Report: CIA has helped Colombia kill dozens of rebel leaders
Source: Associated Press
Report: CIA has helped Colombia kill dozens of rebel leaders
By The Associated Press December 22, 2013 12:01 AM
WASHINGTON - The Washington Post is reporting that a covert CIA program has helped Colombia's government kill at least two dozen leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel insurgency also known as FARC.
The Post says the National Security Agency has also provided "substantial eavesdropping help" to the Colombian government.
And the paper says the U.S. provided Colombia with GPS equipment that can be used to transform regular munitions into "smart bombs" that can accurately home in on specific targets, even if they are located in dense jungles.
The Post report is based on interviews with more than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.
Read more: http://www.canada.com/technology/Report+helped+Colombia+kill+dozens+rebel+leaders/9315358/story.html
(Short article, no more at link.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
Proving beyond a shadow of doubt that he is an evil traitor to America. We should probably talk about that instead. 
Let's keep our priorities straight (pun intended) 
Gotta kill to protect us from the godless commies. Anyway, when it comes to making money, Columbia is wicked awesome!
Ask Richard Grasso (left, photo below), then-head of the New York Stock Exchange, as he gives a nice warm hug to Raul Reyes, (photo, right) then-living FARC #2.
The Real Deal: The Ultimate New Business Cold Call
NYSE's Richard Grasso and the Ultimate New Business "Cold Call"
Monday, 18 February 2002, 10:13 am
Column: Catherine Austin Fitts
Lest you think that my comment about the New York Stock Exchange is too strong, let's look at one event that occurred before our "war on drugs" went into high gear through Plan Colombia, banging heads over narco dollar market share in Latin America.
In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.
The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.
Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.
To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Sam and Dave estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive BIG PERCENT back to SLIM PERCENT and what that means to Wall Street and Washington's cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions.
It was only a few days after Grasso's trip that BBC News reported a General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress as saying: "Colombia's cocaine and heroin production is set to rise by as much as 50 percent as the U.S. backed drug war flounders, due largely to the growing strength of Marxist rebels"
CONTINUED...
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00069.htm
Reyes today is six-feet under. But his money's still good.
''To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.'' ~George Orwell
Ex-Senate President in ‘parapolitics’ scandal dies
posted by Mimi Yagoub
Dec 26, 2013
Luis Humberto Gomez, a former Colombian senate president condemned for paramilitary ties, died on Wednesday. The politician was 52.
Gomez passed away after a heart attack he suffered while playing squash in the Club Campestre in his hometown of Ibague, only months after an early release from a jail sentence in Colombia’s “parapolitics” scandal during which numerous local and high-level politicians were tried for associating with the country’s drug-trafficking paramilitary organizations.
~snip~
At the time, this was the highest sentence given to any of the dozens of politicians who had been imprisoned in for “parapolitics” practices. Gomez is amongst the 12 out of the 13 past Presidents of the Senate to have been shamed for involvement with criminal organizations.
Accusations against Gomez also included allegedly ordering the death of colleague and member of the House of Representatives Pompilio de Jesus Avendaño, and shifting public money to fund terrorist groups.
Despite these heavy claims against his name, Gomez passed away a free man, as he was prematurely released from prison on April 10 this year. He reportedly earned the reduction of his nine-year sentence by giving classes in industrial engineering and breeding quails.
http://colombiareports.co/ex-senate-president-parapolitics-scandal-dies/
(From previous posts here)
Paramilitaries said 1997 massacre was 'well coordinated' with army: US cable .
Wednesday, 18 July 2012 09:31 Adriaan Alsema
Members of paramilitary organization AUC told the U.S. embassy that the 1997 Mapiripan massacre in central Colombia was "well coordinated in advance" with (elements of) the army, according to a released diplomatic cable.
The State Department document was declassified and published Tuesday by the National Security Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to declassifying U.S. government documents.
According to the embassy's anonymous sources, the army provided "travel, logistics, intelligence and security" to the paramilitary who killed dozens of civilians in the five days after their July 15 incursion of the town.
~snip~
The identification of the victims has been complicated as the paramilitaries cut up the majority of their remains and threw them in a nearby river.
Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/25133-paramilitaries-said-1997-massacre-was-well-coordinated-with-army-us-cable.html
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
The Massacre at Mapiripán
By Jo-Marie Burt · April 3, 2000
In July 1997, the paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) went on a grisly killing spree in Mapiripán, a small coca-growing town in southeastern Colombia. According to eyewitness accounts, the paramilitaries hacked their victims to death with machetes, decapitated many with chainsaws and dumped the bodies–some still alive–into the Guaviare River. At least 30 people were killed, though the true number of dead may never be known. Carlos Castaño, the self-anointed leader of the AUC, immediately and unabashedly took credit for the massacre.
