Backlog of Colombian human rights cases pose a test for new president, the U.S.

By Juan Forero

Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 25, 2010; 7:25 PM

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The verdict this week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.

Lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. But the 16-year-old case is no anomaly in a country suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict. Hundreds of cases of murder and massacres, old and new, are coursing through the inter-American justice system.

As President Álvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a firestorm here and as far away as Europe: the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.