Colombia ex-president, EPP secretary general visits Armenian Genocide Memorial

[Judi Lynn]

18:59, 02.03.2019

YEREVAN.- Former president of Colombia and current president of the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) Andrés Pastrana, as well as the the delegation led by Secretary General Antonio López-Istúriz White of the European People’s Party (EPP) visited the Armenian Genocide memorial at the invitation of the Republican Party of Armenia. They laid flowers at the Eternal Flame.

Subsequently, the delegation members toured the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute.

https://news.am/eng/news/499265.html

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To inform people who haven't heard about Andres Pastrama, here's an article which should provide a starting point:

Colombians do not need help like this


America says it's intensifying the war on drugs. The truth is sinister

Isabel Hilton
Wednesday 21 June 2000
The Guardian

Meeting in London this week, senior officials from the EU, the US and Japan were discussing how much backing they should give to an aid package for Colombia. Colombia certainly needs assistance. The question is whether the help on offer will make matters better or worse.
Just to recap on what ails Colombia: an undeclared civil war that has lasted 30 years, displacing up to 40% of the population. Last year there were 402 massacres, many committed by paramilitary gangs working in conjunction with the Colombian army, others by guerrilla forces. The government has effectively ceded a third of the country - mainly the south - to the FARC, the largest guerrilla army, with whom it has initiated peace talks. Oh, and there's cocaine, of course - a trade that keeps the war going, corrupts the government and the judiciary and ensures the attention of the US.

That might be a good thing, except that it is the wrong kind of attention. The document under consideration in London is called Plan Colombia. President Andres Pastrana first announced it as a development plan for his country when he visited Washington two years ago, shortly after his election. Even before taking office, Pastrana had flown to meet rebel leaders - showing that he wanted to negotiate and that he acknowledged that a real end to violence required social justice. Social justice, in turn, demands development, and the plan he brought to Washington was a collection of economic and social programmes that he hoped would transform the areas in conflict. He called it a Marshall plan for southern Colombia, hoping that his country's patent need would elicit a generous response.

In the event, the international community pledged nothing to the plan. The US, however, offered to expand military assistance for counter-narcotics operations until, last year, Colombia became the world's third-largest recipient of US military aid. Meanwhile, Plan Colombia has been redrafted. Social and economic concerns come last. Top of the list is more military aid aimed, the US would have us believe, at suppressing the cocaine trade.

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Latin America hands are thinking they have seen something like this before. Where else did the US pour vast sums into a corrupt army working closely with psychopathic death squads? Where else did it pretend to believe that the men who shot dead an archbishop as he celebrated mass had nothing to do with government security forces? Twenty years on, have lessons been learned from El Salvador?

Apparently not. There are already US "advisers" in Colombia in numbers that are beginning to reach El Salvador levels. Evidence collected by the New York based Human Rights Watch links half of Colombia's 18 brigade-level army units to paramilitary activity.

These units operate throughout the country, including areas in receipt of US military aid. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, the Colombian government's own investigations demonstrated that army officers worked closely with paramilitary groups, sharing intelligence, carrying out joint operations and supplying weapons. Their targets included human rights workers and academics who had documented atrocities. The officers named remain in their posts.

Nowhere in the latest version of Plan Colombia is there mention of curbing paramilitary activity or bringing to justice those responsible for civilian massacres and disappearances.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,5673,334738,00.html

(You could almost say this is droll, seeing what things looked like 19 years ago, under Pastrana. So odd he's touring the world, acting like a beloved world leader... Oh, jesus.)



Pastrana, in the jacket, is asking if the "L" means he's a "loser."



Pastrana, with another Colombian ex-president, Teflon Álvaro Uribe.