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Massacre of Trujillo
The Massacre of Trujillo was a series of murders perpetrated between 1988 and 1994 in the town of Trujillo, Valle del Cauca Department in southwestern Colombia by paramilitaries and the Cali Cartel with the complicity of active members of the Colombian military and police.
Some 245 to 342 people, including unionists and suspected guerrilla supporters, were tortured and dismembered. Among the more gruesome murders was the decapitation and castration of Father Tiberio Fernandez, the local Jesuit priest. The murders were seen as a warning to other pro-guerrilla elements. Most of the corpses were thrown into the waters of the Cauca River.
Judicial Proceedings
The Colombian government declared itself guilty of negligence and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was also notified of the case.
Some members of the Cali Cartel accused of participating in this massacre were Henry Loaiza-Ceballos "aka The Scorpion" and Juan Carlos Ortiz Escobar "aka Knife".
The case was first officially acknowledged and investigated in the mid-1990s under Colombian President Ernesto Samper (1994-1998); however, no one was ever tried for the killings. Declassified U.S. government documents suggest that the United States government regarded this and other human rights investigations under President Samper as lacking resolve. [*]
On March 19, 2008, the Attorney General of Colombia accused retired Colombian Army Major Alirio Antonio Uruena Jaramillo, former Colombian National Police Lieutenant Jose Fernando Berrio and former Sergeant Anibal Alvarez Hoyos for their involvement with a paramilitary group during the massacre.
In March, 1990, Major Uruena was the acting commander of the Palace Battallion in Buga which was engaging in counterinsurgency operations against the ELN guerrilla, Lieutenant Berrio Velasquez was acting commander of the police station in Trujillo and former Sergeant Alvarez Hoyos was in charge of the Sijin in Tulua.
The case was re-opened in 2008 following the publication of an independent report by the Historical Memory Group.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Massacre of Trujillo
