South Korea covered up abuse & killings of "vagrants" during 1988 Olympic prep

Posted on: Wed, 04/20/2016 - 00:05 By: Tom Swiss

The Olympics are one of those things that I used to think were really neat but that I learned later were fundamentally exploitive. Add in a country just emerging from a (US-backed, of course) dictatorship and you've got the makings of a horrorshow.

AP: S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' (The Big Story)

Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.

Yet nobody has been held accountable to date for the rapes and killings at the Brothers compound because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government, the AP found...

Even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology. The few who now speak out want a new investigation.