But Castaño did not act alone. Human rights observers immediately noted the complicity of the Colombian armed forces in the Mapiripán massacre. The paramilitaries used an army-guarded airstrip to land from their stronghold in northern Colombia and from which to launch their attack. Nor did the authorities respond to repeated calls by a local judge to stop the attack, which lasted six consecutive days.
Evidence later emerged suggesting that the role of the Colombian military in the massacre was in fact much deeper, and in March 1999 Colombian prosecutors indicted Colonel Lino Sánchez, operations chief of the Colombian Army’s 12th Brigade, for planning, with Castaño, the Mapiripán massacre. This is not surprising, given that the links between paramilitaries and the Colombian army have been well established. According to a February Human Rights Watch report, half of the Colombian Army’s 18 brigades have clear links to paramilitary groups.
In recent weeks, new evidence obtained by Ignacio Gómez of the Bogotá daily El Espectador, suggests that weeks, if not days, before the Mapiripán massacre, Colonel Sánchez received “special training” by U.S. Army Green Berets on Barrancón Island, on the Guaviare River. While it cannot be said that U.S. forces were directly involved in the massacre, or even knew that it was being planned, the events offer compelling evidence that U.S. equipment, training and money can be easily turned to vile purposes in what Human Rights Watch has called a “war without quarter.”
More:
http://colombiajournal.org/colombia6.htm
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Document Friday: The Mapiripán Massacre “Cover-up”
July 13, 2012
by Michael Evans
The Colombian military falsely blamed a junior officer for complicity in a 1997 paramilitary massacre “as part an effort to confuse and cover up the responsibility of others,” according to a 2003 State Department letter, which we’re featuring here today as our Document Friday selection.
This posting kicks off the Archive’s commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Mapiripán massacre, one of the most infamous and emblematic acts of violence of Colombia’s decades-old conflict. A forthcoming Electronic Briefing Book now being prepared for the Archive’s Web site will highlight new revelations from a highly anticipated set of declassified diplomatic cables on Mapiripán released earlier today by the State Department’s Appeals Review Panel.
The State Department wrote the letter on behalf of Hernán Orozco, a former Colombian army colonel who cooperated with prosecutors during the investigation of his commanding officer, Gen. Jaime Uscategui, the first Colombian general to be sentenced in a major human rights case. The letter and other declassified documents published here today show that the State Department harbored serious concerns that the “whistle-blower” junior officer Orozco was being unfairly persecuted in Colombia for testifying against a senior military commander.
Two of Colombia’s top paramilitary figures, Carlos Castaño and Salvatore Mancuso, masterminded the Mapiripán massacre, flying more than 100 of their men into the region from Urabá, a longtime paramilitary stronghold. Arriving at a joint military/police airfield, the paras traveled by truck and by river to Mapiripán, passing several military checkpoints along the way. Dozens of suspected guerrilla collaborators were killed in the days that followed. A local magistrate—who each night “heard the screams of people who were being tortured and murdered” by Castaño’s men, made urgent pleas to Orozco, commander of the local army brigade, to step in and end the slaughter.
More:
http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/document-friday-the-mapiripan-massacre-cover-up/
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Murder Training: Colombian Death Squad Used Live Hostages
April 29, 2007 By El Tiempo
El Tiempo, Bogota -- "Proof of courage": that is how the how the paramilitaries would term the training they imparted to their recruits so that they learnt how to carve up people while they were still alive.
Initially, the authorities rejected this version of the farmers who reported the practice... but when the combatants themselves started to admit to it in their testimonies before the prosecutors, the myth became a harsh crime against humanity.
Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández (alias Cristian Barreto), one of the perpetrators of the massacre at El Aro in Ituango, Antioquia, received this type of training in the same place where he learnt to handle arms and manufacture home-made bombs. Today, a prisoner at La Picota in Bogota, Villalba has described in details during lengthy testimonies how he applied the learning.
"Towards the middle of 1994, I was ordered to a course... in El Tomate, Antioquia, where the training camp was located," he says in his testimony. There, his working day started at 5 in the morning and the instructions were received directly from the top commanders such as 'Double Zero' (Carlos Garcia, since assassinated by another paramilitary group).
Villalba claims that in order to learn how to dismember people they would use farmers they gathered together in the course of taking neighbouring settlements. As he describes it, "they were aged people whom we brought in trucks, alive and bound up". The victims arrived at the ranch in covered trucks. They were lowered from the vehicle with their hands tied and taken to a room. There they were locked up for days in the hope that the training would start.
