COLOMBIA: TOP GENERAL RESIGNS AFTER REVELATIONS OF TORTURE OF LOWER-RANKING SOLDIERS.
Revelations that a group of low-ranking soldiers in the Colombian Army had allegedly been brutalized and tortured by higher-ranking officers shook up the military, leading to the resignation of the head of the Army in February. Bogota newsweekly Semana published a report the weekend of Feb. 18-19 with photos showing young recruits who reportedly had suffered torture at a military base after failing a training exercise. President Alvaro Uribe, who learned about the incident from his press secretary shortly before Semana's publication and heard nothing about it from his military commanders, removed the head of the Army when the scandal came to public attention.
Physical and sexual assault leads to arrests, investigation
The Semana article, based on reports from the investigative wing of the armed forces, said that 21 young soldiers of the Batallon Patriotas were at the Centro de Entrenamiento y Instruccion (CIE) in the Army's Sixth Brigade base in Piedras, Tolima, about 95 km east of Bogota. They were participating in a training course on evasion and escape to prepare for the possibility of falling into guerrilla hands while fighting in hostile regions of the country. In the exercise, 44 other recruits succeeded in avoiding groups of soldiers posing as guerrillas, but the 21 youths, most of them 18 years old and from poor families, were "captured" and then subjected to multiple abuses.
Semana reported that the soldiers, hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded, were burned with red-hot pokers, beaten repeatedly with sticks, machetes, and blows from hands and feet, almost drowned in the Rio Honda, strangled, and forced to eat animal feces. One recruit's ears were filled with ants, and others underwent forced sexual contact, after their captors told them, "We're going to rape you, faggot, we're going to rape you," during their beatings.
A recruit named Jhon Jairo Cubillos Navarro was burned with a brand by Cpl. Jose Rafael Tarazona Villamizar until a tattoo he had was indistinguishable from his burnt flesh. The captors put ants on the ears of 19-year-old recruit Wilson Orlando Guzman Castellanos and, after the insects had bitten him, they put chili, nettles, and salt on the wounds. All of this is according to the Semana report.
Two days later, Jan. 27, military authorities found out about the abuses, and a military criminal judge ordered the Instituto de Medicina Legal to examine the soldiers' wounds. The institute's report concluded that...
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