In Colombia, allegations link paramilitaries, politicians

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Mon, Jun. 20, 2005

COLOMBIA

In Colombia, allegations link paramilitaries, politicians

Colombian politicians and paramilitaries are trading accusations amid uneasy peace talks.

By STEVEN DUDLEY

[e-mail]

BOGOTA - Startling revelations by leaders of illegal paramilitary groups about their ties to politicians and the government's velvet treatment of a top paramilitary who surrendered have ignited a battle among politicians over who has the most skeletons in the closet.

The revelations, which include the claim that 35 percent of Congress favors the paramilitaries, come during troubled peace negotiations between the government and the right-wing groups, which have been battling leftist guerrillas, often allegedly in collaboration with government forces. President Alvaro Uribe's year-old negotiation with the militias has been repeatedly shaken by accusations of back-room deals and questionable decisions regarding paramilitaries widely accused of drug trafficking and massacring suspected guerrilla sympathizers.

The most recent problem occurred last month when police detained a top paramilitary negotiator inside the northern Colombia region that the government set aside as a safe haven for the talks.

The negotiator, reputed drug trafficker Diego Murillo, also known as Don Berna, surrendered to face charges in the March assassination of an area politician. But instead of jailing him, police and soldiers are holding him at what they call an ''austere'' ranch house near the site of the negotiations.
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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/11936940.htm

[Burried News]

1. No worries here, we don't have paramilita.... Oh Oh

[Village Idiot]

2. It should be MORE STARTLING...

that Carlos Castano's paramilitary organization, the AUC, which Congress has been FUNDING for the past 15 years, was once the private paramilitary of Pablo Escobar...


Yup, FARC bad...AUC good...hmmmmm...

Just

Say

No?

[Travelin Man]

3. I gotta disagree with the Anti-Uribe signs

Uribe is enormously popular in Colombia and attacking the civil war head on. both the FARC and the AUC. Something no other Colombian leader had the cojones to do previously.

some criticize the peace deal as being "soft" on the AUC but the reality is there aren't many alternatives. The FARC on the other hand have not even attempted to join the peace process or lay down their arms.

[Judi Lynn]

4. It's certainly well-known that Uribe's ties to the death squads are deep

May 24, 2004

President Uribe’s Hidden Past

by Tom Feiling

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe is, by his own admission, a man of the right. Unlike most recent Colombian presidents, Uribe is from the land-owning class. He inherited huge swathes of cattle ranching land from his father Alberto Uribe, who was subject to an extradition warrant to face drug trafficking charges in the United States until he was killed in 1983, allegedly by leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Alvaro Uribe grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of who became leading players in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cocaine cartel.

President Uribe’s credentials are impeccable. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, is as sharp as a tack, and a very able bureaucrat. At the tender age of 26 he was elected mayor of Medellín, the second-largest city of Colombia. The city’s elite in the 1980s was rich, corrupt and nepotistic, and they loved the young Uribe. But the new mayor was removed from office after only three months by a central government embarrassed by his public ties to the drug mafia. Uribe was then made Director of Civil Aviation, where he used his mandate to issue pilots’ licenses to Pablo Escobar’s fleet of light aircraft, which routinely flew cocaine to the United States.
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Security forces and paramilitary groups enjoyed immunity from prosecution under Governor Uribe, and they used this immunity to launch a campaign of terror in Antioquia. Thousands of people were murdered, “disappeared,” detained and driven out of the region. In the town of San Jose de Apartadó for example, three of the Convivir leaders were well-known paramilitaries and had been trained by the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade. In 1998, representatives of more than 200 Convivir associations announced that they would unite with the paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), under its murderous leader Carlos Castaño.

When Uribe launched his campaign for president, the candidate’s paramilitary connections appeared to deter many journalists from examining the ties between drug gangs and the Uribe family. An exception was Noticias Uno, a current affairs program on the TV station Canal Uno. In April 2002, the program ran a series on alleged links between Uribe and the Medellín drug cartel. After the reports aired, unidentified men began calling the news station, threatening to kill the show’s producer Ignacio Gómez, director Daniel Coronell, and Coronell’s 3-year-old daughter, who was flown out of the country soon thereafter. Gómez was also forced to flee Colombia and is currently living in exile.
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http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia185.htm

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Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold: Drugs, Oil, and Death in Colombia
by Brad Miller

They walked through the small Colombian village openly brandishing knives used to butcher pigs. Then, as they had the tools sharpened at the local meat market in the Gabriel García Márquez novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the two brothers repeatedly announced to the community that they were going to kill a man. Despite the warnings, the townspeople did nothing but watch as the victim was disemboweled in the street. “There had never been a death more foretold,” wrote Márquez.

In Márquez’s contemporary Colombia, killers roam the barrios and villages with more firepower than butchers’ tools, their arsenals of automatic weapons and helicopter gunships purchased with US tax dollars, oil revenue, and drug money. As politicians in the US and Colombia legislate the intensification of the country’s four-decade-old civil war from the comfort of their chambers, the stress fractures in Colombia’s social structure deepen under the slow crushing--a lump of a campesino’s dry soil disintegrating in a soldier’s hand, life falling through the fingers.

Shortly after taking office in August of 2002, Uribe established the “State of Unrest and Democratic Security” and “Zones of Rehabilitation and Consolidation” in several of the more important economic regions. He unleashed the military to conduct mass detentions of union members, activists, and indigenous leaders. In early December 2003 the Colombian Congress backed Uribe, passing an “anti-terrorist” measure that gave the military judicial powers to tap phones, conduct searches and raids without warrants, and arrest subjects solely on the basis of accusation. Any member of the security forces who commits human rights violations while battling “terrorists” will be immune from prosecution. Uribe branded the “terrorist” stigma on certain NGOs after they dared to question his extreme tactics. This increases the risk for human rights and environmental workers, and decreases any legal options for dissent.
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One group under attack is CENSAT-AGUA VIVA--Friends of the Earth Colombia, a non-profit that helps socially disadvantaged sectors of the Colombian population improve their working and living conditions while maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Over the past several years, CENSAT-AGUA VIVA offices have been ransacked and searched by state security agencies and its members harassed and threatened by the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombio (AUC).

While the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionario de Colombia and Ejercito Liberación Nacional guerrillas do commit abuses, approximately 70 percent of the human rights violations have been attributed to the paramilitaries. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Bush administration continues to break US law, which specifies under the Leahy Amendment that Colombian security forces cannot receive funding until they sever ties with the death squads.
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