Colombia: Old Domino's New Clothes

[Aidoneus]

posted both here & GD.. a more permanent home here.

Colombia: Old Domino's New Clothes
Conn Hallinan, March 16, 2004

There are moments in American foreign policy that run a déjà vu chill down one's spine. Just such a moment was the recent talk to a group of Cali businessmen by William Wood, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia. In his remarks, Wood endorsed efforts by the present government of President Alvaro Uribe to overturn that country's constitution to permit himself a second term. “The U.S. Constitution permits presidential re-elections,” Wood argued, “that's why we don't see this proposal as anti-democratic.”

Wood's remark harks back to the dark old days when the U.S. routinely intervened in Latin America, overthrowing governments and constitutions from Guatemala to Brazil.

In fact, the Uribe government's pursuit of a military victory in Colombia's four-decade-old civil war has spawned a host of undemocratic measures, a human rights crisis, and the threat that the war might spill over into neighboring Venezuela . While the Bush administration argues that respect for human rights has improved under Uribe, trade unionists and human rights advocates disagree. Two years ago, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights found “massive and systematic violations of (human) rights” and recommended 24 initiatives the Colombian government should take. According to human rights advocates, those steps have not been taken.

“The Uribe government has moved backwards on the UN recommendations,” says Richard Howitt, a member of the European Parliament and foreign policy and human rights spokesperson for the European Labor Party. While mass murders and kidnappings have declined, 20% and 32% respectively, targeted killings and disappearances of unionists and left opposition supporters have increased. Disappearances have increased from 258 in the 1994-95 period, to more than 1,200 a year since 2001. In the past 10 years, more than 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered, almost all at the hands of the Colombian Army or the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). According to Human Rights watch, “There is detailed, abundant, and compelling evidence of continuing close ties” between the two.

The most controversial of the new anti-terror legislation is Uribe's plan to “demobilize” the AUC and allow the paramilitaries to buy their way out of trouble. “Rather than serving time in prison,” says Colombian Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo, “there are alternative sentences and the individuals will be allowed to pay reparations.” Human rights organizations contemptuously refer to the plan as “checkbook immunity.”

The Bush administration has endorsed the process, even though AUC founder, Carlos Castano, has already been convicted in absentia for murder and drug dealing. The other AUC leader, Salvatore Mancuso, is a former associate of Medellin cocaine cartel chief, Pablo Escobar. Both are wanted by the U.S. and Interpol for shipping over 17 tons of cocaine to Europe between 1997 and 2002. This past November the government “demobilized” 856 members of a supposed AUC unit in Medellin . But according to Andy Webb-Vidal of the Financial Times, most of the “paras” were petty criminals and young unemployed men rounded up the night before in 28 government buses.

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http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc4099.html