John I. Laun, Colombia Support Network, 2 October 2009
I have a recurring question: Why do the major media in this country so often get Colombia so wrong?
A recent example of media coverage confirms my concern. Lisa Logan, identified as CBS News chief foreign correspondent, reported that Colombian Special Operations Forces would soon be sent to Afghanistan to help the U.S. defeat the Taliban there. Ms. Logan began her account by stating that the “battle tested” Colombian commandos had gained their experience “from having defeated terrorists in their own country”. Except they have not done so: the FARC and ELN guerrillas continue to have several thousand armed personnel in the country. And the paramilitary forces, classified as “terrorists” by the U.S. State Department on September 10, 2001, are active in substantial numbers throughout Colombia. In many instances they have acted in concert with units of the Colombian Army, which has itself engaged in massacres, forced displacement and extrajudicial executions on a wide scale, as detailed in a CSN report elsewhere on this website. While Ms. Logan rapturously proclaims that the Colombian Army is composed of “some of the finest soldiers in the world”, she fails to mention the Army’s widespread kidnapping of youths to kill them and present them falsely as “guerrillas killed in combat”, so as to earn rewards promised for dead guerrillas in a Ministry of National Defense document (the so-called “false positives” scandal).