Colombian VP says AFL-CIO chief is lying.

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Herald

Colombian VP says AFL-CIO chief is lying.
Posted on Fri, Apr. 18, 2008
By PABLO BACHELET
[e-mail]

WASHINGTON -- An irate Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos set aside diplomatic niceties and lashed out Friday at opponents of a U.S. free trade pact with Colombia, accusing them of distorting the country's record on violence.

Santos, saying he had to be ''respectful'' of the legislative branch of another country, avoided attacking Congressional Democratic leader who oppose the agreement. But he showed no restraint in attacking AFL-CIO head John Sweeney and the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, José Miguel Vivanco.

Both have lobbied hard for Congress to delay ratification of the free trade agreement. Opposition by the AFL-CIO is viewed as especially significant because organized labor provides money and volunteers to many Democratic candidates. Human Rights Watch is often critical of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's rights record.
(snip)

He said he understood Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's opposition to the Colombian deal as ''politics'' but said many Colombians were wondering ``about our country's dignity.''





Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/501374.html

---

Colombia's Francisco Santos, worried about " our country's dignity.''

[Virginia Dare]

1. I'm sure there's a very logical explanation..

for the dead union organizers?...:eyes:

[Omaha Steve]

2. They can say John Sweeney is a liar

But they can't say the bodies aren't dead!

[Zorro]

5. Do you know

who killed them?

[struggle4progress]

8. If you don't know much about Colombian death squads, you can start reading here:

http://hrw.org/doc?t=americas&c=colomb

[Zorro]

10. I know a little bit about the situation in Colombia

My question was whether it was known as a fact who the criminals are?

[struggle4progress]

14. Yes, Colombians know who the death squads are

[Zorro]

15. If they knew

then incriminating evidence would be produced.

Where is the incriminating evidence?

[struggle4progress]

17. Colombian establishment rocked by death squad scandal (Nov 06)

Sibylla Brodzinsky in Bogotá
Wednesday November 29 2006

Colombia's political establishment is being shaken to its core by almost daily revelations of how allies of President Alvaro Uribe apparently worked hand-in-hand with feared rightwing militias who used terror for more than a decade to impose their will on the population.

The country's supreme court this week ordered six high profile, pro-Uribe politicians - including the foreign minister's brother - to submit to questioning about their alleged links with the paramilitary groups, which are blamed for the massacre, murder and torture of thousands of Colombians.

Two senators, an acting representative and a former congresswoman from the northern province of Sucre have already been arrested on similar charges, and a former governor is at large. Senator Alvaro García, the lynchpin of Sucre politics, even faces murder charges for allegedly planning the 2000 massacre of 14 people in a small village and for ordering the murder of an election official ...

Senator Miguel de la Espriella from northern Córdoba province revealed in a Sunday newspaper interview that he was among about 40 politicians that had signed a political pact with paramilitary leaders when they were at the height of the their power in 2001. Yesterday, the revelation claimed the head of a minor official in Mr Uribe's government who also admitted to signing the pact when he was a member of Congress ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/nov/29/colombia.sibyllabrodzinsky

[Zorro]

23. So the Colombian government

is taking forceful actions against some supporters for crimes committed before it came into power. It's also been widely reported that serious crime has decreased significantly in Colombia since Uribe took office.

That's certainly a good thing, and the Uribe administration deserves US support to continue such actions. Wouldn't you agree?

[struggle4progress]

25. Organizers of Colombian march against death squads killed (Mar 08)

The Associated Press
Published: March 14, 2008

BOGOTA, Colombia: Six organizers of a recent march to protest violence by the Colombian state and paramilitary death squads have been killed and more than two dozen threatened with death, the U.N. and a human rights group said Friday.

The victims, including union workers and human rights activists, were killed around the time of the March 6 national protest, according to the Movement of Victims of State Crimes and the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

"On March 12, organizations connected with the protest received an e-mail with threats made by the 'Black Eagles' (a death squad), which came with a list of 28 human rights defenders saying the group would be implacable with those people who had organized the protest," said Ivan Cepeda, director of the victims' movement ...

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/14/america/LA-GEN-Colombia-Paramilitary-Killings.php

[Zorro]

28. Let me paraphrase the rest of the linked report

to ensure a proper balance.

You couldn't cite the additional clarifying paragraphs because of DU's copyright rules, right?

1. The UN high commissioner has asked for the murders to be investigated, and there's no accusation of Uribe government involvement.

2. Tens of thousands of paramilitaries have been disarmed by the Uribe government, which has condemned the "Black Eagles" as a criminal organization.

3. The March 6 demonstration was allegedly organized by FARC to counter the massive February protest against FARC.

4. Many Colombians refused to participate in the March 6 demonstration because they viewed it as an attempt to smear the Uribe administration and the Colombian military.

Do you agree that this synopsis is accurate?

[struggle4progress]

33. You claim #23 "crimes committed before (Uribe) came into power." I merely point out that the crimes

continue

The facts I provided show that a deathsquad recently targeted and killed the organizers of an anti-deathsquad march -- simply because they organized an anti-deathsquad march. And consistent with its by now all-too-familiar impunity, the political establishment -- rather than treating these extrajudicial executions as criminal murders -- simply reflexively claims the dead were somehow associated with FARC. And this reflexive claim, to your mind, apparently justifies these executions. Very well, then: I know now on which side you stand, and I find your stance despicable

[Zorro]

39. So the very article you previously quoted

indicated that the Colombian people saw the demonstration to have an agenda different than what was promoted, and did not participate.

It also stated that the Uribe government considers the "Black Eagles" to be a criminal organization. Do you think they could investigate and charge the perpetrators within 24 hours or something? You watch too much CSI, if that's the case.

Are you also asserting that there was no FARC involvement in organizing the march? Or do you reflexively believe whatever anti-Uribe screed you can discover by Googling the web?

I stand on the side of truth and justice, and prefer to not be a gullible simp.

[struggle4progress]

44. Your theory appears to be that murdering organizers of a demonstration is justified if

the government accuses them of being terrorists or if not everyone in the country attends

:puke:

[Zorro]

50. Nope

I'm saying that the murders should be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

You imply that the Uribe administration is complicit in their murders, but can't point to any compelling evidence.

I could just as well assert that FARC murdered these organizers to promote their anti-Uribe agenda, and it would be just as valid as your unproven accusations.

[bitchkitty]

105. You are very gullible, but I don't think you're a simp.

Your stupidity is deliberate. It's pathetic and disgusting.

DEAD PEOPLE - can you justify their murders? And what do you consider proof? Videotape? Broadcast on Fox News?

You nauseate me.

[Zorro]

108. So take a dramamine

"bitchkitty."

Deliberate stupidity? Look in the mirror and then read this about the type of criminals the Colombian government is fighting against:

<snip>

The guerrilla walked out of the jungle tired, hungry and bearing the dismembered hand of his slain commander.

The rebel, known simply as Rojas, said the Colombian troops were closing in on his guerrilla column and he wanted out of the fight. But the rebels shoot deserters — so instead he murdered his commander and fled, lopping off the dead man's right hand to present to the army.

"I did it to save my life," the mustachioed rebel told a press conference Saturday in the western city of Pereira. "Because if you're going to desert, they'll shoot you."

<snip>

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23541790/

But they're the good guys to you, right?

[Judi Lynn]

110. Maybe the rebel in your tale got the idea from the right-wing death squads.

Here's a story which ran in the Colombian newspaper, El Tiempo which is possibly their largest paper:

Murder Training: Colombian Death Squad Used Live Hostages
by El Tiempo
April 29, 2007

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.

“The instruction of courage” would start later: the people would be divided up in four or five groups “and there they dismembered them”, says Villalba in his testimony. “The instructor would say to each of them: ‘You stand there, so-and-so over there and provide security to him who is doing the dismembering’. Every time that a settlement is taken and someone is going to be dismembered, security has to be offered to those doing the job”.

The women and men were taken out in their underwear from the rooms where they had been locked up. Still with their hands bound, they took them to the place where the instructor was waiting to start the first lessons: “The instructions were to chop off their arms, the head, to dismember them alive. They were usually crying and asked us not to do anything to them, that they had families.”

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12697

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here's something you will dispute but don't worry, there are so many more to post:

The Alto Naya Massacre: Another Paramilitary Outrage

by Liam Craig-Best and Rowan Shingler

The district of Alto Naya on the border of the southwestern Colombian departments of Cauca and Valle experienced a savage three day paramilitary onslaught between April 10 and 13 leaving an estimated 120 people dead and more than 4,000 displaced. The episode has once again exposed not only the inhuman brutality of the paramilitary death squads (witnessed on an almost daily basis), but also the complicity of the Colombian Armed Forces and the negligence of the Colombia State with regards to adequately defending the basic human rights of its citizens.

"The remains of a woman were exhumed. Her abdomen was cut open with a chainsaw. A 17-year-old girl had her throat cut and both hands also amputated."
Eduardo Cifuentes, National Ombudsman

Paramilitary activity in the area began on April 10 when peasants sighted a group of 90 men who were later confirmed, by both local guerrilla units and other peasants, to be part of a much larger paramilitary unit consisting of over 400 men in one large and two smaller contingents. Eyewitness Delio Chate said that the killing began on April 11 when death-squads entered his village, as well as the villages of El Ceral, La Silvia, La Mina, El Playa, Alto Seco and Palo Grande among others. According to Chate, the paramilitaries dragged people accused of being guerrilla sympathizers into the street and killed them.

In the tiny village of Patiobonito the death squads killed 7, including a local shopkeeper accused of selling food and supplies to the guerrillas and an indigenous council worker, Cayetano Pilcue, who was murdered for possessing a mobile phone. The other five victims were all members of the same indigenous family: Daniel Suarez, his wife Flor Dizut and their 3 nephews; William, Fredy and Gonzalo Osorio Lopez.

On April 12 residents who had managed to escape the area raised the alarm and the departmental authorities began to take an interest. Peasants fleeing the region that evening testified that the paramilitaries had killed at least 23 people and were giving all the other residents five hours to pack up and leave the district. By midnight on April 12 approximately 170 families had fled.

More:
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia64.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This story also comes from El Tiempo, Colombia leading newspaper

The paramilitaries' worst massacre in 10 years
El Tiempo (Bogotá)
Tuesday, 28 February 2000

Last week, paramilitaries carried out the worst massacre in the country since the Honduras and La Negra, Uraba, massacres of over 10 years ago. Three hundred men arrived in the community of El Salado, 20 kilometres from Carmen de Bolivar, and killed over 40 people.

What were they seeking with this new onslaught of terror? Santander Lozada, second in command of the AUC and the man directly responsible for this massacre, said they were seeking to attack the rearguard of the FARC "head on".

He argued that, from there, the guerrillas were planning to set up checkpoints in the area of the Maria Mountains. And that, in response to appeals from peasants and truckers who travelled from Medellin to Cartagena, they decided to raid the zone.

"We are going to cleanse the coast of guerrillas," said Lozada. And that is what they are doing, by means of orgies of blood and terror.
(snip)

By means of attacks on the civilian population (which the AUC accuses of being guerrillas), Castano moves forward in his strategy to break the "cordon" that the FARC have been consolidating for years, from Uraba, in Antioquia, to Arauca passing through Sucre, southern Bolivar, Monteria, and Norte de Santander. Thus, the country is divided in three: the coastal zone, the southern zone, and, in the middle of the sandwich, the country's centre.

Some analysts add that the AUC would also have an economic interest in consolidating its herds of livestock in Sucre.

Although Castano's logic - if killing can be called logical - would seem clear, it can be said that this massacre in El Salado has deeper origins.

Twenty years ago, this zone belonged to tobacco plantation owners. The attitude of some, which even included demands that peasants pay for their crops by "lending out their daughters", generated a lot of resentment among the peasants. It also motivated a strong movement for the land that led to an extensive agrarian reform led by the ANUC {National Association of Rural Land Users}.

More:
http://www.colombiasupport.net/200002/eltiempo-massacre-0228.html

[Zorro]

112. Making excuses for your favorite terrorist group again, I see

I'm not surprised.

[Judi Lynn]

115. Right. As if people have "favorite terrorist groups." That's really a failed response.

Who would perceive your stupid accusations of "FARC-lover" to be as asinine, loathsome, and nasty as Joe McCarthy's obsession with charging everyone he saw who couldn't stand his ignorant hostility to be a "COMM-YEWWW-NIST."



Half-wit scum. How did it take so long for him to die of alcoholism?

[Judi Lynn]

113. Adding photo of some brave AUC, as they proudly march through another village they have come

to "liberate:"


Their leader was Carlos Mario Jiménez, A.K.A. "Macaco," who, for some strange reason, was recently arrested and is being sent to the U.S., on drug trafficking charges. The families of the people he massacred have been hoping he would stay in Colombia and be held responsible for his true atrocities.

Being sent to the U.S. on drug charges is a good way to keep the grotesque history of atrocities of these monsters well concealed, as they are never considered relative to the drug charges in the States.

[bitchkitty]

111. I'll tell you who are NOT the good guys - and that's MSNBC.

What the fuck? Cutting and pasting propaganda does nothing to prove your point. I am so tired of having to live in a country with so much deliberate ignorance. If we were having a conversation, you'd have your fingers in your ears, singing "lalalalala".

Like I said, pathetic.

[Zorro]

114. Oh I see

FARC are the good guys. MSNBC are not the good guys, because they report something you prefer to not consider. Got it.

If you've actually read this thread, you'll find that I have readily acknowledged atrocities ON BOTH SIDES. Yet FARC's ruthlessness and complicity in criminal atrocities is willfully ignored.

Deliberate ignorance indeed -- of a complex situation.

[bitchkitty]

117. Nothing complex about dismembered farmers.

Unless of course you're morally impaired. I can't think of any other reason why you would stick up for the Colombian government.

[Zorro]

119. I'm curious

Why can't you also acknowledge FARC atrocities? That's the amoral position.

So let me explain it to you one more time. There's blood on the hands of both sides. Recognizing that is not "sticking up" for the Colombian government.

