Killing of 10 Soldiers Deals a Setback to Colombian Peace Talks With FARC Rebels

[Comrade Grumpy]

Source: New York Times

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia — After more than two years of peace talks, the finish line seemed to be getting closer. In the last few months, the rebels had declared a unilateral cease-fire, pledging to stop carrying out attacks, and had promised to stop recruiting child fighters. The two sides had even agreed to work together to find and destroy the thousands of land mines littering Colombia after five decades of war.

But suddenly, that progress suffered a major setback when at least 10 soldiers were killed late Tuesday night in what the government said was an attack by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The clash occurred in a hamlet in western Colombia called La Esperanza, or Hope.

President Juan Manuel Santos called it a “deliberate attack” by the FARC and said the military could resume bombing guerrilla encampments, lifting a ban he imposed in March for the sake of the peace talks and extended just last week.

“This implies a clear break of the unilateral cease-fire pledge,” Mr. Santos said in a televised news conference. “This is a reprehensible action that will not remain unpunished and demands decisive measures, and it will have consequences for those involved.”

<snip>

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/world/americas/colombia-attack-attributed-to-farc-threatens-peace-talks.html?_r=0

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The FARC had declared a unilateral truce in December, and it now blames an "incoherent" government strategy for sending military patrols to probe one of its most aggressive fronts.

Santos said the peace talks would continue.

[Little Tich]

1. FARC has caused so much grief for Colombia. Why can’t they just stop? n/t

[Judi Lynn]

2. You should take the time to start looking for the facts about Colombia's history.

This information is available in so many places it's a wonder you haven't learned about it already. Here's one source:

Death Squads Continue to Reign in Colombia
Posted: 03/24/2014 3:18 pm EDT Updated: 05/24/2014 5:59 am

The vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia last year were committed by paramilitaries and government forces, according to a conflict analysis NGO.

In the report published this summer by the Center for Research and Public Education (CINEP), the group registered a total of 1,332 human rights violations against Colombian civilians last year.

Groups that had emerged from officially defunct paramilitary organization AUC were the biggest offenders, responsible for some 44% of the violations, while state forces, including the military and police, were responsible for 43%. The FARC and other guerrilla groups committed about 15% of the violations.

2013 human rights violations in Colombia

Neo-paramilitary groups like the Urabeños or the Aguilas Negras were suspected of carrying out the vast majority of homicides and threats, while the police received most complaints over assault.

The numbers released by CINEP are in line with figures from a recent report by the Colombian NGO “Somos Defensores” which claimed that of the 194 crimes against community leaders, five of the known perpetrators were from the FARC or ELN. Paramilitaries and state forces were responsible for 128 of these crimes.

http://colombiareports.co/state-paramilitaries-human-rights-violations/

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Anti-guerrilla paramilitarism in Colombia
From Wikipedia

Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are armed groups that claim to be acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population. Anti-guerrilla paramilitary groups control the large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances and are the parties responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian Armed Conflict. According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups have been responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia per year, with the remainder committed by leftist guerrillas and government forces.

The first paramilitary groups were organized by the Colombian military following recommendations made by U.S. military counterinsurgency advisers who were sent to Colombia during the Cold War to combat leftist political activists and armed guerrilla groups. The development of later paramilitary groups has also involved elite landowners, drug traffickers, members of the security forces, politicians and multinational corporations. Paramilitary violence today is principally targeted towards peasants, unionists, indigenous people, human rights workers, teachers and left-wing political activists or their supporters.

Plan Lazo[edit]

US General William P. Yarborough was the head of a counterinsurgency team sent to Colombia in 1962 by the US Special Warfare Center. Yarborough was one of the earliest proponents of "paramilitary [...] and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents"[1].
In October 1959, the United States sent a "Special Survey Team", composed of counterinsurgency experts, to investigate Colombia's internal security situation, due to the increased prevalence of armed communist self-defense communities in rural Colombia which formed during and after La Violencia.[2] Three years later, in February 1962, a Fort Bragg top-level U.S. Special Warfare team headed by Special Warfare Center commander General William P. Yarborough, visited Colombia for a second survey.[3]

In a secret supplement to his report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough encouraged the creation and deployment of a paramilitary force to commit sabotage and terrorist acts against communists:

A concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States."[4]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-guerrilla_paramilitarism_in_Colombia

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May 27, 2014

Extinction Forecast for Indigenous Colombians

Plan Colombia’s Genocidal Legacy

by NICK ALEXANDROV

Extinction may well be the shared fate awaiting some 40 Colombian indigenous groups, UN official Todd Howland announced last month. Howland’s assessment underlined the risks mining operations pose to these communities, and echoes the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia’s finding, presented last year, that 66 of the country’s 102 indigenous communities could soon vanish—“victims of a genocide that is forcing cultural and physical extermination.” The government, for its part, considers mining “one of five ‘engines’ of the Colombian economy,” the U.S. Office on Colombia notes, adding that, in “the last twelve years, over 1.5 million hectares of Colombian land have been sold off to large-scale mining corporations for exploration and exploitation of Colombia’s extensive mineral deposits [.]”

