Cuba and Colombia lead Latin America in human rights abuses, the first because of the broad scope of government repression, and the latter for its bloodshed, an independent human rights group reported Thursday.

``These two are the worst in an otherwise improving picture,'' said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Washington-based Human Rights Watch, in releasing the group's voluminous annual report.

Overall observance of human rights has improved in the Americas since 1996 along with the growth of democracy, the report said, even though ``massacres, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and other forms of police brutality . . . stubbornly continued.''

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori repressed critics ``as part of central government policy,'' while Venezuelan and Brazilian security forces often resorted to torture and illegal executions, the report added.

720 political killings

Colombia suffered the worst bloodshed: 720 political killings in the first eight months of 1997, most of them attributed to paramilitary groups battling leftist guerrillas.

But the breadth and depth of Cuban government repression put President Fidel Castro's ``unelected government'' at the top of Human Rights Watch's list of violators.

Havana ``voiced muffled support for human rights and representative democracy in the past year as it moved toward greater economic engagement with Europe, Canada, Asia and Latin America,'' the report said at the top of its 12-page section on Cuba.

``But the government revealed an intransigent reliance on political oppression to crush internal opposition through its repressive measures against dissidents, failure to amnesty political prisoners, continuing blockage of human rights monitoring, creation of new laws restricting human rights and refusal to dismantle oppressive legal structures,'' it added.

Prisons denied medical treatment to many political prisoners, and inmates who complained about their treatment ``faced retaliatory measures including beatings, isolation and criminal prosecution,'' the report said.

Cuba continued to deny international human rights groups access to the island ``while harassing and prosecuting those attempting to monitor rights domestically.''

Government repression affected academics, religious leaders, youth groups and unofficial political parties, the report said, while authorities ``heightened harassment of homosexuals, raiding several nightclubs known to have gay clientele and allegedly beating and detaining dozens of patrons.''

A policy of silencing dissent was ``glaringly manifest'' in the July 15 arrests of four leaders of the nonviolent Internal Dissidents' Working Group: Felix Bonne, Marta Beatriz Roque, Vladimiro Roca and Rene Gomez Manzano.

Intimidation of journalists

Cuban authorities also continued to intimidate independent journalists through beatings, short- and long-term detentions and harassment by pro-government mobs, the report added.

And although the government allowed the U.S.-based CNN television network to open a news bureau in Havana, new regulations give authorities the power to punish foreign journalists whose reports lack ``objectivity.''

The report noted that while the European Union toughened its stand on Cuba's human rights abuses last December, both European and Canadian investors ``failed to adopt effective strategies to ensure respect for labor rights in their Cuban workplaces, where government-dominated projects denied basic rights of free association and speech'' to the workers.

In fact, Cuban police arrested several dissidents while Havana and Canadian officials negotiated a joint declaration in January that included pledges to cooperate on human rights programs, the report noted.

The report concluded with a two-paragraph attack on the ``anachronistic'' U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, saying it violates international treaties signed by Washington and denies Americans the right to travel to Cuba.