[Judi Lynn]

121. As any tool should read, assuming he has gone through grade school, the death squads carry the heavy

burden of the VAST majority of atrocities, as asserted by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

~snip~
In the last 20 years, Colombia’s armed conflict has cost the lives of at least 70,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians killed out of combat, while more than 3 million people have been internally-displaced since 1985. Tens of thousands of other civilians have been tortured, “disappeared” and kidnapped. The vast majority of non-combat politically-motivated killings, “disappearances”, and cases of torture have been carried out by army-backed paramilitaries.

The government began demobilization talks with the paramilitary umbrella organization, the Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC), soon after the AUC announced a ceasefire in December 2002. Under the Santa Fe de Ralito agreement, signed in July 2003, the AUC agreed to demobilize all its combatants by the end of 2005. More than 8,000 paramilitaries have so far reportedly demobilized.

However, the latest figures suggest that the paramilitaries have been responsible for at least 2,300 killings and “disappearances” since they declared their unilateral ceasefire.

http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR230252005?open&of=ENG-COL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Dirtier War
Colombia’s fake “Peace Process” and US Policy
by Jake Hess
June 19, 2007

~snip~
Nor do the Democratic proposals appear to include any new mechanisms for ensuring that remaining military aid is not used to commit human rights abuses. The Democrats claim to be devoted to justice for Colombia’s struggling social movements; yet, as evidence presented in this article amply demonstrates, the military and government they’re funding continues to collaborate with deathsquads in violently suppressing those activists brave enough to speak out. Democrats claim to be especially concerned about labor rights; yet, the President they’re prepared to hand some $600 million to has presided over the assassination of some 400 trade unionists, almost all of which have been carried out with impunity. As in the past, the majority of these killings are blamed on deathsquads allied with the Colombian state and, as has become clear recently, Uribe’s political network in the government. (7)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13110

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
The final declaration of the G-24, as the international group of donors meeting in Cartagena is known, came a day after the collapse of negotiations between the rightist Uribe administration and lawmakers of different stripes, on legislation aimed at holding the paramilitaries accountable for abuses.

The United Nations and leading human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch blame the paramilitary militias for the vast majority of atrocities committed in Colombia's armed conflict.

http://www.educweb.org/webnews/ColNews-Feb05/English/Articles/DonorsSetConditionsforSup.html

[Zorro]

122. Still can't admit to FARC atrocities, can you?

Because they're the good guys, right?

[Judi Lynn]

129. Since you provided the dismembered hand story, here's one you may appreciate:

II. COLOMBIA AND INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW

The local priest was first to challenge the darkness in Guintar by stringing Christmas lights from the church steeple. Then someone hung lights above a nearby door and window. On the December 1997 day Human Rights Watch visited this village of 2,000 in central Colombia, Robert Jaramillo (not his real name) opened his coffee shop for the first time in four months, and light from this single door spilled onto a lovely, deserted, and dark central square.

Several months earlier, armed men had seized Guintar and accused its residents of supporting leftist insurgents. The men forced everyone from their homes, residents told us, then chose one local man and cut off his nose. One of the men told Jaramillo and other store owners that if they opened again, he would return, cut them open alive, and string their entrails from the manicured bushes in the square. The reason? Store owners were suspected of having sold food and medicine to the leftist insurgents who have operated in these dry mountains for decades.

Weeks later, guerrillas entered Guintar and vowed that their enemies would never win. To underscore their power, they killed the mayor, a town councilman, and a resident of the nearby town of Anzá, accused of supporting their enemies. Seven families left Guintar the next day, joining the thousands forced to flee their homes because of political violence in Colombia.

Jaramillo, though, holds on. He says he has no choice.“I have eleven people in my family, so how are we supposed to live?” Jaramillo asked Human Rights Watch near his store. The only one to reopen since August, Jaramillo knew he was risking his life and the lives of his family to reprisals. A mixture of fury, fear, and humiliation twisted his boyish features. “The minute we see them coming again, we are going to run for our lives.”

The drama of Guintar is repeated throughout Colombia, where war is not fought primarily between armed and uniformed combatants on battlefields, but against the civilian population and in their homes, farms, and towns. Many of the victims of Colombia’s war wear no uniform, hold no gun, and profess no allegiance to any armed group. Indeed, battles between armed opponents are the exception.Instead, combatants deliberately and implacably target and kill the civilians they believe support their enemies, whether or not the civilians are even aware that they are in peril.

It is store owners like Jaramillo, truck drivers, farmers, teachers, doctors, community leaders, food vendors, and washerwomen who run the highest risks in today’s Colombia.1

As much as a battle for control over territory, Colombia’s conflict is one waged on the hearts and minds of its people, a cruel inversion of the Vietnam War-era strategy of winning the population’s support. In Colombia, there is often no attempt to win allegiance, only punish it as it is perceived by men with guns.

More:
http://www.hrw.org/reports98/colombia/Colom989-03.htm

[struggle4progress]

27. Colombian union members still targeted by right-wing death squads (Apr 08)

By Andrew O. Selsky | The Associated Press
9:07 AM EDT, April 8, 2008

... Colombia remains the world's deadliest country for union activists. More than 700 unionized workers have been killed in Colombia since 2001, the government said. Colombia accounted for half of all such killings globally in 2006, according to the International Trade Union Confederation. Uribe has said just 26 union members were killed in all of 2007, but 11 were killed in the past month alone ...

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/caribbean/sfl-0408coltradereact,0,5614614.story

[Judi Lynn]

30. You never expect people to keep pretending to be unaware of the facts. When they go this far, you

can be sure they're hoping to wear you down, since it takes your time, never theirs, looking for articles, while they continue to make idiotic claims and assertions.

I read earlier today that the death rate of union workers in Colombia is CLIMBING again. Countless articles indicate, including reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that the paramilitaries were never really inactive, they've simply been regrouping under new names.

As for Uribe's fabulous control over the death squads, he's been CONNECTED to the narcotraffickers forever, even as it was discussed in a report by the United States Department of Defense in 1991. His father was up to his Uribe nose, as well.

People who attempt to muddy the waters are simply hoping they'll take up so much of your time, you'll have to leave the conversation, since you have other things to do, then they'll claim they've won the dispute. Obnoxious, unprincipled assholes!

U.S. INTELLIGENCE LISTED COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT URIBE AMONG
"IMPORTANT COLOMBIAN NARCO-TRAFFICKERS" IN 1991

Then-Senator "Dedicated to Collaboration with the Medellín Cartel at High Government Levels"


Confidential DIA Report Had Uribe Alongside Pablo Escobar, Narco-Assassins

Uribe "Worked for the Medellín Cartel" and was a "Close Personal Friend of Pablo Escobar"

Washington, D.C., 1 August 2004 - Then-Senator and now President Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels," according to a 1991 intelligence report from U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in Colombia. The document was posted today on the website of the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based at George Washington University.

Uribe's inclusion on the list raises new questions about allegations that surfaced during Colombia's 2002 presidential campaign. Candidate Uribe bristled and abruptly terminated an interview in March 2002 when asked by Newsweek reporter Joseph Contreras about his alleged ties to Escobar and his associations with others involved in the drug trade. Uribe accused Contreras of trying to smear his reputation, saying that, "as a politician, I have been honorable and accountable."

The newly-declassified report, dated 23 September 1991, is a numbered list of "the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations." The document was released by DIA in May 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Archive in August 2000.

The source of the report was removed by DIA censors, but the detailed, investigative nature of the report -- the list corresponds with a numbered set of photographs that were apparently provided with the original -- suggests it was probably obtained from Colombian or U.S. counternarcotics personnel. The document notes that some of the information in the report was verified "via interfaces with other agencies."

President Uribe -- now a key U.S. partner in the drug war -- "was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States" and "has worked for the Medellín cartel," the narcotics trafficking organization led by Escobar until he was killed by Colombian government forces in 1993. The report adds that Uribe participated in Escobar's parliamentary campaign and that as senator he had "attacked all forms of the extradition treaty" with the U.S.

More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm

[Zorro]

31. Here's a fact for you

The reference states on the very first page "THIS IS AN INFO REPORT, NOT FINALLY EVALUATED INTEL".

What it means it that it was not verified as accurate or factual by intel analysts.

Jumping to conclusions based on unvalidated intel served as the basis for the US invasion of Iraq.

It shouldn't be a surprise that misleading propaganda is challenged in a democratic forum.

[struggle4progress]

34. Not very good at intelligence, eh? Uribe was born into a drug-trafficking family;

his childhood friends went to work for Escobar; Uribe campaigned for Escobar and has long relied on Escobar's cousin as an advisor; his connection to the death squads go back decades. Careful cherry-picking is not required to produce the story in general outline

... The U.S. ignored the report. Uribe claimed that the report was false. But he has kept Mr. José Obdulio Gaviria, Pablo Escobar’s cousin, as his right hand adviser and first defender during his entire presidency. Mr. Uribe never denied that he campaigned for Mr. Pablo Escobar, but claimed that “to become a senator from the state of Antioquia, he had to rub elbows with and shake the hands of suspected drug lords ... http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00082.htm

... 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 ... Alvaro Uribe grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of who became leading players in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cocaine cartel ... 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 ... In 1995, Uribe became governor of the Antioquia department, of which Medellín is the capital. The region became the testing ground for the institutionalization of paramilitary forces that he has now made a key plank of his presidency” ... Security forces and paramilitary groups enjoyed immunity from prosecution under Governor Uribe, and they used this immunity to launch a campaign of terror in Antioquia ... http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia185.htm

[Zorro]

37. Oh I'm quite good with intelligence

For instance, I can tell an Op-Ed piece from a factual document. Too bad you can't.

[struggle4progress]

47. Still no links and completely unresponsive to the material I posted

[Zorro]

55. Sorry

don't waste time responding to Op-Ed pieces.

[struggle4progress]

59. You complained that an earlier seemed not to be final intel: I posted corroborating info

[Zorro]

60. An Op-Ed piece is not corroborated, validated intel

[struggle4progress]

61. So far, dozens of links from me, one from you. The interested can read the thread. Goodbye

[Zorro]

66. Wow

Backing up your uncorroborated assertions with links to uncorroborated assertions has only avoided answering the primary issue of contention in this thread, which is:

There has been no evidence produced in any of your posted links that the Uribe government was complicit in last month's murders of trade union organizers. That doesn't qualify as revealing the truth of the situation.

There has been a lot of heat but no light on this issue from you. But thanks for playing. Vaya con Dios.

[AlphaCentauri]

63. Virginia Vallejo may have some good info for us

In 1993, eight thousand men, the Navy Seals and the Delta Force were needed to hunt down Escobar and help a specially-trained squad of the Colombian Police to end six years of narcoterrorism. On July 18th 2006, the American Government saved Virginia Vallejo's life when she was brought to Miami on an airplane belonging to the DEA, as as potential witness in the trial of the Cali Cartel bosses. The following day her departure made front-page news in 42 newspapers worldwide. Several weeks later, the Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers pleaded guilty and their 2.1 billion frozen fortune was split between Colombia and the USA.

A new stage of her life began for Virginia when her book on Escobar became the #1 bestseller in the Hispanic market in November 2007. Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, soon in English, is the only possible intimate - and, definitely, the most multi-faceted and organic - vision of the legendary drug lord: the underworld thug, the businessman, the billionaire, the lover, the warrior, the enemy, the monster and the myth.
http://www.lovingpablo.com/

[Judi Lynn]

72. More on Uribe's history:

~snip~
Uribe’s History

The new disclosures also have brought back to public attention the Uribe family’s long history of ties to drug lords and paramilitary militias. Colombia’s Supreme Court announced in July that it was investigating Senator Mario Uribe, the president’s cousin and his point man in the Colombian Congress, for alleged links to the AUC.

Several paramilitary leaders have said Mario Uribe was one of their allies and an intermediary with the government. He has denied any wrongdoing.

But the family link to purported drug lords dates back several decades. As a young man and an aspiring politician, Álvaro Uribe lost his position as mayor of Medellín – after only five months on the job – because the country’s president ousted him over his family’s suspected connections to traffickers, according to media reports at the time.

His father Alberto Uribe, a wealthy landowner, reputedly had been a close associate of the Medellín cartel and its kingpins, such as Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers, who were personal friends.

In 1983, Alberto Uribe was reportedly wanted by the U.S. government for drug trafficking when he was killed in a kidnapping attempt by the FARC. According to media accounts, his body was airlifted back to his family by one of Escobar’s helicopters.

In the early 1990s, Álvaro Uribe’s brother, Santiago, was investigated for allegedly organizing and leading a paramilitary militia that was headquartered at the Uribe family hacienda. He was never charged and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. But Santiago was photographed alongside Fabio Ochoa at a party even after the government had declared Ochoa one of the most notorious Medellín cartel kingpins.

The incident with Santiago Uribe coincided with Álvaro Uribe’s eight years in the Senate, where he opposed extradition of drug suspects. His critics accused him of working for the Medellín cartel.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2008/030908a.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A good place to look for information on Uribe is to speak with someone who has moved to the States from Colombia. Chances are you're going to hear FAR more than you've ever seen written anywhere, especially in our corporate media.

[Judi Lynn]

73. More Uribe history: The paramilitary candidate

The paramilitary candidate

Tom Feiling

Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe Velez 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 Velez, himself subject to an extradition warrant to face charges of drug trafficking in the USA, until he was killed, allegedly by leftwing FARC guerrillas, in 1983. Uribe Jnr grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of whom were to become leading lights in Pablo Escobar's Medellín cocaine cartel.

President Uribe's credentials are impeccable: educated at Harvard and Oxford, he is sharp as a tack, and a very able bureaucrat to boot. At the tender age of 26 he was elected Mayor of Medellín, the second city of Colombia.
The city's elite in the `80s was as rich as it was corrupt as it was nepotistic, and they loved the young Uribe. But he was removed from office after only three months, by a central government embarrassed by his public ties to the drugs mafia. He was then made Director of Civil Aviation, where he used his mandate to issue pilots' licences to Pablo Escobar's fleet of light aircraft flying cocaine to the US.

