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Dirty War
The history of modern wars has been marked by the fact that most take
place within states and that these conflicts have an abundance of
violations of both human rights and humanitarian law, principally,
the abuse of captured, surrendered or wounded enemy soldiers and the
civilian population. The conflict in Colombia is typical: none of
the warring parties respect the neutrality of the civilian population
in contested territory. This is one kind of dirty war. The other kind
is a highly skewed conflict in which only one side can be said to
be really armed. That would be typical of the events that unfolded
in Chile and Argentina especially in the 1970s, in which military
juntas declared themselves to be in states of war and proceeded to
exterminate their political opponents through outright executions,
but more often through "disappearances," a practice of unacknowledged
detention, execution, and disposal of the body.
