AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL SPONSORS TALK ON "SOCIAL-CLEANSING"
KILLINGS IN COLOMBIA
Juan Pablo Ordonez, a Colombian attorney will speak about "social
cleansing" in Colombia at the Amnesty International Western
Regional Office 500 Sansome St, Suite 615 in San Francisco on
Wednesday evening March 29th at 7:30pm.
Mr Ordonez worked with the Technical Judicial Police of Colombia
where in 1990 he investigated over 40 murders of indigents, all
of which were traced to the Colombian police. As a result of his
diligent investigations, an attempt was made on his life and Juan
Pablo Ordonez had to leave the country. In early 1994 Juan Pablo
returned to Colombia where he has been researching the ill-named
"social cleansing" killings of "disposable" people including the
homeless, street children, prostitutes, homosexuals, petty
criminals, vagrants and the mentally disturbed. These groups are
constant targets of physical and sexual abuse, rape, extortion
and murder. In particular, his research includes the first
study ever in Colombia on discrimination against sexual
minorities.
Amnesty International has followed the human rights crisis in
Colombia with growing concern since the 1970s, when the
organizations's main concerns were the torture, ill treatment and
unfair trials of political prisoners and the imprisonment of
prisoners of concience. During the 1980s the pattern of human
rights violations changed dramatically. The number of political
prisoners declined steadily. But at the same time growing numbers
of reports were received of extrajudicial executions and
"disappearances" attributed to both the security forces and the
nascent paramilitary. Since 1986 more than 20,000 have people
died in political violence in Colombia.
In 1988, alarmed by the dramatic upsurge in political killings,
Amnesty International launched an international campaign to press
for urgent measuresto halt the slaughter. Since then, sucessive
governments have introduced numerous human rights initiatives.
The abuses, however, have continued unabated.
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