So, victims of Paramilitary violence in Columbia, and their relatives, are celebrating a supreme court ruling forbidding the extradition of former paramilitaries to the United States on drug charges:

[Bela] Henriquez [shown] wants to find out as much as she can from the paramilitaries who murdered her father in 2001. Julio Henriquez was killed because of his work organizing poor farmers along a vital cocaine-trafficking corridor. In testimony two years ago, one of the commanders, Hernan Giraldo, confessed to ordering her father’s murder.

But she says the details were scant — and that the testimony didn’t mean that justice was served.

And then, Giraldo was extradited.

Giraldo and the other paramilitary commanders took with them a treasure trove of historical information about the links between Colombia’s elite and the paramilitaries, says Michael Reed, a lawyer with the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York group that studies the efforts to unravel Colombia’s war crimes.

“Basically a political decision was made to trump human rights investigations and prosecutions with drug-trafficking prosecutions,” Reed says.

(emphasis mine)

No, Michael Reed is wrong. A political decision was made to make deport the paramilitaries to the United States in order to silence them. This is not about being nice to the United States, it is about silencing the professional killers hired to murder labor organizers, literacy volunteers, and anyone else who was trying to show the peons something beyond their stations.