In 1995 Uribe became governor of the Department of Antioquia, of which Medellín is the capital. The region became the testbed for the institutionalisation of paramilitary forces that he has now made a key plank of his presidency.
Convivir were "special private security and vigilance services, designed to group the civilian population alongside the Armed Forces". Security forces and paramilitary groups enjoyed immunity from prosecution under governor Uribe, and used this immunity to launch a campaign of terror in Antioquia. Thousands of people were murdered, `disappeared', detained and driven out of the department.
In the town of Apartado for example, three of the Convivir leaders were well-known paramilitaries. All were trained by the 17th
Brigade of the Army. In 1998, representatives of more than 200 Convivir associations announced that they would unite with the paramilitary AUC under its murderous leader Carlos Castano.

Free and fair press?
Even when he announced his intention to run for President, Uribe's paramilitary connections appear to have deterred many journalists from examining the ties between drug gangs and the Uribe family. An exception was Noticias Uno, a current affairs programme on the TV station Canal Uno. In April 2002, the programme ran a series on alleged links between Uribe and the Medellín drug cartel. After the reports aired, unidentified men began calling the news station, threatening to kill the show's producer Ignacio Go'mez, director Daniel Coronell, and Coronell's three-year-old daughter, who was flown out of the country soon after the calls began. Go'mez too was later forced to flee and is currently living in exile.

More:
http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2455/245512.html

[struggle4progress]

18. Key Colombian leaders linked to death squads (Dec 06)

Mike Ceaser, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, December 16, 2006

... The disclosures reveal that mayors, governors, members of Congress, judges and even the current foreign minister have ties to violence and narcotics traffickers.

"The paramilitaries have taken control of a good part of the (Uribe) administration," former President Cesar Gaviria, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, told reporters last month ...

Many observers say the "para crisis" has exposed illicit practices in which paramilitary leaders routinely take kickbacks from government contractors, assassinate their enemies, dictate who will compete in regional political races and then fix elections ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/16/MNGM8N0V001.DTL

[struggle4progress]

19. Colombian Senator: Death Squads Met At Uribe's Ranch (Apr 07)

Scandal Over Paramilitary Ties Widens

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 18, 2007; Page A18

BOGOTA, Colombia, April 17 -- An opposition lawmaker on Tuesday alleged that paramilitary death squads met at the ranch of President Álvaro Uribe in the late 1980s and plotted to murder opponents, an explosive charge in a growing scandal that has unearthed ties between the illegal militias and two dozen congressmen.

Basing his accusations on government documents and depositions by former paramilitary members and military officers, Sen. Gustavo Petro said the militiamen met at Uribe's Guacharacas farm as well as ranches owned by his brother, Santiago Uribe, and a close associate, Luis Alberto Villegas ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/17/AR2007041702007.html

[struggle4progress]

20. Colombian warlord says US firms paid death squads for bananas (May 07)

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
The Guardian,
Saturday May 19 2007

A jailed warlord has accused the US multinationals Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita of funding rightwing death squads while sourcing bananas from war-torn regions of Colombia.

Salvatore Mancuso, a leader of illegal paramilitary groups, which massacred thousands of people, said each company paid his men one US cent for each box of bananas they exported. Mancuso did not explain why the payments were made but it was common practice for Colombian businesses to pay the paramilitaries a so-called "war tax" - a form of extortion as well as protection against attacks.

Del Monte did not immediately respond to the allegation. A spokesman for the California-based Dole Food denied it. "Accounts implicating Dole with illegal organisations in Colombia are absolutely untrue," said Marty Ordman.

In a deal with the US justice department, Chiquita recently acknowledged paying paramilitaries $1.7m (£860,000) over six years. It was fined $25m. Chiquita claimed the payments were to protect its workers but campaigners claim some money was used to finance the assassination of union leaders who lobbied for better pay and conditions ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/19/colombia.foodanddrink

[struggle4progress]

21. Suggestion: next time, read a bit first

[Zorro]

24. Suggestion

Being patronizing is a path to be avoided.

[struggle4progress]

26. What? No links?

[Judi Lynn]

11. It's hard to overlook the dead victims.

This article only surfaced here today, although it was published elsewhere last week:

Labor killings in Colombia become issue in U.S. trade deal
By Simon Romero Published: April 13, 2008



Lucy Gómez and Luis Humberto Ortiz talk about the killing
of her brother, Leonidas. (Scott Dalton for The New York Times)

BOGOTÁ: Lucy Gómez still shudders when speaking of the killing of her brother, Leonidas, a union leader and bank employee who was beaten and stabbed here last month. His death was part of a recent surge in killings of union members in Colombia, with 17 already this year.

"I want those who did this to pay for their crime," said Gómez, 37, a seamstress, clutching a faded photograph of her brother, an employee of Citigroup's Colombian unit, who was 42. "But I feel in danger myself. This is not a country where one can express such a wish without fear of being eliminated like my brother."

Gómez's fear, and the dread felt by union members and their families throughout Colombia, has long been a feature of labor organizing during this country's four-decade internal war. More than 2,500 union members in Colombia have been killed since 1985, and fewer than 100 cases have a conviction, according to the National Labor School, a labor research group in Medellín.

Now these killings are emerging as a pressing issue in Washington as Democrats and Republicans battle over a trade deal with Colombia, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America. The Colombian government is already struggling to recover from the latest salvo in the fight, a vote by U.S. House Democrats on Thursday to snub President George W. Bush and indefinitely delay voting on the deal.
(snip)

In recent weeks, a new wave of threats has emerged, from groups identifying themselves as a new generation of private armies, against human rights activists and labor organizers, many of whom have opposed the trade deal, raising the specter of still more anti-union violence to come.

The 17 union killings so far this year represent a 70 percent increase from the same period last year.
(snip)

Carlos Burbano was a vice president in the hospital workers' union of the municipality of San Vicente del Caguán, in southern Colombia, who disappeared March 9. His body was found four days later in a garbage dump in an area considered paramilitary territory. Burbano, who had received threats before from paramilitaries, had been stabbed multiple times and burned with acid.

Like Burbano, Gómez, a member of the Bank Workers' Union in Bogotá, was an outspoken critic of the paramilitaries. He had traveled throughout Colombia to speak out against the U.S. trade deal, which he expected to raise salaries of senior Citigroup executives while eroding the benefits of employees, said Luis Humberto Ortiz, a fellow union official and Citigroup employee.

Last seen at a meeting with leftist politicians on the night of March 4, Gómez was found dead in his apartment on March 8, with multiple stab wounds and his hands tied behind his back. Missing from his apartment were his laptop computer, USB memory sticks and cash from his pockets, his sister said.

More:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/13/america/bogota.php?page=1

[Arctic Dave]

3. Hey Colombia VP, FUCK OFF!!!!!

If you can't tell, we don't really care for "free trade" agreements. They have a way of fucking over average Americans and we are sick of it. So if you don't remeber what I said at the beggining of my post. FUCK OFF!!!!!

[Zorro]

6. I think free trade agreements are net beneficial

for both countries.

How do they fuck over the average American? I'm curious.

[struggle4progress]

9. Forcing Americans to compete against workers who are killed if they try to organize for better wages

and working conditions -- is to everybody's advantage?

Nope: Workers benefit when American workers stand in solidarity with Colombian workers

[Zorro]

12. From my understanding of the situation

Many Colombian exports to the US are already essentially duty-free due to agreements made over 20 years ago, so Americans are probably already competing with Colombian goods in the US.

The FTA is primarily intended to reduce Colombian tariffs on US-produced goods, like heavy-machinery and other items the US still manufactures here. Increased US manufactured goods exported to Colombia would serve to increase US jobs here, correct? Seems like that would be a good thing for US workers, so I think that it is a net economic benefit -- certainly for the US worker. So from an economic perspective I think opposing the FTA is not rational.

The political argument is a different debate than the economic argument.

[struggle4progress]

13. From my understanding of the situation: the unionists know the score, and I'll listen to them

[Zorro]

16. So you only listen to unionists?

Do you think they have an unbiased perspective?

[struggle4progress]

22. In deciding if the Colombia FTA will benefit workers, I'll certainly ask the workers' opinion

[Zorro]

29. So have Colombian workers been polled about the FTA?

Got a link?

[struggle4progress]

32. Colombian unions cared enough to work at organizing international opposition

And given the climate in Colombia, such work is quite risky

Nevertheless:

"... the AFL-CIO, together with our Colombian union counterparts, is opposing the Colombia FTA ..."
http://www.miamiherald.com/851/story/497375.html

This means, simply, that workers in both countries have decided the FTA won't help them

[Zorro]

35. Uhhh...

It means that Mr. Fred Frost of the AFL-CIO has submitted an Op-Ed column that asserts that its Colombian union counterparts don't support the FTA, primarily because of reported violence against Colombian union organizers and members. There is no mention of which Colombian unions do not support the FTA, nor does it mention their membership size, etc. etc.

This hardly constitutes your assertion "that workers in both countries have decided the FTA won't help them". I'm a worker, and I don't agree with that position; and neither do I see any empirical evidence that confirms that assertion. I think there are net benefits for workers in both countries.

I do agree that there should be security and freedom to organize in Colombia. However, I also recognize that the situation is complex, and that there are valid concerns that agents provocateurs use union demonstrations to provoke strong reactions and further an agenda different from what is being promoted.

Uribe has made real improvements to Colombian society, but it's both disingenous and disturbing to ignore the progressive accomplishments of his administration.

[struggle4progress]

36. WHAT PART OF "REGIME KILLS ITS OPPONENTS" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

YOU THINK I'M GOING TO SIT HERE AND TRY TO CONSTRUCT A HANDY LIST FOR THE DEATHSQUADS TO TARGET?

:hi:

[Zorro]

38. So you have nothing to back your assertions up

I thought so.

Stating "REGIME KILLS ITS OPPONENTS" in caps doesn't make your assertion true, just a bunch of hot-air rhetoric.

You and Judi should get a room together.

[struggle4progress]

40. Killing the messengers (Dec 2007)

Published in The International Herald Tribune
By Hollman Morris
Tuesday, December 18, 2007

BOGOTÁ: This autumn I had coffee with a journalist colleague who was forced to leave Colombia for more than two years due to death threats. When he returned, President Álvaro Uribe welcomed him home by publicly calling him a liar. Soon after, fresh death threats arrived at his office. Uribe commonly tars the opposition, human rights defenders and journalists with the same brush, accusing us of being in cahoots with guerrillas and terrorists. In Colombia, such accusations can be a death sentence ...

My country is one of the deadliest places in the world for reporters. More than 70 Colombian journalists have been killed in the past 30 years. Fewer journalists are being murdered today, relatively speaking, but we now have increasing self-censorship.

A recent survey of 235 Colombian journalists found that more than one third had received death threats. Almost all of them - 88 percent - said they believed that freedom of the press is under threat and admitted to having refrained from publishing information due to pressure from paramilitaries, guerrillas, politicians, media owners and government officials. The vast majority have seen no improvement in the situation of freedom of the press in the last five years ...

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/12/18/colomb17685.htm

[Judi Lynn]

45. Very clear, easy to grasp. Excellent link. Here's another important quote from your article:

Yet the same recent survey found that 89 percent of journalists believed that the information about the armed conflict provided by the government authorities was manipulated. Without a free, unconstrained press, what Colombia and the world usually get is just the government's version of events.

To cite one example: Over the last five years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of extrajudicial executions of civilians committed by the army. In a pattern that is repeated over and over around the country, soldiers take civilians from their homes or workplaces, kill them, and then dress them up as combatants to claim that they were guerrillas killed in combat.

The United Nations and human rights NGOs have carefully documented and reported on this trend, which appears to involve hundreds of cases a year. Yet the president has refused to recognize the problem, publicly dismissing the reports as the work of guerrillas seeking to make trouble for his government. And, unfortunately, the reports by the major media, especially television, rarely reflect this information.

Colombia is a society that prefers to forget: to forget the atrocities, the lost lives. We forget every day. To end the conflict, we must recover our memory of these abuses.

Absolutely hideous.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here's something on the right-wing death squad leader, Carlos Castaño, who admits here he's killed journalists:

This Colombian warlord cultivates
journalists. He also murders them.
For Carlos Castaño, it’s all about
image.
By Frank Smyth

A CPJ Briefing (September 2001)
Click here for sidebar: "Killing the Messengers"

Bogotá—On May 3, 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named
Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño to its annual list of the ten worst enemies
of the press. Six weeks later, a reporter from the Paris daily Le Monde caught up with
Castaño in northern Colombia and asked how he felt about the distinction.

“I would like to assure you that I have always respected the freedom and subjectivity of
the press,” said the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC),
Colombia’s leading right-wing paramilitary organization. “But I have never accepted that
journalism can become an arm at the service of one of the actors of the conflict. Over the
course of its existence the AUC has executed two local journalists who were in fact
guerrillas.” He no longer remembered their names.

Since 1999, in fact, forces under Castaño’s command have been linked to the murders of
at least four journalists, the abduction and rape of one reporter, and threats against many
others, according to CPJ research. “Against the violent backdrop of Colombia’s
escalating civil war, in which all sides have targeted journalists, Carlos Castaño stands
out as a ruthless enemy of the press,” CPJ’s citation noted.

This self-confessed murderer of journalists is now turning to the local press in an effort to
rehabilitate his image in Colombia. To that end, Castaño has launched a uniquely
Colombian public relations campaign, seemingly modeled after tactics employed by
legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar. Not unlike Escobar, Castaño’s strategy combines a
charm offensive with forthright acknowledgements of the AUC’s use of terror.
While Escobar attacked journalists who favored his extradition to the United States to
face drug trafficking charges, Castaño attacks any journalist whom he suspects of
cooperating or even sympathizing with Colombia’s left-wing rebels. This year, Castaño
admitted that he had murdered journalists and tried to bomb a newspaper for its alleged
communist sympathies. He has been implicated in many other attacks on the press in
recent years.

In November 2000, Castaño granted an exclusive interview to the Bogotá weekly
Semana. The reporter asked whether Castaño thought he deserved to be compared to the
late Escobar. “There is no way you can compare me with a monster like that,” replied
Castaño. “While he sought to destroy the country, I intend to save it.”

