LatinNews Daily - 19 May 2011

Colombia: On 2 August Colombia's interior minister, Fabio Valencia Cossio, announced that Colombia would seek to establish a 'minimum sentence' in its extradition treaty with the US. This followed concerns expressed the previous day by Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe to a regional anti-drugs summit that drug-traffickers might serve “a short sentence then be released to live like a king". It is not the ordinary drug-traffickers Uribe is most worried about, however: in May he extradited more than a dozen of the most senior paramilitary leaders to face drug-trafficking charges in the US. Uribe is concerned that these paramilitaries, who have been accused of numerous massacres and other crimes against humanity, might walk free far earlier than the Colombian public will tolerate.