Take Action: Send a message to the
State Department
School
of the Americas Instructor Who Oversaw Dozens
of Killings Leads U.S.-Backed Army 
In the wake of Colombian military scandals
earlier this year, General Jaime Lasprilla
Villamizar has been appointed commander of the
Colombian Army. He had just served as commander
of the Joint Special Operations Command, and
previously as commander of Joint Task Force
Omega – both units that have been the focus of
U.S. assistance in Colombia.
The special operations unit, known by its
Spanish acronym CCOES, has been a key vehicle
for U.S. military aid in Colombia. A Washington Post investigation
in December reported that the unit is sent in
after bombing runs to gather bodies of
guerrillas and other material. CCOES is the
Colombian counterpart to the U.S. Joint Special
Operations Command, which conducts secret
targeted killings around the world.
A former instructor at the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation (the SOA's
new name), General Lasprilla previous commanded
Task Force Omega, which received tens of
millions of dollars in U.S. training, supplies
and equipment, under Washington’s ill-conceived
drug war and ‘war on terror.’
There is just one catch. In 2006-2007,
Lasprilla directed the Ninth Brigade in
Colombia’s Huila Department, which was
responsible for at least 75 killings of
civilians under his command. Under the U.S.
Leahy Law, aiding a foreign unit is prohibited
if there is credible information that the
unit’s commander committed gross human rights
abuses. To abide by Leahy Law, Washington must end its
assistance to the Colombian Army, until
those responsible for the killings committed
under Lasprilla’s command are brought to
justice.
Take Action: Click here to send a message
to the State Department.
Most of the killings committed under Lasprilla
in Huila are called “false positives,” many
under investigation by Colombian human rights
prosecutors. “False positives” were
executions of civilians  by
troops who then claimed the victims were
guerrillas killed in combat. The Army
reportedly carried out more than 4,000 such
killings from 2002 to 2010.
Lasprilla was an instructor at WHINSEC in
2002-2003, and studied for a year at the
National Defense University in Washington in
2005-06, just before his deployment to Huila.
Take action: Send a message to
Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights,
Tom Malinowski, and urge him to apply Leahy Law
to the Colombian Army under General Lasprilla’s
command: http://SOAW.org/colombia
Article by John Lindsay-Poland, one of the
authors of the upcoming report The Rise
and Fall of “False Positive” Killings in
Colombia. The research in the report
shows that the 25 Colombian WHINSEC
instructors and graduates from 2001 to 2003
for which any subsequent information was
available, 12 of them – 48% - had either been
charged with a serious crime or commanded
units whose members had reportedly committed
multiple extrajudicial killings.
PS: SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois;
Field Organizer Maria Luisa Rosal; our
newest Council member Kevin Moran; long-time SOA
Watch activist Irene Rojas DeCambias; and others
are currently walking 120 miles from Fort
Benning, Georgia to Atlanta, Georgia,
to call attention to the SOA, drone warfare, and
the persecution of immigrants. Follow their walk
on twitter, read daily
updates on facebook and on SOAW.org (or join them on the walk).
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