Old war
Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War remains hot in Colombia. The
U.S.-backed Colombian military has been fighting against various Marxist guerrilla
organizations for nearly forty years. The army frequently collaborates with private
paramilitary groups, including the AUC, which the Colombian government has outlawed.
Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that half of the army’s 18 brigades were sharing
intelligence and other resources with rightist paramilitary groups, most of them under
Castaño’s command.

http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2001/Colombia_sep01/Colombia_sep01.html

[Zorro]

62. Here's something about current events instead of a 7 year old report

from the Economist article at: http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11053186

<snip>

...Mr Uribe is that rarest of beasts: a democratic, pro-American president winning an anti-terrorist war. On the day of his inauguration, in 2002, guerrilla units lurked not only in the lush peaks that tower over Bogotá but sometimes inside the capital itself. During his swearing-in, rockets aimed at the palace landed in a working-class district, killing 19 people and wounding 60. Six years on, however, it is not only Bogotá but Colombia as a whole that has been transformed. This is still a violent country, but the long epidemic of murder and kidnapping, spread in ascending order by class hatred, ideology and drug money, is at last being tamed. The economy is growing at a lusty 7% a year.

It is good news all round—not least, you might think, for the United States. Colombia provides much of the cocaine snorted up American noses. In Mr Uribe, however, the Americans have an ally who has worked hard, through the American-financed Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca and disrupt the traffickers...

<snip>

Now back to your pro-FARC sandbox, Judi; everyone knows your agenda.

[Hannah Bell]

68. And this puff piece is different from an op-ed piece - how, exactly,

Mr. "Give-Me-Hard-Evidence"?

Your agenda is quite obvious as well.

[Zorro]

78. Yes my agenda is quite public

I support a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.

I believe it is beneficial to workers in both countries, and am interested in debating the economic merits of such an agreement.

Others responding in this thread want to go off-topic and turn it into a political debate about Uribe, and resort to conferring guilt by innuendo.

And they produce no evidence regarding the reported murders of 4 alleged union organizers, just more juvenile insults.

If you had read the "puff piece", you would have seen a chart indicating an impressive drop in murders and kidnappings in Colombia since Uribe took office.

That's the kind of empirical fact that the anti-Uribe zealots choose to completely ignore.

Do you agree that there's been a significant decrease in crime since Uribe took office?

[struggle4progress]

83. NFU Statement: Colombia FTA is Wrong Move at Wrong Time

WASHINGTON (April 8, 2008) – National Farmers Union President Tom Buis made the following statement today in response to President George W. Bush’s announcement that he was sending the Columbia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to Congress.

“It is premature to consider the Columbia Free Trade Agreement until provisions for a level playing field have been established. America’s farmers and ranchers produce the safest, most abundant, most affordable food supply in the world. Yet our trading partners are not required to meet our high labor, environmental, health and safety standards.

“Our current trade agreements have failed to live up to their promises. The Columbia Free Trade Agreement is another step in the wrong direction.

“We should fix current trade deals before considering the Columbia agreement. We need to stop and take a look at what our goals are in approving trade agreements and work to adopt the best deal for America’s farmers and ranchers ...

http://nfu.org/news/2008/04/08/nfu-statement-colombia-fta-is-wrong-move-at-wrong-time.html

[Judi Lynn]

87. Americans with consciences! Apparently it still can happen. Great info. Thank you. n/t

[struggle4progress]

84. Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as Rebels'

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 30, 2008; Page A12

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena González saw when the soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered, as they trudged past her meek home in this town in northwestern Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son, Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government human rights ombudsman ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/29/AR2008032901118.html

[Judi Lynn]

94. It's shocking to see the Washington Post, and Juan Forero actually publishing and writing something

like this. You have to wonder what the heck is going on, don't you?

It's not like either the Washington Post, or Juan Forero to EVER show anything negative about any government of any politician _Bush needs, from the things I've read there.

This is just too spooky for words.

Makes you wonder if Forero isn't starting to worry that his closeness to the Colombian military, etc., might come back to bite him, too, and he's trying to edge away from his old position. Great idea, Juan!

He should know, by now, if he gets too caught up in distancing himself from these guys, to the point he gets completely truthful, he may have to go into hiding!

You might find this material amusing, even though it was written SEVERAL YEARS AGO, (shudder!) and might be offensive to visiting DU critics:

Atrocity's Apologist

~snip~
The Juan Forero Story
Who in hell is Juan Forero, this relative rookie at the New York Times who has appeared out of nowhere to faithfully execute the party line of wartime Washington and its billionaire military contractors?

Three years ago, Juan Forero - a Colombian citizen who resided in the United States - wrote for something called the "Religion News Service," churning out sophmoric ideological propaganda with titles like "Pope's Visit Gives Cubans Hope for Freedom."
Two years ago, Forero was a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, in New Jersey.

A year ago, Forero popped up as a New York Times correspondent, writing some stories from New York City - where, as the Times' discredited ex-bureau chief in Mexico, Sam Dillon, once commented, that Times correspondents "learn to obey" their bosses - but quickly ended up on the Latin America beat, soon after narco-lobbyists had pushed the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia military intervention through Congress.

His First Global Disgrace

On December 5, 2000, Forero caused his first global disgrace, when he authored a hagiography - known in the profession of journalism as a "puff piece," the kind that is done on rock stars and Hollywood moguls - but he wrote it about the notorious drug-trafficking Colombian paramilitary phenomenon, in which Forero hailed the "savvy public relations efforts by its straight-talking leader, Carlos Castaño."
Three months prior, The Narco News Bulletin had exposed a fact that has since become accepted by serious news organizations, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and others:

"Carlos Castaño-Gil," reported Narco News in September 2000, "is the boss of one of the largest and the most violent drug trafficking organizations on earth."

Castaño and his business-backed paramilitary troops, we reported, "protected narco-trafficking… charged a tax on their illicit income, and used to profits to enrich themselves personally. Indeed, although he claims modest roots, Castaño lives in luxury, sends his kids to private school in England, and is a major landowner throughout Northern Colombia -- land from which he helped displace tens of thousands of peasants."

Castaño, we reported, "peddles in 'anti-drugs' and drugs alike, with the support and backing of the US and Colombian governments."
Ever since then, Human rights organizations and serious journalists have had to - when writing about Castaño and his paramilitary movement - mention this undeniable fact: Castaño has been linked to high-level cocaine trafficking. This has not been disputed by anyone - except by, to our knowledge, by the omissions of a certain rookie New York Times correspondent, the International Desk to whom he reports, and by Castaño himself, who, a month before our report, claimed via e-mail to the Miami Herald: "I don't accept that anybody, absolutely nobody, without valid arguments and sustainable facts, can accuse me of being tolerant of drug trafficking and much less drug traffickers, simply because I have never been involved with this despicable practice."

http://www.narconews.com/forerostory1.html



Carlos Castaño, dead as a doornail these days, having been murdered,
along with his body guards, by a "hit" from his own brother.

[ronnie624]

69. You chided another DUer for posting an opinion piece.

The article claims Uribe is "winning an anti-terrorist war", but his government has been linked to terrorists, and union organizers are seemingly murdered with impunity under the aegis of his government. The article also claims that Uribe "has worked hard, through the American-financed Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca and disrupt the traffickers", right after it notes that "Colombia provides much of the cocaine snorted up American noses."

Oh, but look, "He even backed the war in Iraq", notes your article. I guess he's a swell chap after all.

[Zorro]

79. So what's not factual in the article?

Are you asserting that coca trafficking has not been impacted by Plan Colombia?

[ronnie624]

82. I have no first-hand knowledge,

but some say there has been no impact on cocaine production.

"There were those who did not believe it was possible to change the availability of cocaine in the United States," Walters said. "What we're announcing today is, there's no question that's happened."

But the GAO, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, specifically criticized those figures, saying that they reflected trends that "could reflect law enforcement patterns rather than drug availability patterns" and that the number of U.S. cocaine users remained constant at about 2 million. "Other sources estimate the number of chronic and occasional cocaine users may be as high as 6 million," the report stated.
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1207-07.htm>

The centerpiece of the Bush administration's "supply side" campaign against illegal drugs is staunch support for the Colombian government's "Plan Colombia." But the facts show that the plan is a waste of time and money.

But evidence has recently emerged that Plan Colombia's claims of success are erroneous-or at least irrelevant. Even as President Andres Pastrana and other leaders boasted of the plan's achievements, reports were leaking out that a new study, funded by the United Nations, indicated that there were more than 340,000 acres under cultivation.

Even more to the point, previous U.S. estimates of total cocaine production in Colombia-580 tons annually out of total world production of 780 tons-were too low. The new study concluded that Colombia's actual cocaine production was between 800 and 900 tons per year.
<http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3949>

Coronell also called attention to what some analyst have termed the balloon effect, where increased pressure on the guerrillas by Uribe’s government simply shifted the areas of coca production to other regions, leaving its volume unaffected. These new regions are clearly under the influence of various paramilitary groups. The Colombian government’s massive fumigation of coca crops has thus had little effect on the total volume of production.
<http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/fall2006/10-23-06-coronell/ordonez.html>

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual Andean Coca Survey on Tuesday. It found an 8 percent increase in the amount of coca grown in Colombia in 2005. Similarly, U.S. estimates released in April found either an increase in 2005, or an adjustment to reflect more area under measurement.

If you want to know about drug-crop cultivation in Colombia and the rest of the region, this document is absolutely required reading. How much coca was grown in each department of Colombia last year? How much land was fumigated in each department? How extensively do alternative development programs cover affected populations? What prices are coca-growers are being paid for their product? For answers to these and many other questions that an informed counter-drug strategy must answer, this report is the only source available.

The U.S. government, by contrast, just provides an overall number of hectares of coca estimated to have been grown in each country, and little else. The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports, released each March, are not useful for discerning trends, since they either omit or play down information that might indicate that the strategy is not working.
<http://www.cipcol.org/?p=225>


There are dozens more, but I think you get the idea.

[Judi Lynn]

85. Hi, ronnie624. We've read lately that due to the abundance of this stuff, now it's getting CHEAPER

to buy in the U.S., a real benefit for those who want to buy it.

It's been discussed here repeatedly by DU'ers who find this a wry side-effect of all those buttloads of U.S. taxpayers' hard-earned dollars being shipped to Colombia.

Isn't it odd that Uribe is the Colombian President who has never had to live on just the Colombian budget? Strange. He's got his hand out for the THIRD LARGEST FOREIGN AID PACKAGE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Nice achievement for the country with a murder rate of union workers HIGHER THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD PUT TOGETHER, and the SECOND WORST HUMANITATIAN CRISIS IN THE WORLD with so many, MANY displaced people.

[ronnie624]

91. Hi, Judi Lynn.

There's lots of good info on this thread. My thanks to you for your valuable contributions.

The purpose of Plan Colombia is, in my opinion, not to eradicate cocaine, but to insinuate forces in Colombia that aide the Colombian government in its struggle against political opposition. The availability of cocaine has never been effected by U.S. 'eradication' efforts, because that isn't really the goal. I doubt that U.S. policy planners even obliquely mention cocaine as they plot and scheme. They're far more interested in the political persuasions of those who hold power in Latin America, and whether or not they can be trusted to work on behalf of U.S. business and strategic interests.

Good night. :hi:

[Judi Lynn]

93. You've GOT it, no doubt! Cocaine? Schmocaine! It's a cover, an excuse.

The people they are trying to beat down now they used to claim were "communists" as they ran them to ground all over South and Central America. Eventually they beat so many down and intimidated the rest to a sufficient degree they didn't seem to be a big a problem. Whatever resistance is left is currently designated "terrorists" and "drug" people. It would make a maggot gag. They are entirely transparent. Everyone knows what they're doing, and they basically don't care at this point since they've got the massive weaponry stocks and seemingly unlimited funds, and so many very poor people who can be used to kill other poor people, since there are so few ways to make enough money to live in these ravaged, pillaged, raped countries.

People know the game the U.S. right-wing is playing. They knew it back in 1958 in Venezuela when they ran into the streets and attacked the car bearing Vice President Richard Nixon through Caracas, kicking, hitting, beating, and spitting on it, breaking its windows. THEY are the ones who have been living with the effects of U.S. policy. THEY are the ones who know exactly how it feels.

Our own media either ignore the situation altogether, or it acts completely astonished that there would EVER be any resistance in Latin America to American intentions toward them. They (the majorities) are treated as if they are insane wild beasts. You recall hearing BOTH Condoleeza Rice and Henry Kissinger make remarks to the effect that they shouldn't be allowed to have a choice in what kind of governments they'll elect. Isn't that SICK? They get reamed and excoriated in our own media, as if they've deeply wounded a bunch of saintly humanitarians in Washington by choosing leaders who are leftist, instead of begging our Republicans to choose their leaders for them.

Wouldn't it be great to see this all start to go right, for a change? Can only wait and hope with them that somehow the greedy, imperious, bloodthirsty, racist warmongers who've been calling the shots will eventually be replaced by actual intelligent, decent human beings. The sooner, the better.

Always looking forward to your perceptive, deeply informed remarks. Your comments are always taken very seriously, and appreciated. Have never seen you misfire, not once. You elevate conversations.

[Zorro]

96. Your pro-FARC slip is showing

Do you also support Shining Path objectives in Peru?

These aren't heroic revolutionaries. They are organizations of kidnappers, murderers, and criminals.

[Tempest]

98. Give up, you lost

As soon as someone starts in with the strawmen and logical fallacies, as you have done, it's a sign of surrender.

Just what is your agenda in supporting a corrupt government with a long history of human rights violations?

[Zorro]

101. Again, my agenda is quite public

I believe that a FTA with Colombia is a good thing for both workers in the US and Colombia.

That was the original topic of this thread, which has been relentlessly driven off-topic and turned into an anti-Uribe bashfest. So who's been throwing up the strawmen?

It's very annoying to read the flapdoodle of armchair revolutionaries romanticizing criminal organizations while ignoring their excesses. Especially armchair revolutionaries who have neither been to South America nor in territories where armed conflicts are occurring.

Certainly there has been a lot of violence committed in the name of the government, yet I find it quite disingenuous to ignore the atrocities committed by FARC while dismissing or otherwise ignoring the real decline in overall crime. The Colombian people recognize this decline, which is the source of Uribe's undeniable popularity.

Oh, and asking a relevant question isn't a logical fallacy. But I doubt it will be answered.

