Paramilitary link could sink Colombia's Uribe

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Delaware on line

Paramilitary link could sink Colombia's Uribe
TARA PATEL • October 1, 2009

During the last decade, the U.S. has spent or handed out more than $10 billion in social, defense and security assistance to the South American republic of Colombia, according to tabulations by the Washington Office on Latin America. Much of that funding was aimed at countering Colombia's massive production of coca and export of cocaine to North America and Europe and eradicating human rights violations associated with paramilitary organizations operating freely in the country.

Smaller than Alaska, Colombia consistently produces more than half of the entire world's supply of coca and cocaine. While trends on production and trafficking wax and wane, the 2009 World Drug Report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggests that little lasting progress is being made in wiping out that trade. Meanwhile, another United Nations report has called into question the efforts by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to demobilize paramilitary organizations and stem human rights violations. On the contrary, the new report from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says more paramilitary gangs have been created since Colombia's professed demobilization went into effect in 2003, and since last year 76 of the nation's 268 members of Congress, most of them Uribe confederates, have been arrested for colluding with paramilitary groups -- a scandal known as "parapolitics.

The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, was, in its heyday, a paramilitary and narco-trafficking group whose 10,000-13,000 fighters were classified by the U.S. State Department as terrorists. Formed in 1997, ostensibly to fight the leftist FARC and other insurgent groups, the AUC supported itself by "taxing" landowners and drug trafficking. They generally aligned themselves with President Uribe's policies and were linked to the deaths of approximately 10,000 Colombians during their peak years of activity.

In December 2002, under international pressure, the AUC accepted a cease-fire and started negotiations with the government that Uribe hoped would end up reinforcing Colombian security. AUC leadership has episodically cooperated with the Uribe government, receiving amnesty from drug charges in exchange. Though its territorial control and reliance upon drug profiteering has shrunk, AUC factions continue to thrive politically, claiming influence over 30 percent of the Colombian Congress.



Read more: http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20091001/OPINION07/910010314/1004/OPINION/Paramilitary+link+could+sink+Colombia+s+Uribe

[troubledamerican]

1. Watch out for a Karl Rove "Dan Rather" style False Flag.

Fake evidence mysteriously appears, seeming to link Uribe directly to paramilitaries.

Suddenly, bloggers discover it was "planted by FARC"...

Voila, Uribe's reputation is restored as "pure and holy" and "Uribe is the persecuted one" just in time for the next attack on Hugo Chavez, who has no mass graves or Death Squads.

This is as predictable as the plot of a bad movie.

Incidentally, Uribe's birthday is July 4. Watch for "exonerated" Uribe to be given a hero's treatment by FOX News and the U.S. Right Wing.

[Peace Patriot]

2. A good article on the whole, but I argue with the following...

The article fails to connect the dots between this...

"Much of that funding ($10 BILLION US taxpayer dollars) was aimed at countering Colombia's massive production of coca and export of cocaine to North America and Europe and eradicating human rights violations associated with paramilitary organizations operating freely in the country."

...and this...

"...the 2009 World Drug Report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggests that little lasting progress is being made in wiping out that trade."

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Gee, TEN BILLION DOLLARS down the toilet and (more truthful) NO progress in wiping out that trade--but, hey, lots of progress in wiping out small peasant farmers, union leaders, political leftists, human rights workers, journalists and youthful bystanders getting called for jobs, murdered and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerillas, to "up" the Colombian military's "body count" to impress US Senators.

The "dot" that needs connecting here is that this TEN BILLION DOLLARS were NEVER "aimed at" wiping out the drug trade. It was a aimed at wiping out leftists and keeping Colombia in a state of terror, all the better to serve Monsanto, Chiquita, Dyncorp, Blackwater, Occidental Petroleum and other global corporate predators.

The US "war on drugs" is a complete and total lie.

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In 1996, after years of denials <78> the US Pentagon declassified translated excerpts from seven training manuals. <79> These manuals were prepared by the U.S. military and used between 1987 and 1991 for intelligence training courses at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and were also distributed by Special Forces Mobile Training teams to military personnel and intelligence schools in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. <80> The manuals taught counterintelligence agents to use "fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum" <81> The manual entitled "Handling of Sources" teaches, "The CI <82> agent could cause the arrest of the employees <83> parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating" to coerce cooperation.