These land sales mark one success of former President Álvaro Uribe’s (2002-2010) “Democratic Security and Defense Policy,” rolled out in 2003, and geared towards “defending Colombia’s sovereignty, the integrity of the territory and the constitutional order,” the government claimed. The state’s expanded presence, consolidation of territorial control, and subsequent auctioning of acquired regions seem to be the real legacies of the Plan Colombia era, too often discussed in “counterdrug” terms, and thus dismissed as a failure. A 2008 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) document, for example, pointed out that “coca cultivation and cocaine production levels [had] increased by about 15 and 4 percent, respectively” since the Plan’s 1999 launch, while Amnesty International mentions that “US policy has failed to reduce availability or use of cocaine in the US,” one indication that “Plan Colombia is a failure in every respect .”

Perhaps, but does Washington even want to roll back drug smuggling? “The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich ‘consuming’ countries,” Ed Vulliamy wrote in the Guardian two years ago, summarizing two Colombian academics’ conclusions. Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía’s research determined that “a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks,” in Europe and the U.S. How many bankers has the “drug war” put in jail? Or would Washington undercut an ally’s source of funds? The Colombian paramilitaries, for example, function as the army’s unofficial “Sixth Division,” according to Human Rights Watch. And Carlos Castaño, the paramilitaries’ former leader, admitted in March 2000 that some 70% of their funding came from drug trafficking, an assessment in line with U.S. intelligence estimates, which “have consistently reported over a number of years that the paramilitaries are far more heavily involved than the FARC (guerrillas) in drug cultivation, refinement and transshipment to the US,” International Security expert Doug Stokes writes.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/27/plan-colombias-genocidal-legacy/

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RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Coca-Cola, Nestle and Chiquita Brands on ‘Trial’
By Constanza Vieira
Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Apr 4 2006 (IPS) - The first public hearing held by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) in its Colombia session accused U.S. and Swiss multinational corporations of benefiting from the civil war in this South American nation in order to boost profit margins.

. . .

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, who are frequent paramilitary targets. Although private armed groups have long existed in Colombia, today’s paramilitary groups emerged in the early 1980s, financed by landowners to fight the leftist guerrillas, who were kidnapping and extorting wealthy ranchers. The collaboration between paramilitaries and the armed forces has been well documented by the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and Colombian government investigators, who hold the paramilitaries responsible for the lion’s share of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s four-decade civil war. The two main leftist rebel groups, the powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), both emerged in 1964. The government of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe, who took office in 2002, negotiated a controversial demobilisation of many of the groups making up the paramilitary umbrella organisation, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), many of whose top leaders are drug traffickers.

The number of trade unionists killed has gone down in the past few years. Official figures put the number at 43 for 2005, compared to 196 in 2002. But according to the National Trade Union School (ENS), a research centre founded in 1982 by academics and trade unionists in the Colombian city of Medellín, 70 members of trade unions were killed last year, while 260 received death threats, 56 were arbitrarily detained, seven were injured in bomb attacks, 32 were persecuted for their labour activism, eight were forced to flee their homes, and three were forcibly disappeared.

Those who report the persecution of trade unionists and attempt to draw attention to their plight are in turn accused of being guerrillas sympathisers, according to the PPT.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2006/04/rights-colombia-coca-cola-nestle-and-chiquita-brands-on-lsquotrial/
[font size=6][font color=red]ETC.[/font][/font]

[Little Tich]

3. Human Rights Watch 30 July 2014: Colombia: FARC Battering Afro-Colombian Areas

(2nd paragraph, snip)
"Human Rights Watch documented a wide range of abuses committed against scores of victims in Tumaco in 2013 and 2014 in which there is compelling evidence the FARC was responsible. These abuses included killings, disappearances, kidnapping, torture, forced displacement, attempted forced recruitment, planting landmines, extortion, and death threats against community leaders. Official data indicates the FARC has also committed sexual violence in Tumaco in 2013 and 2014." (end snip)

Read more: http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/30/colombia-farc-battering-afro-colombian-areas

The FARC guerillas are complete assholes that should disband. But so should the rest of the guerilla and paramilitary groups. And the false positives should stop.

[COLGATE4]

4. FARC has now become nothing but a way of making a

living for criminals. They need to be totally disbanded, along with the ELN and other, smaller groups.

[Comrade Grumpy]

5. Analysts I've talked to say that simply isn't true.

They say the group retains its ideological coherence and commitment.

But, yeah, they're involved in the coca/cocaine trade. So are a lot of other actors.

[Bacchus4.0]

6. Their goal has always been to overthrow the democratic government and replace with a marxist system

[COLGATE4]

7. Not the case. The oid ideologically driven leadership of

FARC is essentially geriatric now. The newer members, particularly the new recruits (cannon fodder) are driven to join out of economic necessity while the older leadership expolit the advantages of rank having its privileges (plus the money from either guarding or now running coca labs). The old political coherence that characterized it in the late 40's through the 70's is now a thing of the past.