Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: Rights Groups Protest Killing of Students in FARC Camp

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Mar 21 2008 (IPS) - Human rights groups in Mexico and Ecuador plan to take legal action against the Colombian government for what they call the “unjustified massacre” of four Mexican students in this month’s attack on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador.

“It will be a lengthy process, carried out in different courts or international bodies, which could take from three to 10 years, but we have agreed to not allow this crime to go unpunished,” Adrián Ramírez, president of the Mexican League for the Defence of Human Rights (LIMEDDHH), told IPS.

In a cross-border aerial bombing and land incursion in Ecuador, the Colombian military killed 25 people in a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp on Mar. 1, including the rebel group’s international spokesman Raúl Reyes.

The attack ordered by the Colombian government, without notifying Quito, prompted Ecuador to sever ties with Colombia and triggered an acute political crisis in the Andean region, which was, however, resolved a few days later.

Four Mexican university students were killed in the attack on the camp, and a fifth was wounded and is recovering in a military hospital in Quito. It is also possible that an Ecuadorean citizen was killed, although the body, which is in the hands of Colombian authorities, has not yet been fully identified.

Ecuadorean forensic experts have established that the four Mexican students were killed while they were sleeping, when the bombs fell on the camp in the wee hours of the morning.

Ramírez said LIMEDDHH and four other human rights organisations from Mexico, the Quito-based Latin American Human Rights Association (ALDHU), and the Ecumenical Human Rights Commission (CEDHU) of Ecuador will work with the families of the four Mexican students killed in the camp in taking legal action against the Colombian government.

“We will take this as far as we have to,” said the activist.

He said the groups would seek a condemnation by the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) and by the legislatures of Colombia and Mexico, and that the case may be brought before the Mexican courts and before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“The final objective is to achieve sanctions for those guilty of this crime,” said Ramírez.

Álvaro González, the father of one of the Mexicans killed in the camp, said he would resort to “the relevant bodies, whatever they may be, until those guilty of the deaths of our children are punished.”

ALDHU has already brought a lawsuit in Quito against Colombia for the Mar. 1 bombing raid, which it describes as a “terrorist act.”

As Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa stated after the attack, forensic evidence shows that several of the bodies had bullet wounds in their back, fired from a short distance, indicating that they were the victims of extrajudicial execution.

Colombia’s incursion into Ecuadorean territory was condemned by the Rio Group, Latin America’s highest-level political forum, and “rejected” by the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Ramírez and the families of the Mexicans killed in the raid are calling on President Felipe Calderón to order an investigation by Mexican authorities into what they call a “treacherous crime” in which high-powered bombs were dropped, “possibly from U.S. airplanes.”

Military and diplomatic sources told IPS in Ecuador that the United States played an important role in the attack.

Although the Mexican government condemned the violation of Ecuadorean sovereignty, it has so far refused to do the same with respect to the murders of the Mexican students in the FARC camp.

However, Mexican diplomatic personnel flew to Quito to provide advice to the students’ families, who had travelled to Ecuador to identify and bring home the remains of their loved ones.

The families returned to Mexico on Thursday and Friday.

The Calderón administration is carrying out an investigation to determine what kind of ties the students had with the FARC. The information available so far indicates that they were leftist activists who “sympathised” with the guerrilla group that emerged in the mid-1960s in rural Colombia, and who were involved in a FARC solidarity group at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where they studied.

The Mexican newspaper Excélsior reported Friday that the student activists had sold and distributed at UNAM a video showing the military training received by young people who decide to join the FARC.

However, the students’ families and the human rights groups supporting them say the students were visiting the FARC camp to carry out an academic study on the last major rebel group active in Latin America.

UNAM denies that the students were on an academic mission linked with the university.

Next week, LIMEDDHH and student organisations will stage demonstrations demanding that the government condemn the killings of the Mexican students.

On Tuesday they will hold a march on the UNAM campus, on Wednesday an open forum, and on Friday a protest outside the Foreign Ministry.

There is evidence that the camp in Ecuador was the site of ongoing negotiations between the FARC and international negotiators for the release of hostages held by the rebels, including French-Colombian citizen Ingrid Betancourt.

“Colombia knew that, and attacked it anyway, violating the sovereignty of a neighbouring country and killing innocent people, including the Mexicans,” said the activist.

Ecuadorean President Correa and Betancourt’s husband Juan Carlos Lecompte have said that the raid and Reyes’s death thwarted the imminent release by the FARC of Betancourt and 11 other hostages. Lecompte said the release operation had been scheduled for Mar. 14 or 15.

Diplomatic sources in Quito also told IPS that French negotiators were near the camp, on their way to a meeting with Reyes, the day he was killed.

The press reported that the camp had areas for cooking, eating, sleeping, and military and physical training, electric generators, and TV sets.

Bogota acknowledged that it violated Ecuadorean sovereignty, but argued that it had a right to self-defence.

The camp was reportedly visited in February by a group of Chilean activists who, like the Mexican students, had participated in Quito in the Second Congress of the Bolivarian Continental Coordinating committee, made up of radical leftist groups from around Latin America.