Colombian politico sentenced to 40 yrs for militia tieshttp://www.laprensasa.com/2.0/3/309/477509/America-in-English/Colombian-politico-sentenced-to-40-yrs-for-militia-ties.html

Bogota, Dec 3 (EFE).- Colombia's Supreme Court sentenced the former governor of the northern province of Sucre to 40 years in prison for ties to brutal right-wing militias and his role in a 2003 murder.Salvador Arana Sus was serving as Colombia's ambassador to Chile at the time of his indictment. He resigned the diplomatic post and disappeared, but authorities tracked him down in May 2008.Arana was found guilty of having instigated the April 2003 assassination of the mayor of El Roble, Eudaldo Diaz.Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was present at a security meeting weeks before the killing in which Diaz disclosed that he had received death threats.Arana was among the first politicians to be caught up in the "parapolitica" scandal, which erupted in late 2007 with the revelation that scores of officeholders and officials had ties with the AUC militia federation, a group blamed for tens of thousands of deaths.

now read this ...

The ill-advised United States certification of Colombia on Human Rightshttp://www.coha.org/the-ill-advised-us-certification-of-colombia-on-human-rights/

However, the US has repeatedly turned a blind eye to human rights abuses when a given nation is viewed as being strategically important to US interests, especially in furtherance of its economic and military goals. In the case of Colombia, the US has sidestepped the standards of an accurate assessment of human rights abuses in favor of meeting its strategic military-related goals. Regardless of the current human rights situation in Colombia, a decision was made several years ago by Washington policy makers to automatically minimize the latter's record of abuse.

One of the most recent national scandals involved 44 Colombian congressmen who allegedly have been linked to a number of paramilitary groups, as well as numerous charges of extrajudicial killings carried out by the Armed Forces (members of which have yet to be brought to trial). They have also been linked to a series of illegal domestic wiretapping and surveillance incidents carried out by the Department of Administrative Security (DAS).

Recent rises in the murder rate of Colombian trade union leaders (after a period of decline), and the increasing numbers of internally displaced people, due to persistently high levels of violence (mainly at the hands of the security forces and the paramilitaries) only serve to reinforce Colombia's macabre image as one of the hemisphere's most egregious human rights violators. These incidents, among many others, demonstrate that today Colombia hardly meets even the minimal human rights certification criteria

then this...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law