[Zorro]

95. And some say just the opposite

From recent formal testimony before a House subcommittee from a former ambassador:

<snip>

...The eradication programs in Colombia, which sprayed or manually eradicated over 200,000 hectares of coca in 2006, kept about 320 metric tons of cocaine from reaching the United States and Europe. Coupled with the seizure of 178 metric tons of Colombian cocaine and cocaine base in the same time period, and calculating an average price within Colombia of $1,700 per kilo, our joint efforts have taken about $850 million in one year out of the hands of drug trafficking organizations. Aerial eradication alone accounted for slightly more than half of that value. This may help explain why the FARC are reportedly under financial pressure and slow in paying their coca growers.

When I was in Colombia, there was a perverse fear among Colombians that if we were successful in reducing drug income to the FARC and right-wing paramilitaries, other types of violence, particularly kidnapping, would increase. In fact, the opposite has been true: violence is sharply down throughout Colombia. The government has reestablished its presence throughout the country and is now providing increasingly effective governance to large parts of the countryside. This success has driven both the FARC and the coca cultivators out of their comfortable surroundings and has lessened the FARC’s access to revenue through extortion, roadblocks, kidnapping, cattle stealing, and similar crimes. In a growing number of municipalities, for the first time in decades, government presence is allowing sustainable development to take place in a reasonably secure environment.

These successes are no secret to the Colombian people. Polls taken in major cities since 1995 show that 60 to 80 percent of the population approve of President Uribe’s management of drug trafficking issues. In a February 2007 poll, 72 percent approved of Plan Colombia, 73 percent felt the Uribe administration respects human rights, and 71 percent felt the country was more secure than a year ago. 76 percent held a positive view of the Colombian military forces, and 69 percent approved of the National Police -- a tie with the Catholic Church.

<snip>

http://www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rm/83654.htm

[ronnie624]

97. You think I should accept testimony

from a Bush Administration ambassador? :eyes:

[Zorro]

100. Well let's see...

A distinguished ambassador testifying under oath to a Democratically controlled House subcommittee...Yeah, she must have been lying and her testimony automatically rejected. Right?

Oh yeah, one more thing, Einstein. She was ambassador to Colombia beginning in 2000, and was ambassador to El Salvador before that.

Those were Bush administration appointments? Gosh, I learn something new all the time.

Maybe you could take a course in current history and learn something new, too.

[ronnie624]

103. The bottom line is,

you posted testimony from a Bush Administration appointee. Anything she says before Congress will be carefully contrived to make Bush look good. Suggesting otherwise is foolish in the extreme.

If you had anything truly compelling, you would have posted it by now.

[Zorro]

104. The bottom line is

she was previously a Clinton administration appointee. Do you have reading comprehension problems?

Your casual dismissiveness -- she was since appointed ambassador to Pakistan by the Democratically controlled Senate in 2007 -- shows your intention to remain blissfully ignorant.

Welcome to the ignorati class.

[ronnie624]

107. There are better sources of information

than your Bush Administration. I posted four of them and could have continued on with a dozen more. Instead of wasting your time with silly little insults (a sure sign of desperation), you should have addressed the information I posted.

And Ms Patterson was not appointed ambassador by the Senate. She was appointed by the Bush Administration and her appointment was confirmed by the Senate.

Good day to you Zorro.

[Zorro]

109. I stand corrected

It is indeed confirmed.

And sworn, detailed testimony in front of a Democratically controlled Senate subcommittee trumps tubs of propaganda.

[Judi Lynn]

118. Probably not the same Senate you're pretending, as the Democratically controlled Senate

only lasted for 17 days:

The U.S. Senate election, 2000 was an election for one-third of the seats in the United States Senate which coincided with the election of George W. Bush as president. It featured a number of fiercely contested elections that resulted in a victory for the Democratic Party, which gained four net seats from the Republican Party in the Senate. (Democrats had already gained one seat since the 1998 elections when Zell B. Miller (D-Ga.) was appointed following the death of Paul M. Coverdell (R-Ga.).)

This was six years after many Republicans had won seats in Senate Class 1 during the elections of 1994, and it was this group who were seeking reelection or retiring in 2000. Because such a large number of these seats were being defended by Republicans, most of the races that were considered to be in play were won by challenging Democrats. They defeated Republican senators William Roth (R-Del.), Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), Rod Grams (R-Minn.), John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), as well as winning the open seat in Florida. Ashcroft's defeat was noteworthy in that his opponent, Mel Carnahan, had died before the election, but still won. (The Democratic governor had promised to appoint Carnahan's wife to the seat if he won). The Republicans did defeat one incumbent, Chuck Robb (D-Va.), and win an open seat in Nevada.

This resulted in the Democrats winning control of the Senate for only 17 days, since Al Gore was still Vice President and President of the Senate. But the Republicans won control the chamber with the tie-breaking vote of new Vice President Richard B. Cheney on January 20th.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Senate_election,_2000

Nice try, of course.

[Zorro]

120. The testimony on Colombia was in 2007

Perhaps you should actually read what you blindly and reactively respond to first. But going off-topic seems to be your style.

So let's get back on-topic.

Since you seem to troll almost exclusively for Colombian news articles, how about one with some facts:

1. What are the names of the reported union organizers who were killed?

2. When/where/how were they killed?

3. What has been uncovered in the investigation?

Let's have some answers to those questions.

[struggle4progress]

123. You apparently haven't even glanced at most of the posts in this thread

since some of the questions you ask have been answered over and over again

[Zorro]

124. Oh I have glanced at the posted links

One link that lists some names had this paragraph conveniently snipped around when posted:

"Complicating matters, the leftist guerrillas, who have sought to topple the government, have targeted union officials for assassination in the past. Union leaders who are in favor of the trade deal, largely from export-oriented industries, have suggested that some of the recent killings may have been carried out by factions opposed to stronger trade ties with the United States."

I'm sure the original poster had some perfectly innocent reason to clip around that paragraph.

[Zorro]

130. Oh, here's some more from the same previously posted link

<snip>

No one denies that assassinations of union members have dropped significantly from the 1990s, the worst years of Colombia's war, when more than 200 a year were reported.

In 2007, union killings fell to 39 from 72 the previous year, according to the National Labor School in Medellín. They were expected to decline further this year until the recent spike in killings. (Figures from Colombia's government are often lower because killings are not included when motives are unclear. So far this year the government has counted 15 union killings, compared with 17 documented by labor groups.)

"We must remember that these killings are not a matter of state policy," Vice President Francisco Santos said in an in interview in March. "On the contrary, we abhor these acts and are doing everything we can to bring the number down as low as possible," he said, citing an unprecedented increase in prosecutions of union killings in the past year.

For 2008, the government budgeted the equivalent of $45.7 million for protecting people at risk of assassination, of which about a third goes to threatened union members. Under the program, more than 200 unionists have armored cars or bodyguards and more than 170 union buildings and homes of union members have bullet-proofing improvements.

<snip>

No one denies that assassinations of union members have dropped significantly -- except certain posters in this thread, that is.

[Judi Lynn]

131. This article is guaranteed to make you weep with joy, as a truthseeker. I've posted it earlier

at D.U., but it REALLY is worthy of a second squint:

Meanwhile, Colombian and international human rights organizations that routinely document human rights violations have repeatedly shown over the years that the guerrillas are responsible for only a minority of the killings of civilians. For example, the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) reported last year that during President Uribe’s first term in office (2002-2006), the guerrillas were responsible for 25 percent of the killings of civilians. Meanwhile, the paramilitaries accounted for 61 percent of the deaths and the Colombian military for the remaining 14 percent.

Because most people do not read annual human rights reports, the news stories ultimately influence the opinions of a far greater number of people. Consequently, President Uribe’s accusations that human rights groups are spokespersons for the guerrillas seems plausible to many because the human rights statistics they present contradict most people’s perception that the FARC is the principal abuser.

The same propaganda strategy is evident in other areas of human rights in Colombia. For instance, according to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), 305,966 people were forcibly displaced in 2007—a startling 38 percent increase over the previous year. However, because the Colombian military and paramilitaries are responsible for a majority of the forced displacements, and because the victims are poor Colombian peasants, there is little government focus on this human rights issue—and by extension little media emphasis of the humanitarian crisis.

In stark contrast, there is an enormous focus both in Colombia and internationally on kidnapping. In contrast to displaced persons, most kidnap victims are members of the middle and upper classes and it is the guerrillas that have violated their rights. The disproportionate media coverage of the plight of several hundred kidnap victims helps the government focus attention on human rights abuses perpetrated by the FARC. Meanwhile, more than a quarter of a million poor Colombians are displaced annually—the majority by state security forces—and their dilemma is mostly ignored.

The propaganda strategies of the Colombian government have proven very effective with regard to distorting the country’s human rights reality. Government officials blaming the FARC on an almost daily basis for killings committed throughout the country and a disproportionate focus on kidnapping has convinced most people that the guerrillas are the principal perpetrators of violence and human rights abuses. The fact that such perceptions stand in such stark contrast to the reality on the ground illustrates just how successfully the Colombian government has propagandized human rights.

Finally, the mainstream media in both Colombia and the United States are complicit in this psychological warfare by continuing to dutifully report the allegations of government officials even though reporters are fully aware of the fact that the claims are often false. It does not seem to matter to reporters and media outlets that the same officials have repeatedly manipulated them in the past—and are likely doing so again. Representatives of the mainstream media claim that they are simply reporting what a particular government official has said—and that the allegations by officials are, in and of themselves, news. However, by dutifully and unquestioningly reporting any statement issued by government officials, the mainstream media reduces itself to little more than a propaganda tool for the state.

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia280.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By the way, I've recently read information on the fact the Uribe government manipulates information which is passed to the media. We know this is true in this government. We know it happened in Venezuela after El Caracazo massacre in 1989, when Carlos Andres Perez's administraion insisted they only murdered a couple of hundred unarmed citizens, when the people themselves have indicated there are around 3,000 of them missing now, including the ones the government dumped into mass graves.

If I see it, I'll post it, again.

[Judi Lynn]

125. True, I wasn't following what you were saying too closely. Guilty.

Names of union organizers who were killed? Where were they killed? Look them up yourself! Jesus.

If you're referring to the ones who worked for the Drummond coal mining operation based in Birmingham, Alabama, one was killed with a gun on the bus in front of his fellow workers on the way home, one was taken away and tortured and murdered, and I think there was another whom I can't recall.

I do remember they had begged the Drummond mine to allow them to stay on the premises at night during the week because they were terrified of the trip to and from work, as they had been getting death threats, and the Birmingham based coal mine refused to give them haven, and these union workers, who dared to ask for better working conditions were assassinated.

Here's an article on the story, and if I have time to look I'm sure I can find a ton of others like the ones I've already read:

Drummond Corporation and Colombia's Death Squads
Death Squads Drummond Paramilitarism Plan Colombia
Reprinted from Fight Back! News

By staff

Birmingham, AL - In northwestern Colombia in 2001, the president and vice president of the mining union Sintramienergetica were taken off a Drummond bus and shot to death by paramilitary death squads hired by the corporation. Later that year, paramilitaries also killed the new president. These men were all killed during negotiations with Drummond.

The miners union and the International Labor Relief Fund filed a civil suit against Drummond in 2002. Despite the court case, even more Drummond workers have since been threatened and murdered by paramilitaries. The civil suit was going to start on July 9 in Birmingham, Alabama. But on June 20 Bush-appointed judge Karen Bowdry ruled that Drummond will not have to stand trial on ‘wrongful death’ charges, even though there are numerous Colombian citizens willing to testify that Drummond paid right-wing death squads to kill union organizers. “Drummond, which made $2 billion last year strip mining coal in Colombia, is an Alabama firm, owned by Republicans, being tried in a Republican court,” explains Birmingham community activist Reverend Jack Zylman.

At the trial multiple witnesses were scheduled to testify that Drummond made regular payments to the U.S. government-sponsored death squads, and a paramilitary officer was going to testify to being hired to ‘neutralize’ union leadership.

Peace and student groups are organizing a demonstration for what would have been first day of the trial on July 9 at the federal courts building in Birmingham. This case brings further national and international attention to the crimes of U.S. corporations in Colombia and to the role of U.S. sponsored death squads. Chapin Gray of Tuscaloosa Students for a Democratic Society explains, “Corporations should not be allowed to literally get away with murder. Period. When Colombians try to improve their working conditions, they are killed so that big corporations like Drummond can continue raking-in high profits. We want to bring attention to these charges so that more people will realize what is going on, will see the ties between the U.S. government, the Uribe administration and the paramilitaries, and to demand that those ties be severed. We want Drummond to know that we’re watching them. We want justice.”

U.S. Aid Funds Colombian Death Squads

“Colombia is a country dominated by U.S. economic and political interests. There is growing U.S. intervention with soldiers on the ground engaged in combat, and $5 billion given to Colombia since 2000. The U.S. is running Colombia for the benefit of corporations. Worker after worker and peasant after peasant told the Colombia Action Network delegation that U.S. military aid goes straight into the hands of U.S. government-sponsored death squads that terrorize their communities,” said Meredith Aby of the Colombia Action Network.

Colombia receives more U.S. military aid than any other country outside of the Middle East. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Colombia Action Network delegations have documented that the right-wing Colombian government uses U.S. tax dollars to kill and threaten trade unionists, human rights workers, and campesinos (peasants) who organize against the U.S.’s free trade agenda.

http://www.colombiasolidarity.org/node/139

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here's another good article for you:

Testimony details death squad acts in Colombia
Ex-militia chief cites massacres, drug trafficking
By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff | January 18, 2007

BOGOTÁ -- A former chief of Colombia's right-wing death squads testified in court this week about his role and the involvement of military and public officials in scores of massacres and assassinations of perceived political opponents.

The testimony by Salvatore Mancuso in the northwestern city of Medellín is a key step toward clarifying and assigning blame for atrocities committed in the last two decades of Colombia's ongoing civil war between insurgents and the state.

In two days, Mancuso, 48, detailed a nexus of collusion by army generals, police colonels, a state prosecutor, and politicians in planning the murders and seizing the land of scores of alleged leftists, local politicians, and peasants, according to lawyers and victims who were permitted to watch the closed-door sessions.