More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/murder-training-colombian-death-squad-used-live-hostages-by-el-tiempo
or:
http://www.africanamerica.org/topic/murder-training-colombian-death-squad-used-live-hostages
This is a translation of an article printed in Colombia's largest newspaper, "El Tiempo."
[center]
Former AUC, Francisco Enrique Villalba.[/center]
Material from a testimony by this man, Francisco Villaba, former death squad member. He was murdered not too long ago, after he had testified in court regarding his participation in AUC (right-wing paramillitary) activities:
Details of testimony that involves Uribe in a massacre
Posted on June 20, 2008 by csn
http://colombiasupport.net/2008/06/details-of-testimony-that-involves-uribe-in-a-massacre
(Very, very graphic. Horrendous.)
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Colombia Searches for its Dead
Apr 29 2007
Luz María Sierra
They Gave Quartering Classes
~snip~
When we decided at El Tiempo to do a special report on the phenomenon of common graves a scene began to repeat itself in our newsroom: one by one, reporters coming back from the field, returned mortified.
Few discoveries have shaken us so deeply and few are as difficult to write about: from the scale of the horror, to the way they died, and by the insatiable pain of the families, as well as—perhaps most unsettling—realizing the magnitude of the work that remains to be done throughout the country. Will a significant number of the dead be unearthed and identified to alleviate their families? Will we be able to mourn, as we should, to prevent a third chapter of extreme violence from enrapturing Colombia?
Paramilitary testimonies and the results of forensic teams lead us to conclude that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary umbrella group, not only designed a method to quarter human beings, they also took the extra step of actually giving classes on the subject, using live people taken to their training camps.
~snip~
Paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso confessed that to prevent authorities from finding the body of indigenous leader Kimi Pernía, they dug up his grave and threw his remains into the Sinú River. Informed sources allege that before beginning his demobilization negotiations with the government, Mancuso ordered land that was seeded with the dead on the Ralito estate to be dug up to hide his crimes. Now, investigators say the “Black Eagles,” which are a successor group of the paras, are going around the country digging up graves and throwing the remains into the rivers.
And the guerrillas? Their common graves have been found as well, especially in the department of Cundinamarca, but 98% of the denunciations and claims of graves being investigated by the Fiscalía are connected to the paras.
More:
https://nacla.org/node/1467
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Here's one reason it's hard to get a lot of formal information on the Colombia massacres:
Mounting Evidence of President’s Involvement in Massacre
News from Colombia | on: Sunday, 27 April 2008
~snip~
• In the months and years that followed, government agencies as well as human rights organisations opened investigations into the massacre at El Aro. However, in 1999 the government investigators that were involved in this work were themselves all murdered. The highest profile human rights defender in Antioquia at that time, Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo, publicly stated that the Army and paramilitaries had collaborated on the massacre and questioned why Governor Uribe had ignored the plea for help from residents in the period immediately preceding the attack. Uribe responded by accusing Mr Valle Jaramillo of being an "enemy of the armed forces". Then in February 1999, he too was assassinated.
• Some time afterwards Jose Ardila, the CONVIVIR representative who had attended the first meeting at the ranch with the Uribe brothers, had a falling out with Uribe. He was subsequently sentenced to a 60-year prison term but shortly afterwards was taken out of jail. He has never been seen since.
• Since going public with his testimony, Mr Villalba, who himself is in jail, has been the victim of three assassination attempts.
More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/news/article/296/mounting-evidence-of-presidents-involvement-in-massacre
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
COLOMBIA: Half Century of US Military Presence
Analysis by Javier Darío Restrepo
BOGOTA, Aug 11 2009 (IPS) - In the 1960s, it went by the name of Latin American Security Operation, or Plan LASO; today it is known as Plan Colombia. Back then, the aim was to weed out communism; now it is to combat drug trafficking, while at the same time dealing a blow to the guerrillas. But at that time or today, the interests of the United States are at stake, although the killing takes place in Colombia – whether in the fight against communists, guerrillas, drug traffickers, or all of them together.
In May 1964, the teletype machines were clicking as a United Press International (UPI) cable arrived from Washington about “a group of special forces technicians of the United States Army…sent to Colombia with (the) purpose of instructing soldiers and police in counter-guerrilla tactics.”
The advisers formed part of a campaign started by President Alberto Lleras (1945-1946 and 1958-1962) and continued by his successor Guillermo León Valencia (1962-1966).
The UPI cable goes on to say that “one of the principal tactics employed in the counter-guerrilla operations was the implementation of psycho-warfare which brought about the cooperation and trust of the indigenous population.”
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/08/colombia-half-century-of-us-military-presence/