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

     a.  Freedom of Speech and Press

The authorities generally respected these constitutionally
protected rights, but in at least one instance there was
implied intimidation of the media (see below).  Print and
broadcast media regularly criticized the Government without
recrimination.  The privately owned print media published a
wide spectrum of political viewpoints, especially throughout
the presidential campaign.  They often voiced harsh
antigovernment opinions without administration reprisals.  The
Government imposes some restrictions on electronic media
coverage of public order and drug terrorist activity and has
the right to prohibit coverage of certain news events that
could affect state security.  In July some observers charged
that the Minister of Communications' public reminder to the
media of this constitutional provision during the
"narco-cassette" scandal, in which President-elect Samper's
campaign financing was allegedly linked to Cali drug barons,
constituted a veiled threat of government censorship.  In
September and November, Constitutional Court decisions struck
down some of the provisions on government prescreening of
electronic media coverage of public order and narcotics
terrorist events.

All citizens have the right to seek a judicial injunction or
motion (tutela) for immediate redress of violations of basic
constitutional rights.  This theoretically provides all persons
and organizations, including the media, a mechanism to denounce
both private and government violations of basic constitutional
rights.

Several incidents of violence directed against journalists
occurred during 1994.  An unidentified gunman murdered Cucuta
radio and print journalist Jesus Medina in January.  Unknown
persons killed Medellin radio journalist and national vice
president of a broadcasters' union, Martin Eduardo Munera, in
September.  Colleagues of Munera also reported receiving death
threats.  The International Press Society reported that
Munera's death was the sixth slaying of a Colombian journalist
since August 1993.   While very few of these cases are ever
definitively resolved, it is apparent that journalists are most
often the victims of guerrilla groups, paramilitary
organizations, and narcotics traffickers.  In one case,
however, the Procuraduria charged an ex-soldier with the 1991
slaying of "El Tiempo" journalist Henry Rojas.  It also charged
Colonel Diogenes Castellanos Guerrero, a former commander of an
army unit based in Arauca, with covering up the incident.

The Government generally respected academic freedom, and there
exists a wide spectrum of political activity throughout the
country's universities.  Teachers at the elementary and
secondary levels in guerrilla-controlled territory are often
subject to threats and intimidation from local subversive
operatives and are unable to resist guerrilla propaganda
campaigns.

     b.  Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The Constitution provides for freedom of peaceful assembly and
association, and the Government respects these rights in
practice.  The authorities do not normally interfere with
public meetings and demonstrations and usually grant the
required permission except when they determine that there is
imminent danger to public order.  Any organization is free to
associate with international groups in its field.

     c.  Freedom of Religion

The Constitution provides for complete religious freedom and
there is little religious discrimination in practice.  Catholic
religious training is no longer mandatory in public state
schools, and a July Constitutional Court decision found
unconstitutional any official government reference to Colombia
as "the country of the sacred heart."  The Government permits
proselytizing among the indigenous population, provided the
Indians welcome it and are not induced to adopt changes that
endanger their survival on traditional lands.  Indian tribes
must still invite outsiders onto their reserves, and these
groups remain at the disposition of the indigenous community.

     d.  Freedom of Movement Within the Country, Foreign
         Travel, Emigration, and Repatriation

The Constitution provides citizens the right to travel
domestically and abroad.  In areas where military operations
against guerrillas are under way, police or military officials
occasionally required civilians to obtain safe-conduct passes;
guerrillas reportedly used similar means to restrict travel in
areas under their control.