Journalist association to march against recurrent death threats

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

Journalist association to march against recurrent death threats
Tuesday, 19 April 2011 10:19
Marguerite Cawley

The Colombian Federation of Journalists (FECOLPER) has scheduled a march to protest recurrent death threats made against journalists by criminal bands.

According to Spanish news agency EFE, members of FECOLPER, an organization which represents more than 1,300 journalists, reported Monday that a "march of silence" will take place countrywide on May 3.

Those congregated in the Barranquilla assembly, at which the decision was made, demanded that President Juan Manuel Santos' administration makes "concrete actions to guarantee the life, the physical integrity of the journalists and the right to the free exercise of their profession."

Among other elements, the march is in part a response to a February email sent by the "Aguilas Negras" neo-paramilitary organization's central bloc to a number of journalists, which stated, "It's time to kill and annihilate all the people and organizations that pose as human rights defenders."

Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15700-journalist-association-schedules-protest-march.html

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(The last time a march was accomplished protesting the violence against Colombians, several years ago, the organizers of the march were first terrorized by death theats, then were murdered. Of course, no one was officially charged with their murders.)

[Judi Lynn]

1. DAS planned smear campaign to sabotage NGOs (Colombian CIA & FBI)

DAS planned smear campaign to sabotage NGOs
Tuesday, 19 April 2011 10:20
Kathryn Thompson

Colombia's security agency DAS planned a smear campaign to discredit NGO organizations working for Colombia's displaced and violated citizens, El Espectador has discovered in classified DAS reports.

The plan was that DAS undercover agents would infiltrate the Second National Meeting of Victims of Crimes against Humanity and Violations of Human Rights in June 2005. The agents would chant and distribute flyers amongst a crowd of protesters in an attempt to suggest links between the NGOs and guerrilla groups the FARC and the ELN.

The event was specifically targeted because it was seeking to draw attention from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), with DAS officials also aiming to obtain "audio and video recordings of the event's participants and to establish the full identity, ideology and other information of interest of the participants."

~snip~
The government agency, which has been disgraced by the wiretapping scandal undertaken under President Uribe, was dealt a further blow earlier this month when former DAS official Jorge Alberto Lagos claimed that the government agency was heavily infiltrated by paramilitaries when he reviewed the organization in 2007.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15703-das-planned-smear-campaign-to-sabotage-ngos-.html

[Peace Patriot]

2. The Bush Junta didn't just trash Iraq and slaughter a million of its people; it didn't just invade

Afghanistan for a ten+ year war with the U.S. killing civilians to this day; it didn't just massively loot our own country and trash its institutions; it promulgated a culture of murder and mayhem in Colombia and, get this: early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Bush Junta didn't just promulgate a culture of murder and mayhem in Colombia; it very likely used Colombia to experiment with methods of murder and mayhem for use elsewhere--possibly including a Pentagon/USAID "pacification" plan in the La Macarena region, in Colombia, where a mass grass containing 500 to 2,000 bodies has been found.

"Murder USA"--a new American theme park--was being spread to the four corners of the earth--while vomitous de-regulation prepared the way for mass death and suffering, and Halliburton contracts, in the Katrina disaster, massive destruction of the Gulf coast in the BP disaster, massive nuclear radiation leaks in the Fukushima disaster and the disaster of global warming, while they induced a Great Depression by the most humongous thieving in history and destroyed our election system with corporate-run 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, so that we couldn't do anything to curtail these horrors or hold anyone accountable.

And I will add one more thing that the Bush Junta was likely doing in Colombia, with their "investment" of $7 BILLION stolen from the American people--they were very likely using this "war on drugs" funding to gain control of Colombia's trillion dollar-plus cocaine revenue stream and direct it to U.S. banksters, the CIA and the Bush Cartel.

It is NO ACCIDENT that journalists are being murdered and threatened with murder in the two chief U.S. client states in this hemisphere--Colombia and Honduras. It is BY DESIGN. Where there are real journalists, there is a chance at accountability. And that is the last thing that the U.S. and its local fascist operatives want in these countries.

It is the most mind-boggling irony that the U.S. and its corporate media propaganda machine accuse Hugo Chavez of suppressing free speech--when he and his government are daily subjected to the most scurrilous rightwing corporate rantings, in a country where journalists DON'T get murdered--while in the two most U.S. corporate/war profiteer-friendly countries in Latin America--Colombia and Honduras--journalists are routinely murdered and threatened with murder. The only thing Chavez did was to not renew the license of a fascist broadcaster who had actively participated in the 2002 coup d'etat. He should have put them in prison. He acted with restraint. And he and his government have, in fact, greatly improved public access to the public's broadcast airwaves, public participation in government and politics, honest, transparent elections, voter turnouts and free speech for all, not just for the rich and the corporate.

Yet how Washington and the corporate press howl about Chavez--telling dreadful lie after dreadful lie!

I am very impressed with the courage of the Colombian Federation of Journalists (FECOLPER) in mounting a protest against the murders and threats of murder against their members and other journalists. This takes a commitment to free speech that we simply don't see exhibited by the fatcat, collusive, so-called journalists of the U.S.-based transnational corporations that control our so-called 'news' --the scribblers of the New York Slimes, the Associated Pukes, Rotters, et al, and the scumbags of the corporate broadcast 'news.' It's true that Donald Rumsfeld targeted them in the early days of his slaughter in Iraq, but their corporate masters shut their protests down fast and they were collusive all along in that war. Rumsfeld was just trying to keep them that way--and succeeded. Where was our "free press" in helping to prevent that horror? Nowhere! Where has our so-called "free press" been on ANY issue of importance to this democracy? NOWHERE!

Now blood-drenched Colombia is being prepped for U.S. "free trade for the rich." Where is our scumbag, corporate, unfree press on this? NOWHERE!

[plumbob]

3. You'll have to admit - the evil bastards keep their minions busy.

Too bad none of it is for any positive or humane purpose...

[Judi Lynn]

4. The devastation of Colombia's civil warIn Colombia, years of civil war and assassinations have torn

The devastation of Colombia's civil warIn Colombia, years of civil war and assassinations have torn families apart
Mike Power
The Guardian,
Saturday 23 April 2011

Sitting in a shack that totters on stilts in a slum overlooking Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, Gloria Torres gasps as she looks at the creased and faded photograph of her son. He is smiling slightly, dressed in his best, thumbs in pockets, his dark eyes soft.

Torres holds it to her chest, crumples, seems to shrink by half in less than a second, then remembers she has guests. She composes herself, and lays the photo carefully back in a shoebox and strokes the face, brushes down her apron and pulls her youngest daughter closer. In a gentle, determined voice, she begins to tell her family's story.

Torres will remember 7 June 2007 for the rest of her life. She can even pinpoint the hour she knew that her son, 17-year-old Aurelio, was dead. "It was 3am. I felt something, like he'd come home, come to my bedside. I awoke and spoke to him, but he wasn't there. Then a feeling, a pain came over me, which to this day I still can't shake off."

~snip~
"Later, I found out that at that very moment the army were assassinating him," she says.


More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/23/colombia-farc-killed-mothers-justice