News stories by Constanza Vieira, page 10

Six months after human rights defender Julio Avella was put behind bars, a prosecutor reviewing the case threw out the charges against him, which were based on the testimony of former guerrillas and police and army reports, on the grounds that they were 'contradictory, incoherent, inconsistent and illogical.'

'Why did they kill them? Out of physical cowardice. It's what we call murder. Sheer physical cowardice. It's what we call a war crime,' said former lawmaker Sigifredo López, just freed by the FARC, about the massacre of his 11 colleagues on Jun. 18, 2007, when they were hostages of the Colombian guerrillas.

The purge of the Colombian army over killings of civilians passed off as guerrilla casualties continues, this time with the dismantling of an entire army brigade and the removal of 11 officers who served in another battalion.

Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA and former U.S. ambassadors were fully aware, as far back as 1990, that the military in Colombia -- the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt -- were committing extrajudicial killings as part of 'death squad tactics.'

Activists from more than 1,000 human rights groups and other civil society organisations who followed the live Internet transmission of this week’s United Nations Human Rights Council’s review of the situation in this country at a university auditorium in the Colombian capital shared the sensation that their voices had finally been heard.