Dressed in an expensive suit and reading quickly in a matter-of-fact tone from a prepared statement, they said, Mancuso testified that his men paid the army and police in one region $400,000 a month for their cooperation, and that paramilitaries coerced voters at gunpoint to support regional and presidential candidates who favored their right-wing agenda.

Mancuso's admission so far of involvement in at least 70 crimes in northwestern Colombia is part of a peace deal that promises demobilized militia leaders a maximum of eight years incarceration, no matter the severity of their crimes, in exchange for full confessions and payment of reparations to victims.

Mancuso is among some 30,000 alleged members of right-wing militias who have laid down their arms since late 2003.

The attorney general's office says it has opened more than 100,000 investigations into crimes denounced by some 25,000 alleged victims of the militias.

A wealthy cattleman who studied at the University of Pittsburgh, Mancuso helped found civilian militias in the 1980s, financed by rich landowners to combat attacks and extortion by left-wing guerrillas.

The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, morphed into shadowy armies that tortured and massacred civilians and became major drug traffickers.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2007/01/18/testimony_details_death_squad_acts_in_colombia?mode=PF

[Judi Lynn]

127. Or were THESE the union organizers to whom you referred? Here's an open letter to Uribe on it:

March 25, 2008

S.E. Álvaro Uribe Vélez
Presidente de la República
Cra. 8 #7-26
Palacio de Nariño
Bogotá
Colombia

Dear President Uribe:

We write to express our deep concern about the recent wave of threats, attacks and killings of human rights defenders and trade unionists in connection with the March 6 demonstrations against state and paramilitary human rights violations. We urge you to publicly and immediately adopt effective measures to stop this violence.

Over the course of one week, between March 4 and March 11, four trade unionists, some of whom were reportedly associated with the March 6 demonstration, were killed.(1) Members of human rights organizations have also been subject to a large number of physical attacks and harassment. Their offices have also been broken into and equipment and files have been stolen.

In recent weeks a large number of human rights organizations, including la Asociación MINGA, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, Reiniciar, CODHES, the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), and Ruta Pacífica de Mujeres have received threats purportedly coming from the Black Eagles. One threat sent by email on March 11 specifically named twenty-eight human rights defenders. The threat, which was signed by the paramilitary group “Metropolitan Front of the Black Eagles in Bogotá,” accused the individuals of being guerrillas, referred explicitly to the March 6 demonstrations and stated that they would be killed promptly. The next day, another paramilitary email threat to various other groups announced a “total rearmament of paramilitary forces.” In addition to national human rights groups, the threats have targeted the international organization Peace Brigades International Colombia Project (PBI), the news magazine Semana, the Workers Central Union (CUT), indigenous organizations, and opposition politicians. A large number of additional recent instances of harassment, attacks and threats are currently being documented by national human rights groups.

This string of threats and attacks calls directly into question the effectiveness of the paramilitary demobilization process. Indeed, the Organization of American States has reported that twenty-two armed groups linked to the paramilitaries remain active around the country and has expressed “serious doubts about the effectiveness of demobilization and disarmament.”

We are especially concerned by the fact that the threats and attacks came shortly after a series of public accusations made by your presidential advisor, José Obdulio Gaviria, against the organizers of the March 6 protest. On February 10 and 11, on national radio, Mr. Gaviria suggested that the march’s organizers, including specifically Iván Cepeda (spokesman of MOVICE), were affiliated with the abusive guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Your government issued statements on February 15 and March 14 promising to guarantee the rights of those participating in the March 6 protest. However neither statement deterred Mr. Gaviria from continuing his stream of accusations on February 17 and March 20. His latest statement, suggesting that Mr. Cepeda is essentially a member of the FARC, is particularly outrageous coming after the recent wave of attacks and threats.

Baseless comments such as these are profoundly damaging to Colombian democracy and human rights, and place those against whom they are made in direct danger of violence. These statements stigmatize the legitimate work of thousands of human rights defenders, trade unionists, and victims, and can have a chilling effect on the exercise of rights to freedom of expression and free association. And in a country like Colombia, with its record of political violence, statements like these only contribute to a climate of political intolerance that fosters violence. Indeed, on February 11, the day after Mr. Gaviria first made the comments, the supposedly demobilized AUC paramilitary group released a statement on its website echoing Mr. Gaviria’s attacks on Mr. Cepeda and the victims’ movement.

It is precisely because prior administrations recognized the importance of respecting the work of human rights defenders and others, that Presidential Directive 7 of 1999 and Presidential Directive 7 of 2001 are now in place. Both directives order public servants “to abstain from questioning the legitimacy of… NGOs and their members… and to abstain from making false imputations or accusations that compromise the security, honor and good name…” Directive 7 of 1999 further clarifies that public servants must not “make affirmations that disqualify, harass or incite harassment of said organizations… emit … declarations that stigmatize the work of these organizations.”

We urge you to combat this wave of violence by:

Disavowing, in public and before national media, the statements made by Mr. Gaviria and others linking the March 6 protest organizers to guerrillas; rejecting the recent wave of threats and attacks; reaffirming your government’s support for, and protection of, the legitimate work of human rights defenders and trade unionists; and ensuring that no further inflammatory remarks are made by members of your government;
Ensuring a prompt, impartial and comprehensive investigation into each of the recent killings, attacks and death threats. It is vital that those responsible for these attacks are held responsible. Any supposedly demobilized persons who participated in or ordered these crimes should be stripped of their paramilitary demobilization benefits, and you should take decisive action to dismantle paramilitary groups and break their links to state officials in accordance with United Nations recommendations;
Providing protective measures to those individuals named in the March 11 death threats, as well as to other persons who have been subject to attacks or threats, and personally holding meetings with victims, trade unionists, and human rights defenders who have been affected by the recent attacks to listen to their concerns.
Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.

Sincerely,

Andrew Hudson
Human Rights Defenders Program
Human Rights First

José Miguel Vivanco
Americas Director
Human Rights Watch

Renata Rendón
Advocacy Director for the Americas
Amnesty International USA

Kenneth H. Bacon
President
Refugees International

John Arthur Nunes
President and CEO
Lutheran World Relief

Joy Olson
Executive Director
Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli
Senior Associate for Colombia and Haiti
Washington Office on Latin America

James R. Stormes, S.J.
Secretary, Social and International Ministries
Jesuit Conference

Lisa Haugaard
Executive Director
Latin America Working Group

Adam Isacson
Director of Programs
Center for International Policy

Stephen Coats
Executive Director
U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP)

Robert Guitteau Jr.
Interim Director
US Office on Colombia

Heather Hanson
Director of Public Affairs
Mercy Corps

Mark Johnson
Executive Director
Fellowship of Reconciliation

Mark Harrison
Director, Peace with Justice
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society

Monika Kalra Varma
Director
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights

Viviana Krsticevic
Executive Director
Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL)

Joe Volk
Executive Secretary
Friends Committee on National Legislation

Melinda St. Louis
Executive Director
Witness for Peace

Bert Lobe
Executive Director
Mennonite Central Committee

Rick Ufford-Chase
Executive Director
Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

Charo Mina-Rojas
AFRODES USA

T. Michael McNulty, SJ
Justice and Peace Director
Conference of Major Superiors of Men

Cristina Espinel
Director
Colombia Human Rights Committee, Washington DC

Phil Jones
Director
Church of the Brethren Witness/Washington Office

cc.

Vice President Francisco Santos
Vice President of the Republic of Colombia
Cra. 8 No. 7-57
Bogota
Colombia

Mr. Carlos Franco
Programa Presidencial de Derechos Humanos
Calle 7 No 6 – 54
Bogota D.C
Colombia

Mr. Thomas A. Shannon
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520

Mr. David J. Kramer
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights, and Labor
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520

Ambassador William R. Brownfield
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia
U.S. Embassy in Colombia
Calle 24 Bis No. 48-50
Bogotá, D.C.
Colombia

Ambassador Carolina Barco
Ambassador of Colombia to the United States
Embassy of Colombia in the United States
2118 Leroy Place, NW
Washington, DC 20008


(1) Carmen Cecilia Carvajal, member of the North Santander Teachers Association (ASINORT) was killed on March 4. Leonidas Gomez, member of the Union Nacional de Empleados Bancarios (UNEB) and Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) trade unions was killed on March 5. Gildardo Antonio Gómez Alzate, delegate of the Asociacion de Wenstitutores de Antioquia (ADIDA) and investigator for the Centro de Estudios e Wenvestigationes Docentes (CEID) was killed on March 7. Carlos Burbano, member of the organization ANTHOC, was found dead on March 11. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also reports that on February 28 there was a shooting against the house of Luz Adriana González, a member of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights and a promoter of the March 6 event in Pereira.

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=570#more-570

[Judi Lynn]

128. I need to add 2 more union organizers were also harmed who died after this letter, apparently. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

102. Looks as if we got off on the wrong foot altogether with Colombia, and "Plan Colombia."

This is something I didn't know until very recently. I don't think it was well publicized at the time:

Clinton's Colombia Waiver "a Grave Mistake"

(08/23/00) -- President Clinton's decision to waive human rights conditions on the $1.3 billion military aid package to Colombia will encourage violent abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. On August 23, Clinton signed a waiver allowing the United States to ignore human rights conditions included in the military aid package. In granting the waiver, Clinton not only makes America complicit in ongoing abuses but risks converting a failed drug war into a disastrous human rights policy.

"This is the wrong policy and the wrong time," said Jos?Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. "The message is that the bad apples with the armed forces shouldn't be worried. Ultimately, the waiver defeats the purpose of any policy meant to improve human rights."

Human Rights Watch was among several leading human rights groups who took part in a two-day consultation with the State Department required by law before any certification. During those meetings, all of the human rights groups present, including Human Rights Watch, unanimously opposed Colombia's certification to receive military aid and called on President Clinton not to issue a waiver.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2000/08/23/colomb730.htm

Very large screw up, for sure. Everything which has proceeded from that point is completely tainted.

[High Plains]

135. Are you asserting it has?

We've spent about $5 billion to wipe out the coca, and there is just about as much as ever.

[Judi Lynn]

70. Here's an article which covers the British position on Latin America.

Britain's relations with Latin America
Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Published 31 March 2008

Two powerful Latin American presidents arrive in Britain this week. Both these women are shrewd so I fear it will not take them long to tumble to the facts about this country and Latin America. The British government, they will see, is ignorant and misguided about their nations. Just as it was about Iraq before Blair took Bush’s shilling five years ago, illegally invaded that country under his command and started the present bloody cataclysm there. With the Foreign and Commonwealth Office shaken and intimidated, Britain is today being lead by the nose by Washington around the Southern Hemisphere as easily as for the past five years it has been led around the Middle East.

Seen worldwide as the weak partner in a transatlantic relationship - the fifth wheel on the US motor car - and as a semi-detached member of the European Union, Her Majesty’s Government, thank God, presents no threat to President Cristina de Kirchner from Argentina and President Michelle Bachelet from Chile. But the legacy of Blairism and the continuing US connection mean there will be disappointment among who hoped that Britain would help Latin Americans with their principal problem, how to bridge the horrific chasm which separates the desperately poor majority from the minority of fat cats. Hopes for reform, effective democracy and the development of a market which would benefit the whole Atlantic world and boost international trade are not on the US agenda. Its past patronage of violent plutocrats such as Somoza, Videla and Pinochet confirms that.

In November, for instance, the FCO, the Department for International Development and the US-controlled Inter-American Development Bank held a conference in London on inequality in Latin America. But, bizarrely, the organisers had invited no-one from the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador or Nicaragua which had actually achieved something in combating inequality. When I ventured to ask why, the response was silence: no one found the courage to confess what I suspect which is they were absent because Washington did not like them.

Washington prefers the corrupt and murderous government of President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia. Consequently so does Britain.

And this despite a 1991 report from the US Defence Intelligence Agency which listed Uribe - senator, later governor of Antioquia province, a narco paradise – as among "important Colombian narco-traffickers”. The DIA noted he was a close friend of Antioquia’s drug boss Pablo Escobar.

More:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200803310007

[Judi Lynn]

80. Critics say Colombia's president manipulating statistics to make country appear safer

This article was posted at DU back in February, along with this triple blessing photo gift, suitable for framing:











You may want to copy it, and cut it out to carry in your wallet, along with your collection of fine articles on Colombia.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Critics say Colombia's president manipulating statistics to make country appear safer
By Darcy Crowe
ASSOCIATED PRESS

6:36 p.m. February 17, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia – Critics say President Alvaro Uribe's government is manipulating statistics to make Colombia appear safer, casting doubt on achievements that have made him popular both at home and with the U.S. government.
One of the leading critics is Cesar Caballero, who said he quit as director of the federal statistics office in 2004 because Uribe's office told him not to release a study that found sharply higher homicide rates in major Colombian cities.


“The president's policy is that you have to maintain the perception that security has improved, no matter what the case,” Caballero said.

Jose Obdulio Gaviria, a close Uribe adviser, said the study was not published because the government wanted to review it first. But Caballero insisted the decision was political.

Uribe's aggressive tactics to tame a five-decade-old, cocaine-fueled insurgency has made him one of the most popular presidents in recent Colombian history. He has boosted the ranks of the military and seized territory held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's biggest rebel group.

The Bush administration has cited a drastic drop in kidnappings to justify continuing some $700 million in annual aid for Colombia, mainly for its military.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said in a November speech that with U.S. help, Uribe had reduced kidnappings by 72 percent – from 2,882 in 2002 to 800 in 2005.

There is little doubt that kidnappings have fallen since Uribe first took office in 2002. But even some of his supporters have questioned whether the drop is as steep as the government figures cited by Burns.

“Kidnappings have dropped during his presidency, but five years ago these numbers were more reliable,” said Olga Lucia Gomez, director of Pais Libre, a nonprofit foundation that helps kidnap victims.

The problem, Gomez said, is that the government has added bureaucratic hurdles to classifying missing people as kidnap victims. Reports of missing people must now go through a special committee of the kidnapping police, which works with prosecutors to determine if there is evidence of an abduction.

The government has not said how many disappearances it has declined to list as abductions or what standards it uses to make such decisions, said Gomez, who supports Uribe's security initiatives but criticizes the new policy for abduction reports.

