Colombia’s military carried out at least 6,400 extrajudicial killings and presented them as combat deaths between 2002 and 2008, a number significantly higher than previously estimated, a special court said Thursday.

AFP

Colonel Orlando Inocente Montano Morales was working in a sweet factory on the outskirts of Boston when his inglorious war record finally caught up with him.
Col Montano Morales, a senior commander during El Salvador’s brutal civil war, had been quietly living in the United States for a decade when in May 2011 he and 19 former colleagues were indicted by a Spanish court on suspicion of participation in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuits priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.
The massacre was one of the most notorious crimes of the war, which between 1980 and 1992 left 80,000 people dead, 8,000 missing and one million displaced – in a country the size of Wales. The vast majority of the atrocities were committed by US-backed armed forces and paramilitaries, according to the subsequent United Nations Truth Commission.
The Reagan government poured billions of dollars into El Salvador, and other Central American countries, to support right-wing military dictatorships fighting “dirty wars” against populist uprisings.