MIAMI HERALD

Thursday, 30 July 1998


                Samper apologizes for state killings
                ------------------------------------

        By Tim Johnson


BOGOTA -- In a rare ceremony of public apology, President Ernesto Samper
admitted Wednesday that state agents were responsible for killing 49
people between 1991 and 1993.

It marked the second time Samper acknowledged state responsibility for
major massacres, all of which occurred before he came to office in 1994.

``The national government wants . . . to express in this act of public
apology its shame at these events of insane violence,'' said Samper, who
leaves office Aug. 7.

As relatives of some of the victims looked on, Samper asserted that his
administration had made ``immense strides . . . in the matter of human
rights.''

While hailing the act of contrition, human rights monitors disputed
Samper's contention that human rights have improved, suggesting that his
government has tolerated the rise of brutal paramilitary groups and let
perpetrators of state violence go unpunished.

The public act was ``one token way that the state can approximate its
debt'' to victims of the massacres, said Carlos Salinas, Amnesty
International's advocacy director for Latin America. But he said the
Samper government had done next to nothing to prosecute rights violators,
and that attacks on human rights defenders are at an all-time high.

``Samper's administration has been a human rights disaster,'' he said in a
telephone interview from his office in Washington.

Wednesday's ceremony acknowledged government responsibility for five
different massacres and selective killings:


        Soldiers forced 15 peasants and two passersby to lie face down in
the southwestern village of La Vega on April 7, 1991, then killed them
one by one.

        On Dec. 16, 1991, police helped gun down 20 Paez Indians who had
been called to El Nilo ranch by its owners, who were upset by a labor
dispute.

        In an apparent attempt at ``social cleansing,'' police killed
eight children and  an adult in the poor Medellin neighborhood of
Villatina on Nov. 15, 1992.

        Two other cases involve the murder of two lawyers on a highway
north of Bogota on April 13,    1992, and the execution-style slaying of a
youth in Bogota on June 22, 1993.


In all cases, defendants accused of responsibility in the killings were
absolved by military tribunals. Civil investigations are still pending in
several cases.

Complaints were later sent to the human rights branch of the Organization
of American States, where the Colombian government was found liable.

``To get the government to acknowledge what it did today was really
arduous work,'' said a local human rights lawyer, who asked not to be
named.

In a similar ceremony in January 1995, Samper accepted government blame
for brutal sweeps by government agents and cocaine cartel hit squads
through the town of Trujillo in 1989 and 1990 that left 107 peasant
leaders and activists dead.

        Copyright 1998 Miami Herald