She said her organization provided assistance for 2,000 kidnapping cases last year, but at least 40 percent were not registered by the government. In many cases, relatives may have not wanted to notify the government. But Gomez fears others may not have met the government's new criteria.

More:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070217-1836-colombia-numbersgame.html

Adding additional, important snip:

In his November speech, Burns also cited a sharp drop in the number of Colombians displaced by political violence. But the United Nations has said Uribe's administration is underestimating the internal refugee problem by more than a million people.

The government's figure – 1.9 million – counts only those who were forced to flee their homes by actual violence – not just threats. The U.N. says the real number is 3 million and that the number has risen since Uribe took office, basing its estimate on data compiled mostly by the Roman Catholic Church.

[Judi Lynn]

71. It's important to call attention, AGAIN, to your report, which stands as is, can't be dismissed. n/t

[annabanana]

106. We should all thank Zorro for giving us the opportunity to show more people

how complicit the Uribe government is.

[Judi Lynn]

116. That's a side effect they just can't seem to anticipate! Funny, isn't it? n/t

[struggle4progress]

41. Uribe Adviser’s Statements Contribute to Climate of Intolerance That Fosters Violence (Mar 08)

(Washington, DC, March 26, 2008) – Recent statements by a close adviser to Colombian President Álvaro Uribe contributed to “a climate of political intolerance that fosters violence” shortly before a wave of killings, attacks, and threats against trade unionists and rights activists, a group of 22 international human rights organizations said in a joint letter to Uribe today ...

“Baseless comments such as these are profoundly damaging to Colombian democracy and human rights, and place those against whom they are made in direct danger of violence,” said the NGO coalition in a letter to President Uribe. “These statements stigmatize the legitimate work of thousands of human rights defenders, trade unionists, and victims, and can have a chilling effect on the exercise of rights to freedom of expression and free association.” ...

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/03/26/colomb18353.htm

[struggle4progress]

42. U.S. Silent on Colombia’s Election Irregularities (Mar 06)

March 13, 2006

Pro-Uribe parties proved victorious in the March 12 congressional elections, gaining a majority in Colombia’s Congress. Many of the pro-Uribe candidates had violence and intimidation perpetrated by right-wing paramilitaries to thank for their victory. As German Espejo, an analyst with the Bogotá-based Security and Democracy Foundation, noted, “The paramilitaries played a decisive role in this election, particularly in the northern part of the country” ...

Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office” ...

The supposed demilitarization of the paramilitaries has done little to alleviate the threats faced by candidates critical of the paramilitary agenda. Juan David Diaz was a candidate running in the town of Magangue in northern Colombia, where he had exposed paramilitary ties to powerful local business people. According to Diaz, paramilitaries threatened to kill him if he attempted to campaign in the town of 160,000. In another prominent case, independent Colombian Congressman Pedro Arenas from the eastern department of Guaviare was warned by paramilitaries that they would kill him if he ran for re-election. Arenas chose not to run and moved his family out of the region ...

Three pro-Uribe parties—Partido de la U, Cambio Radical and the Democratic Colombia Party—recently expelled seven candidates for plotting election strategies with the paramilitaries. The candidates were only expelled, however, after their links to militias were revealed in the nation’s largest daily El Tiempo. Ultimately, the expulsion meant little as all seven candidates immediately joined smaller pro-Uribe parties in order to continue their congressional campaigns. Meanwhile, the two reporters that broke the story received death threats shortly after the article was published ...

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia231.htm

[struggle4progress]

43. None so blind as those who choose not to see n/t

[Zorro]

46. So read this with your eyes open

<snip>

...American labour unions and international human-rights groups make much of the fact that trade unionists are murdered in Colombia, and that few of the assassins are investigated and brought to trial. Human Rights Watch says that 17 unionists were killed in first three months of 2008 alone, and more than 400 during the six years of Mr Uribe's administration. No doubt, there is a problem. Photos of assassinated unionists are posted outside the thick glass security door of the CUT trade-union federation in Bogotá. Police with automatic rifles patrol outside. Carlos Rodríguez, the federation's head, claims that the killers include right-wing paramilitary groups and “agents of the state”.

Yet these murders, however grotesque, should be seen in the context of a society still emerging from extreme violence. It is not only success against the FARC that has brought about the startling reduction of killing. Between 2004 and 2006 Mr Uribe persuaded the right-wing paramilitaries to give up their weapons. If they gave an account of their crimes, they would be treated more leniently. As a result, the justice system is swamped. Mario Iguarán, the attorney-general, says that in spite of being voted extra resources from Congress, his investigators are overwhelmed by the numbers. Some 4,000 people are being investigated for crimes against humanity; 800 new murders have come to light as a result of confessions alone.

In response to foreign pressure, the government has also set up a special unit to investigate the murder of unionists. But the government points out that union members are less likely to be murder victims than members of the population at large. Some of those killed, it says, may have been victims of common crimes, not singled out as unionists. Besides, says Mr Uribe, the unions have other reasons for opposing him. They do not like his liberal economic reforms. And although Colombians should be, and are, free to join unions, Mr Uribe says, there are historical reasons for distrust. In the 1960s unions were penetrated by Marxists who espoused all forms of struggle, including violence...

<snip>

Read the whole article at: http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11053186

[struggle4progress]

49. Out of the fields, into the halls of government: see my #48

[struggle4progress]

51. Colombian paramilitaries rearming after peace deal (Feb 2007)

Sat Feb 10, 2007 6:39pm GMT
By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Former right-wing Colombian warlords say junior members of their ranks are re-arming to take over the criminal networks they left behind, a trend that would put the country's paramilitary peace process at risk.

Pedro "The Knife" Guerrero, former paramilitary chief of the southern jungle province of Guaviare, said in a letter published by local media on Saturday that he fears this new generation of militia will assassinate him if he turns himself over to authorities as part of a deal promising reduced jail time.

"I am hiding in order to preserve my life," says the letter to the government from Guerrero, who authorities say earned his alias by using a knife to kill and mutilate peasants suspected of supporting left-wing rebels ...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUKN1024920220070210

[struggle4progress]

52. Colombian right-wing "paras" still a threat - OAS (Dec 2007)

12 Dec 2007 23:21:52 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Colombian paramilitaries have been weakened but not destroyed despite government assertions to the contrary, the Organization of American States said on Wednesday ...

"The demobilization and disarmament has clearly weakened paramilitarism," Caramagna, who monitors Colombia's peace process for the OAS, told reporters. "But we do not think it has ended."

He said that some paramilitaries were rearming and that a man on a motorcycle rode up to OAS headquarters in a poor neighborhood in the city of Medellin last month and threatened to kill the head of the office if she did not get out of town.

"For the first time in four years an official of the OAS mission was threatened in Medellin," Caramagna said ...

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N12647344.htm

[struggle4progress]

54. RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Paramilitarism Alive and Well (1 Apr 08)

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Apr 1 (IPS) - "If their slogan was land, dignity and peace, this time it will be terror, murder and hell," said a threat sent to human rights defenders and trade unionists who took part in a Mar. 6 march in homage to the victims of Colombia’s far-right paramilitary groups ...

Complicity between paramilitaries, the security forces and other authorities has been established in 10 sentences handed down by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights that have held the Colombian state responsible for human rights violations ...

According to a source with an international body, who asked not to be identified, the demobilised paramilitaries were called to take up their weapons again late last year in Urabá and Chocó in the northwest, and Cesar in the northeast, along the Venezuelan border, as well as in "many other regions."

That situation, observed on the ground by the international body, is in keeping with the threats, which announced the "total rearmament of the paramilitary forces" ...

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41817

[struggle4progress]

56. Paramilitaries are rearming, says Salvatore Mancuso (6 Apr 2008)

Salvatore Mancuso, former second in command of the demobilized United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), acknowledges that demobilized paramilitary forces are rearming.

In an interview with Terra, Mancuso blames the Uribe administration for the remilitarization, because of breaching agreements with the paramilitaries, failing to reintegrate them into Colombian society and letting the regions important for the drug trade fall in the hands of guerrillas and criminals ...

http://colombiareports.com/2008/04/06/paramilitaries-are-rearming-says-salvatore-mancuso/

[Judi Lynn]

74. It's been a real education reading what Salvatore Mancuso has testified in court!

It'll be an easy matter for any Colombia-watching DU'ers to find a lot to investigate on this man in any search.

His name appears in this article which I retrieved to point to fixed elections:

‘Uncomfortable Coincidences’
The latest evidence that ties Colombia’s President to the paramilitaries
by Paul Haste
July 23, 2007

The presidential candidate and the ‘Comandante’

Colombia’s compliant editorialists refer to the revelations as ‘incómodas coincidencias’ - ‘uncomfortable coincidences.’ President Álvaro Uribe claims the accusations are ‘insinuaciones malévolas’ - ‘malevolent insinuations’ - and has, as usual, attacked the messenger, criticising American newspapers, Colombian opposition politicians and even México in an attempt to divert attention from the latest evidence that ties him to the paramilitaries.

The first is a video that shows Álvaro Uribe at a private meeting on 31st October 2001 to organise support for his 2002 presidential campaign. According to the Colombian political magazine Semana, five of the 13 people present were associated with the paramilitaries in the far right AUC militia, and one of them, Frenio Sánchez Carreño, was a notorious narco boss whose militia name was ‘Comandante Esteban.’

Comandante Esteban had been complicit in at least 80 assassinations and also the forced displacement of more than 3000 peasant workers, according to Colombia’s DAS intelligence service, whose agents were actively searching for him at this time. He had threatened local journalists as far back as December 2000, and just twelve days before meeting with Álvaro Uribe, he had signed an AUC ‘communiqué’ that declared union and worker organisers to be ‘military targets.’

The meeting pledged to support Uribe’s presidential campaign, and also other rightist candidates in the 2002 Senate and Congress elections, in the hope that legislation promoted by these politicians would ‘legitimise’ the paramilitaries. These militias succeeded in electing their candidates in 2002 - AUC national boss Salvatore Mancuso has since admitted that intimidation and bought votes, or threats and assassinations, allowed many rightist candidates to be ‘elected’ unopposed - and soon received a payback from the politicians in the form of virtual impunity for their crimes.

The DAS arrested Álvaro Uribe’s supporter, Comandante Esteban, just six weeks after the 31st October meeting, and charged him with aggravated homicide and attempted homicide, among other crimes. For ‘reasons that are still not clear’, according to Semana, and after Uribe became president, he was freed from jail in 2005. Now, as Frenio Sánchez Carreño, the authorities have offered a $5,000 reward for his arrest, accusing him of leading supposedly ‘demobilised’ paramilitaries reprised as criminal gangs.

An interview in México revealed more details about the president’s ties to the paramilitaries. Fabio Ochoa Vasco is a narcotics cartel boss who is one of the United States’ most wanted criminals - he has a $5 million price on his head - and he claimed to Colombian journalists that the paramilitaries’ boss of bosses, Salvatore Mancuso, had financed Álvaro Uribe’s presidential campaign in 2002.

It is suspected that Mancuso, in jail and expecting a lenient sentence while avoiding extradition to the US, has not revealed all about the paramilitaries’ ties to Colombia’s political elite for this reason. Ochoa, lacking Mancuso’s political protection to avoid his fate, has decided to detail his part in the parapolítica scandal in an attempt to be worth more to Colombian investigators and avoid an American jail.

Ochoa claimed that he took thousands of dollars in cash - paramilitaries’ narcotics profits - in suitcases to the capital, Bogotá, to finance rightist candidates in the 2002 elections. He claimed that the paramilitaries and Mancuso contributed $2 million to the president’s campaign, and that he also organised campaigns to intimidate voters in Medellín to ensure Álvaro Uribe was elected.

Mancuso said ‘that the paramilitaries should finance the (presidential) campaign because one of the promises is that there will be a law that should anyone be accused or suspected of being in the paramilitaries, they will be saved,’ Ochoa related, ‘so we made sure that all the votes had to be for Uribe.’ In Medellín’s barrios, people confirmed that the paramilitaries patrolled the streets that election day, demanding to see residents’ cedulas, (identification cards), and warning opposition supporters ‘not to show at the polls if you’re not going to vote for Uribe,’ as one barrio activist recalled.

The third revelation came in another video, this time posted on the opposition Polo Democrático Alternativo internet site that showed another paramilitary boss, ‘Ernesto Báez’, acclaiming Uribista politicians in the 2002 elections as ‘his candidates.’ The Colombia Democrática and Convergencia Popular Cívica parties that the paramilitaries supported succeeded in electing Senators and representatives to Congress in 2002, who subsequently went on to approve laws that gave the paramilitaries their virtual impunity.

More:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13357



'comandante Esteban' is the face in the circle, Uribe is sitting in front of him, to his right.







These three photos are Ernesto Baez

[struggle4progress]

48. Colombian gov't infiltrated by 'paras' - witness (18 April 2008)

Colombian gov't infiltrated by 'paras' - witness
18 Apr 2008 23:01:39 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, April 18 (Reuters) - Colombian government ministries and other state institutions are infiltrated by outlawed right-wing militias, a witness told judges in testimony on Friday that could further imperil a U.S. trade deal.

More than 60 members of Congress, most from President Alvaro Uribe's conservative coalition, are being investigated for possible links to drug-running paramilitaries who have terrorized Colombia for years in the name of combating left-wing rebels.

The probe's star witness, former intelligence official Rafael Garcia, now in jail for erasing the criminal histories of paramilitary leaders from a government database, told the Supreme Court the armed forces, government ministries and other institutions were also rife with "paras."

"Congress is not the only institution penetrated by the paramilitaries," he said while testifying against a senator caught in the scandal ...

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N18429290.htm

[Zorro]

53. Sounds as if the Uribe administration is cleaning house

Don't you agree that's a highly commendable action?

[struggle4progress]

57. Colombia’s death squads get respectable (2005)

... Two telling statistics indicate the political and economic power of these groups. They claim to control 35% of congress and, according to Colombia’s government accounting office, the contraloría general, they control at least a million hectares of land (6). As a result there are 3.5 million displaced people wandering the streets of Colombia’s main towns. Even official figures concede that between 1988 and 2003 paramilitary forces killed 14,476 people, including many community leaders (7) ...

