In news from Colombia, Human Rights Watch has released a report on killings by right-wing paramilitary successor groups in the largely Afro-Colombian port city of Buenaventura. The groups reportedly use so-called “chop-up houses” to slaughter victims, sometimes dismembering them while they are still alive, then dumping them in the ocean. Scores and potentially hundreds of residents have been abducted and disappeared. Last year, more than 19,000 people fled Buenaventura, more than in any other municipality in Colombia, a country with the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world. HRW’s Daniel Wilkinson described the groups’ origins.

Daniel Wilkinson: “There are basically two groups who are operating in these neighborhoods. One is called the Urabeños. The other is called the Empresa. And these are groups that basically descended from right-wing paramilitary death squads that existed throughout the country. Those paramilitaries demobilized in the government program 10 years ago. But these groups today operate in a very similar fashion.”