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| Colombian children |
Courtesy of
WSWS:
US soldiers and military contractors were responsible for the rape and sexual abuse of scores of Colombian children, but faced no legal repercussions because of a treaty between Washington and Bogota granting them full immunity.
A fresh revelation of these appalling crimes came as a byproduct of ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement taking place in Havana, Cuba.
Last month, a Historical Commission on the Armed Conflict and its Victims in Colombia, formed jointly by the Colombian government and the FARC, presented an 800-page report documenting the causes and consequences of the decades of civil war that have claimed millions of victims in terms of dead, wounded, abused and displaced. The commission was composed of leading Colombian academics and intellectuals acceptable to both parties.
A section prepared by Renan Vega Cantor, a professor of history at the National Pedagogical University of Bogota, dealt with the role played by the US military. The Pentagon has sent advisers and contractors to the country as part of Plan Colombia, which has included $6 billion in mostly military aid directed at combatting both drug trafficking and the anti-government guerrilla movements.
The report cites 54 cases of rape and sexual abuse of minors, some as young as 12. “In one of the best known cases, in Melgar and in Giradot [both are to the southwest of the capital of Bogota, with a major Colombian air base that housed US “advisers” located in Melgar], 53 minors were abused sexually by mercenaries, who also filmed it and sold the tapes as pornography,” the report states. The young girls were subsequently threatened with death, and they and their families had to leave the area.
This post is the result of a late night message from my daughter demanding that I write something about this and let people know what we have done.
She was of course quite horrified and wanted to know how we could not only allow this to happen, but also protect those who committed these atrocities.
My response is of course to refer to
the Ted Cruz post from earlier today.
After all how can Americans be held accountable when they are clearly agents of the "American civil religion" whose every action is divinely inspired?
This is the result when you see the military, and military contractors, through rose colored glasses and believe that their every action overseas "protects us over here."
How dare we even think of prosecuting them for helping to keep us free by spreading American exceptionalism to every corner of the planet?
For those who want to learn more about this you can read
here,
here, and
here as well.
