Human Rights Watch not naming corporate names in Colombia report

[Judi Lynn]

Human Rights Watch not naming corporate names in Colombia report
By Joe Emersberger at Oct 30, 2013

Daniel Kavlik noticed that a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Colombia avoided naming the corporations on whose behalf millions of people have been driven from their homes over the past three decades:

HRW refers vaguely, but ad nauseam to “businesspersons,” “businessmen,” “landowners,” “cattle ranchers,” “regional elites,” “mining and agro-industry,” “private companies,” and to unnamed “banana companies”

Kavlik asks “Should we be writing to the paramilitary groups, such as the Urabenos which are named in the report, and politely ask them to stop raping and killing people?”

He contrasts HRW’s report with a much more concise one put out by the Interchurch Justice and Peace Commission (IJCP). The IJCP report is entitled “Colombia: Banacol, a company implicated in land grabbing in Cubarado and Jiguamiando.”

The IJCP report explains that Banacol is a distributor for Chiquita Brands – a company that pled guilty in US courts to paying paramilitary death squads $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004. Chiquita was fined $25 million, less than the combined salary of its top five CEO’s in 2012 alone (each of the top five made roughly $6 million).

Kavalik concludes

…IJCP does more to give the concerned reader an avenue for protest and action than in the bulky HRW report of nine times its size. If one wishes to help the largest IDP community in the world reclaim its land, one can start by protesting such companies as Chiquita, Banacol, Del Monte and Dole.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/human-rights-watch-not-naming-corporate-names-in-colombia-report-by-joe-emersberger.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Excellent point! HRW is protecting these murdering corporations.

And how deceptive can you get--parading as an advocate for human rights, while blacking out the names of some of the worst human rights violators in Latin America?

This article nails something that is hard to get at, about Human Rights Watch. Yeah, they reveal human rights violations--and the violations in Colombia include the murder of thousands of labor leaders, teachers, community activists and other advocates of the poor, and the brutal displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers--but they never "connect the dots," say, between the $7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayer dollars larded upon the Colombian military, with its close ties to rightwing death squads, using the phony excuse of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," and all the subsequent carnage, about half committed by the Colombian military itself and the other half by its paramilitary death squads.

Would all those people be dead or displaced without that $7 BILLION? No! In fact, many people were killed by the military and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerillas, in order to up the military's "body count," to earn bonuses and to impress U.S. senators and get more billions in military aid.

HRW never takes on the root cause, that it is U.S. government POLICY to kill and brutalize the poor--to smash their advocates, destroy their labor unions and drive them from the land.

Nor do they nail those for whom this is being done--U.S.-based transglobal corporations--and whose executives have actively participated in the killing, as this article points out.

We began to smell a rat at HRW with their absurd "reports" on Venezuela, where a leftist democracy revolution has occurred, where labor unions and grass roots organizations are strong, where poverty is actually being solved, where the country's resources are used to benefit the people, and where the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and the whole apparatus of the phony, murderous U.S. "war on drugs" has been evicted. Venezuela is also a country TO WHICH tens of thousands of Colombia's poor HAVE FLED from the Colombian military and its death squads. HRW thinks nothing of this--that the poor can vote in Venezuela, and, by voting, improve their lot; that the U.S. war machine is banned there, and thus, the Venezuelan military doesn't have to ply the U.S. government with its "body counts" to get more U.S. taxpayer billions flowing their way.

It has been quite clear for some time that HRW serves the U.S. government and its transglobal corporate overseers, on the matter of Venezuela. This excision of the names of corporations that have hired death squads to solve their "labor problems" in Colombia, and/or are hugely benefiting from the U.S. billions given to the Colombian military, confirms that smell at HRW of CIA rats at work on one of their clever projects: USING human rights violations to gain respectability, to get quoted in the media, but, in truth, COVERING UP a major CAUSE of human rights violations in Latin America--the U.S. government SERVING its transglobal corporate rulers.

The brutal displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their land, in Colombia, and most of the murders of the poor and their advocates, was prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." Chiquita, Dole, Banacol, Del Monte, Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, Drummond Coal, et al, and all their local fascist/gangster operatives, are both perps and beneficiaries.

[Paolo123]

2. I'll bet

HRW has some big contributions coming in this year.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Down where the death squads live: How Human Rights Watch covers for companies in Colombia

Down where the death squads live: How Human Rights Watch covers for companies in Colombia
Last updated: Friday, November 01, 2013 19:00

On the CounterPunch masthead are these words proudly written, “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” It’s because CounterPunch lives up to these words that I happily write for it and proudly donate to it.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), on the other hand, fails to name the names in its recent report on Colombia entitled, “The Risk of Returning Home, Violence and Threats against Displaced People Reclaiming Land in Colombia.” [1] And, this is much to HRW’s discredit.

Before diving into the report and its grave shortcomings, some general comments about HRW are in order. For years, I have been concerned about what appears to be HRW’s penchant for helping lay the groundwork for US and NATO strikes against claimed enemies of the West. Most recently, HRW’s Executive Director, Kenneth Roth, has been fulminating on his Twitter account against anyone, including the EU, who refuses to acknowledge what has yet to be proven as fact – that the Syrian government was allegedly responsible for the chemical attack of August 21, 2013.

This is an obvious attempt by Roth and HRW, proponents of the so-called “right to protect” doctrine, to gin up support for an attack on Syria in the ostensible name of human rights. Of course, given that HRW has a former Secretary General of NATO, Javier Solana, on its Board of Directors [2], this pursuit should come as little surprise. Meanwhile, Roth is also promoting what he calls a “New alliance formed to secure fair #Afghanistan elections, protect women’s rights & civil society, improve governance httrib.al/Y6L9oty.” If you click on the link, you’ll see an “alliance” headed by such rogues as Stephen Hadly, Former National Security Advisor to George W. Bush; Michele Flournoy, Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Obama Administration; and, of course, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis. That is, the alliance that Roth believes will secure human and women’s rights in Afghanistan is made up of the very individuals who have undermined these rights for years.

In its report on Colombia, HRW betrays not its pro-NATO proclivities, but rather, its pro-corporate ones. In this report, HRW does do a good job of detailing the grisly violence – including threats, assaults, rapes and murders – which continues to keep Colombia in the number one spot in the world for internally displaced peoples (IDPs) at nearly 5 million. And, as HRW relates, it does so despite a recent law which was passed to allow these peoples, disproportionately Afro-Colombian and indigenous, to return to their farms and ancestral lands which were forcibly taken from them.

More:
http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20131101-down-where-the-death-squads-live-how-human-rights-watch-covers-for-companies-in-colombia.aspx