Colombian soldier dies fighting for paramilitaries
Five far-right fighters killed in combat with government forces
Monday, April 18, 2005 Posted: 1720 GMT (0120 HKT)
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- Five far-right paramilitary fighters, including an army sergeant secretly belonging to the illegal group, were killed in combat with Colombian security forces on Sunday, officials said.
Army Commander Reinaldo Castellanos admitted that one of the dead militiamen was a member of the army, in the latest example of links between Colombia's security forces and right-wing squads set up by drug traffickers and cattle ranchers in the 1980s to combat Marxist guerrillas in the Andean country.
Castellanos said the government was investigating the case. The battle took place near the town of Cucuta on the Venezuelan border.
The paramilitaries have killed thousands of people in a war against leftist rebels and have earned international notoriety for massacring peasants, sometimes using crude weapons such as hammers and chain saws.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/04/17/colombia.violence.reut/Also from the article:
President Alvaro Uribe, a strong Washington ally, says the rebels, who have been fighting since the 1960s, are terrorists more interested in drug smuggling and kidnapping than in liberating the poor.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Quaint! More about Alvaro Uribe:
May 24, 2004
President Uribe’s Hidden Past
by Tom Feiling
Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe is, by his own admission, a man of the right. Unlike most recent Colombian presidents, Uribe is from the land-owning class. He inherited huge swathes of cattle ranching land from his father Alberto Uribe, who was subject to an extradition warrant to face drug trafficking charges in the United States until he was killed in 1983, allegedly by leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Alvaro Uribe grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of who became leading players in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cocaine cartel.
President Uribe’s credentials are impeccable. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, is as sharp as a tack, and a very able bureaucrat. At the tender age of 26 he was elected mayor of Medellín, the second-largest city of Colombia. The city’s elite in the 1980s was rich, corrupt and nepotistic, and they loved the young Uribe. But the new mayor was removed from office after only three months by a central government embarrassed by his public ties to the drug mafia. Uribe was then made Director of Civil Aviation, where he used his mandate to issue pilots’ licenses to Pablo Escobar’s fleet of light aircraft, which routinely flew cocaine to the United States.
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http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia185.htm