In a 1981 study, human rights researcher Lars Schoultz concluded that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens...to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." <84> In 1998, Latin American professor Martha Huggins stated "that the more foreign police aid given (by the United States), the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their governments become." <85>

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In 1997, Amnesty International (AI) opined that the war on drugs is “a myth”, stating that members of Colombian security forces worked closely with paramilitaries, landlords and narco-traffickers to target political opposition, community leaders, human rights and health workers, union activists, students, and peasants. Amnesty International reported that “almost every Colombian military unit that Amnesty implicated in murdering civilians two years ago <1995> was doing so with U.S.-supplied weapons”. <108>

In 2000, studies carried out by both the United Nations and Human Rights Watch argued that paramilitaries continued to maintain close ties to the Colombian military . <109> HRW considered that the existing partnership between paramilitaries and members of the Colombian military was "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia_–_United_States_relations

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So, fast-forward to the Bush Junta, 2000 to 2008, and take these realities of the Clinton administration and magnify them a thousand times, as to US motives for larding Colombia with $10 BILLION, most of it in military aid.

US taxpayer suckers have been successfully propagandized to believe this horseshit about the "war on drugs." And even well-intended writers, journalists and report-authors fall for it, in the language they use to describe the alleged purpose of this money. They never say "alleged."

[bemildred]

3. Fat chance of that.

If only it were so.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Jaime Garzon murder was an AUC favor for Army Officers

Jaime Garzon murder was an AUC favor for Army Officers
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 10:10
Ashley Hamer

Former head of paramilitary organization AUC, Carlos Castaño, ordered the murder of Jaime Garzon at the specific request of senior military commanders, claimed ex-paramilitary chief 'El Aleman' on Monday.

Freddy Rendon Herrera, alias 'El Aleman', has brought the case back into the light ten years after the murder of the comedian Garzon with statements made yesterday to the prosecution in a Justice and Peace process.

According to Colombian media, 'El Aleman' declared that one of the 'Castaño Brothers', Vicente Castaño, had told him that Carlos Castaño had taken charge to order the killing of Garzon and that they had the support of some military leaders as well as important persons in Bogota. Castaño had allegedly been visited by important military personel in the lead up to the murder.

'El Aleman' also claimed that he met Jose Miguel Narvaez, the former deputy director of Colombian intelligence agency DAS, in 1997 in one of Carlos Castaño's paramilitary training schools. Narvaez is currently being investigated for his alleged implication in the killing of Garzon.

Though 'El Aleman' said he did not know whether Narvaez had been involved in the Garzon murder, he did state that the ex DAS deputy gave the AUC the addresses of journalists, NGO members and students who were thought to have links with FARC guerrillas.

"We took the addresses and names that he gave us because those people were leftist guerrillas infiltrating universities, NGO's and the media and they had to be killed" concluded 'El Aleman'.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/6263-jaime-garzon-murder-was-an-auc-favour-for-army-officers.html

[Judi Lynn]

5. L.A. Times to Colombia: Prosecute Corporate Supporters of Terrorism

L.A. Times to Colombia: Prosecute Corporate Supporters of Terrorism
Written by Leo W. Gerard, United Steelworkers International President
Wednesday, 07 October 2009

In an Oct. 1 editorial, the Los Angeles Times echoes the sentiment that the United Steelworkers union has been expressing for years -- corporate supporters of paramilitaries in Colombia who murder trade unionists must be held criminally accountable.

Specifically, the Los Angeles Times is applauding the order of a Colombian judge that top officials of the Alabama-based mining corporation, Drummond, be investigated as the intellectual authors of the brutal slayings of three union leaders in 2001.

As the Los Angeles Times opines:

"It is troubling . . . that when a defendant is convicted {in Colombia}, it is generally a hit man or low-level thug and almost never the mastermind or shot-caller who ordered a labor leader's murder. That's why it is significant that a judge in Colombia has asked the attorney general to launch a criminal investigation of top executives at Alabama-based Drummond Co., a multinational coal company."

The Los Angeles Times explains:

"at issue is whether Drummond executives collaborated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC in Spanish), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to murder union leaders organizing the Drummond coal mine in La Loma in 2001."

This issue arises in the context of an epidemic of anti-union violence in Colombia unprecedented in the world. As the Los Angeles Times notes:

"Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union organizer. In the last 17 years, more than 2,700 teachers, farmworkers, coal miners and other laborers have paid with their lives for seeking rights that Americans have long taken for granted, such as safe working conditions. During that same period, there were more than 4,000 reported death threats against labor leaders, 350 disappearances and kidnappings, and 75 cases of torture."

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2147/68/