Human Rights abuses even worse After a decade of human rights abuses, the situation in Colombia is getting even worse. At the centre of the declining situation is the state's use of paramilitary groups as a central component of its repressive strategy. In other words, there were more than ten times as many political assassinations in the 1980s, compared to the previous decade. In the first half of the 1990s there were 11,471 political assassinations, slightly more than the total for the preceding ten years. Every second day a person is 'disappeared' and another is killed through 'social cleansing'.
Arbitrary detentions are frequent and torture is endemic.
Since 1986, approximately 20,000 people have been killed for political reasons or presumed political reasons.,and 600,000 have been forced to flee from their homes in order to protect their lives. An openly militarist mentality is abroad in the Colombian state and society, to such a degree that we can talk of the resurrection of a constitutional dictatorship. The space won for democratic ideas, such as controlling the state's ability to declare states of emergency and repress social conflicts or our ability to subordinate the military to civilian control or institutionalise measures to protect our rights which have been threatened, is increasingly reduced. This is certainly the conclusion to be drawn from the government's proposals for the reform of the 1991 Constitution in respect of human rights. On the one hand there are a series of proposals about the character and use of states of emergency, which taken together go against the Commission of Human Rights and what has been stipulated by the American Convention on Human Rights.