Inside La Tramacúa

26 August 2010

The first in a series, Narco News has a chilling feature on Colombia’s brutal network of high security prisons which is funded, and partly managed, by the US government. Focussing in particular on “La Traumacúa”, the first prison to be built under the joint US-Colombia initiative, the articles exposes how in harrowing detail the torture and beatings occurring in Colombia’s jails.

The US is financing the Colombia’s growing penal system for the same reason that it builds bases in that country: to control civil unrest. The US government maintains close links with the conservative government in Colombia, a country seen as a key ally in the region. From the its perspective, the Colombian government must be able to exert total control over dissent, a task more easily accomplished with a state-of-the-art security infrastructure. The number of political prisoners in Colombian prisons is believed to be around 8,000.