Once the law comes into force, 20 judges will have just 60 days to examine the crimes committed by 10,000 paramilitaries who are expected to make a derisory “free confession” before returning to civilian life by the end of the year. Any prison sentences will be limited to a maximum of eight years, to run from the beginning of negotiations (the Santa Fe de Ralito agreement of July 2003). Condemned paramilitary members will serve their terms in agricultural settlements, or may be allowed to pay a fine and leave the country.

The paramilitaries announced the end of their activities and declared a ceasefire as long ago as November 2002. But the government has had to admit that there have been many violations (9). In September 2004 Colombia’s public defender announced that during the first eight months of that year he had received 342 complaints about apparent ceasefire violations (10). Estimates by NGOs are even higher: the Colombian Commission of Jurists has insisted that between December 2002 and August 2004 1,899 people died or disappeared because of paramilitary activity ...

The former president Andrés Pastrana is among those who have suggested that the main consequence of the new law has been for the paramilitaries to move into the towns to prepare the ground for the May 2006 election in which Uribe, or one of his allies, hopes to be returned to power.

http://mondediplo.com/2005/10/12colombia

[struggle4progress]

58. Under Uribe, The Dark Side of Colombia (2007)

http://nylatinojournal.com/home/eagles_in_fall,_lions_in_spring/analysis/under_uribe,_the_dark_side_of_colombia.html

[AlphaCentauri]

64. Uribe is cleaning house for what purpose?

he wants to be re-elected? he is not doing anything for the Colombian people, he could have to sign a peace agreement with the leftist guerrilla and then advocate all it's affords to end the narco mafia but he is letting the narco mafia expand while he is obsess with the guerrilla.

[struggle4progress]

88. Troubled Times (Jan 08)

Published in Progress Magazine
By José Miguel Vivanco and Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

... As documented by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in recent years there has been a sharp increase in reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the army. In several cases, members of the military have allegedly killed civilians and then dressed them up as guerrillas killed in combat, apparently to boost the military’s body count. When human rights defenders have reported these abuses, Uribe administration officials have accused them of being tools of the guerrillas ...

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/02/01/colomb17975.htm

[Judi Lynn]

92. Absolutely wonderful statement from Jose Miguel Vivanco. Amazing to hear this from him. Astonishing.

From the Human Rights Watch director's statment you posted:

The Bush and Uribe governments cite as evidence of progress official statistics showing a drop in kidnappings and massacres. However, a more disturbing reality hides beneath the statistics and rhetoric. It’s true that there has been a reduction in some abuses, in part because the government has aggressively pursued the FARC. But when it comes to abuses by right-wing paramilitaries and the military, the government’s approach has been very different.
As documented by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in recent years there has been a sharp increase in reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the army. In several cases, members of the military have allegedly killed civilians and then dressed them up as guerrillas killed in combat, apparently to boost the military’s body count. When human rights defenders have reported these abuses, Uribe administration officials have accused them of being tools of the guerrillas.

Since 2002, the government has been engaged in a “peace process” started by paramilitary commanders seeking protection from extradition to the United States on drug charges. Thus, the government has repeatedly proposed initiatives favoring commanders’ interests in avoiding accountability, keeping their wealth, and hiding the truth about long-standing links to the military, the business sector, and politicians.
In fact, the Uribe administration is now embroiled in a growing scandal over links between high-ranking government officials and paramilitaries. Uribe’s former intelligence chief, Jorge Noguera, has come under prosecution for allegedly collaborating with paramilitaries. The allegations are serious enough that the US has revoked Noguera’s visa. More than 40 congressmen from Uribe’s coalition, including his close political ally and cousin, Senator Mario Uribe, are under investigation for similar links. Rather than fully support the investigations, Uribe has repeatedly lashed out against the judges and journalists who are bravely trying to break paramilitaries’ influence.

Fortunately, the climate of opinion in Washington towards Colombia has been shifting since Democrats took control of the Hill. Last year, they froze a portion of military aid to Colombia due to military abuses. The Congress has even suspended consideration of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement until Colombia shows concrete and sustained results in improving the human rights situation.
(snip)

The UK, too, should rethink its policy towards Colombia, lest it be left behind, saddled with Bush’s unprincipled policy.

This is probably going into the files of a lot of people who see your post. Thank you!

[struggle4progress]

Army & Paramilitaries Implicated in New Killing (Apr 08)

... Mr Ciro, who was murdered as he left his him in the village of El Jordan, was a leading member of the Colombian NGO ASOPROA which assists in rural community development. The NGO implements various projects in the Cocorna area and Mr Ciro had travelled abroad on behalf of the organisation to seek funding for their work. He had also been elected as the community leader in Cocorna and was known for his work to denounce human rights violations against peasant farmers in the region.

Threats against Mr Ciro began in 2002 when paramilitaries forced him to flee his home, though he returned in 2005 to be with his family. Shortly afterwards the threats resumed and additional threats were made against his wife and daughter. As a result a meeting was held in June 2005 under the auspices of the local ombudsman, Ossman Castano, where regional military and police officials promised to protect his life.

On January 6th 2006 his son, Javier Ciro, received a note saying that if his father did not leave the area the entire family would be killed. The note also said that anyone who publicly spoke out about army killings in the region would be targeted too. The following month, on February 4th 2006, a second meeting was held at which Mr Castano, local commanders of the security forces, the mayor of Cocorna and human rights groups were present. Again assurances were given that Mr Ciro's life would be protected.

But despite the promises, Mr Ciro was killed on March 30th 2008. Though it has not been confirmed who was responsible for the murder human rights groups have pointed out that Mr Ciro had been the target of a systematic campaign of threats and persecution at the hands of the paramilitaries and the Army for some years. In addition, the 'Corporacion Juridica Libertad', a well-respected human rights group based in the city of Medellin, has reported that in the days leading up to his death a joint unit of soldiers and paramilitaries had been asking locals where they could find Mr Ciro.

http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/?link=newsPage&story=245

[Judi Lynn]

89. Jesus! That will teach this man to "denounce human rights violations against peasant farmers."

This is an important article because it points to something a lot of journalists try to either gloss over or never mention at all, that that is that the Colombian military and the death squads can and do work together in Colombia.

Hideous, yet, unfortunately familiar story, isn't it? What DOES it take to keep one's sanity in a country with a government like that? A good man cannot stand by while these monsters torture and slaughter his neighbors, countrymen, and keep his dignity, his soul. If he speaks out, he doesn't get to keep his life.

He will be remembered forever by those who knew them. I hope his image is burned into the eyelids of his murderers, so they will be able to see the face of a good man when they're trying to go to sleep.

Glad to see you found an article for the "purist" among us who implies ONLY THE VERY LATEST NEWS IS ACCEPTABLE if it comes from a Democrat, (apparently truth from an earlier date is invalid if it supports a decent approach to life!).

[OKthatsIT]

67. The corporations behind these agreements care about 'communities'

They only care about the cheapest labor, the highest profit margin. There is no benefir for the workers other than slavery.

But a little is better than none, huh?

[unkachuck]

4. what's the matter....

....francisco, don't you like Union leaders? Mr. Sweeney is just testing how deaf our Democratic Party leadership has become prior to our November election....

....it's an occupational hazard up here....whenever good politicians get elected to federal office they all seem to suffer dramatic voter hearing loss....

....beside, how many billions do you need from us?....c'mon, who pocketed the 5 mil from the reyes hit?

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ronnie624]

65. Vivanco seems to be an enigma.

I like his stance on this issue, but I've read speeches by him extolling the virtues of the neo liberal economic paradigm in Latin America, and generally speaking in support of U.S. policies in the region. And his 'reports' on Venezuela for HRW are down right ridiculous to anyone who is familiar with the recent political history of the country.

[Judi Lynn]

75. Colombia's Uribe hit by another political scandal

Colombia's Uribe hit by another political scandal
Hugh Bronstein , Reuters
Published: Monday, April 21, 2008

BOGOTA (Reuters) - A former member of Colombia's Congress says she was offered illegal favors by the government to support an amendment that allowed President Alvaro Uribe to stand for re-election in 2006, a charge Uribe denied.

The attorney general on Monday opened an inquiry into Yidis Medina's accusation that the administration promised, but did not deliver, political favors in exchange for supporting the change in law.

The investigation comes on top of a scandal linking some of Uribe's closest political allies to far-right death squads and could further complicate passage of a U.S. free trade deal, which is being blocked by U.S. Democrats concerned about Uribe's human rights record.

In an interview conducted in 2004, but not released until late Sunday night, Medina told a journalist that administration officials offered her the chance to appoint members of three local commissions in her home province -- if she backed legislation allowing Uribe to run for another term.

At one meeting, she said, Uribe asked for her support and promised the government would honor its promises to her.

More:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=9699c153-8281-402c-ad21-3b47b9118936&k=50556

On edit: correcting link. Sorry.

[Judi Lynn]

76. This could be hard to rationalize, even for the most frenzied fascist.

From the article:Uribe called for an investigation of reporter Daniel Coronell, who conducted the interview. Coronell, known for his critical coverage of the president, writes a column for Colombia's main weekly news magazine and also works for the Noticias Uno, or News One, television station.

"Everything indicates that the journalist and the interviewee talked previously about the questions and answers and held the video back until both believed it was the right time to air it," a presidential statement said.

Medina, a Conservative party member who was part of Uribe's coalition in the lower house of Congress, says during the interview that the video could be shown if she is killed or if the government fails to keep the promises it made to her.DU'ers recall Uribe targeted march organizers in the last anti-paramilitary march, and six of them were assassinated IMMEDIATELY. No leaps of imagination need to grasp the meaning of that one.

[Judi Lynn]

77. You may wish to vote at the Yahoo site on this story. Here's the link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080421/wl_nm/colombia_scandal_dc

Thank you.

[ronnie624]

86. "The government persuades.

It does not buy loyalties," Uribe said. "We do not tolerate corruption."

:rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

90. Oh, we've always known that about him, haven't we? Why ELSE would

_{George W. Bush} find him so delightful?

http://d.yimg.com.nyud.net:8090/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20070311/capt.sge.elp98.110307203419.photo00.photo.default-421x512.jpg
When he says "We," does he include the over 60 people in his administration who are tied to the narcotraffickers, some of them his relatives? Who knows?

[Judi Lynn]

81. Uribe's vice president Santo's name comes up in this fine, VERY RECENT article:

March 31, 2008

Propagandizing Human Rights in Colombia

by Garry Leech

It happens time and time again. Following the killing of Colombian peasants, the government immediately blames guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the mainstream media in both Colombia and the United States dutifully report the allegations. In most cases, evidence later emerges showing that the Colombian military or its right-wing paramilitary allies were the actual perpetrators of the crime. The media, however, rarely reports the new evidence with the same vigor with which it reported the original claims holding the FARC responsible—if they report the new findings at all. Consequently, the Colombian government’s propaganda campaign has successfully created the impression in many people’s minds that the FARC are responsible for a majority of Colombia’s human rights abuses despite the fact that statistics released by human rights organizations year after year contradict popular sentiment.

The disconnect between what people believe and the human rights reality in Colombia has again been made evident by the recent issuance of arrest warrants for Colombian soldiers responsible for the February 2005 massacre of eight peasants in the peace community of San José de Apartadó. Immediately following the massacre, community members had claimed that the Colombian army was operating in the area at the time. The Colombian Defense Ministry immediately denied these claims, stating that the army was not involved in the killings and that “no army troops were closer than two days’ distance” from where the massacre occurred.

Vice-President Francisco Santos then quickly sought to shift blame for the massacre to the guerrillas by stating, “The Government has evidence that leads to the FARC as authors of this horrible crime.” According to this alleged evidence, the victims were FARC collaborators who were killed for trying to leave the guerrilla group. And then, several weeks after the massacre, President Alvaro Uribe accused leaders of the peace community of San José de Apartadó of “helping the FARC” and “wanting to use the community to protect this terrorist organization.” By publicly aligning the victims with the guerrillas—a common strategy of the Colombian government—the president sought to redirect attention away from the possible perpetrators and onto the victims by holding them responsible for their own deaths.

While the mainstream media dutifully reported all of the government’s accusations, the fact that the massacre occurred in San José de Apartadó posed a problem for the Uribe administration. The peace community has achieved a relatively high profile with international solidarity and human rights organizations over the past decade, which led to the mainstream media in this particular case also reporting claims by community members that the Colombian army was involved in the massacre.

Finally, last week—more than three years after the massacre—Colombia’s attorney general’s office issued arrest warrants for 15 soldiers accused of perpetrating the killings. The warrants were issued following testimony given by a demobilized paramilitary fighter named Jorge Luis Salgado. According to Salgado, he and other paramilitaries acted as guides for the Colombian army patrol that committed the massacre in the hamlet of Mulatos in San José de Apartadó.
(snip)

Finally, the mainstream media in both Colombia and the United States are complicit in this psychological warfare by continuing to dutifully report the allegations of government officials even though reporters are fully aware of the fact that the claims are often false. It does not seem to matter to reporters and media outlets that the same officials have repeatedly manipulated them in the past—and are likely doing so again. Representatives of the mainstream media claim that they are simply reporting what a particular government official has said—and that the allegations by officials are, in and of themselves, news. However, by dutifully and unquestioningly reporting any statement issued by government officials, the mainstream media reduces itself to little more than a propaganda tool for the state.

More:
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia280.htm

[Judi Lynn]

99. They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia

April 22, 2008
Memo to the Clinton Campaign
They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia
By DAVID MACARAY

Even though the Colombian government argues that the level of violence has, in fact, declined, there have been more than 2,500 union members murdered in Colombia since 1985. More than 400 have been killed since 2002, when conservative president Alvaro Uribe took office, and 19 union members and leaders have already been killed this year.

According to statistics compiled by the National Labor School, a research organization located in Medellin, Colombia, of those 2,500 murders, less than 5 per cent of the cases have resulted in convictions.

So who is murdering these union members and why are they doing it? Based on press reports and information supplied by human rights agencies, the murders are being committed by right-wing paramilitary groups and “private armies” who suspect labor unions of harboring left-wing activists or sympathizers, or of being infiltrated by left-wing rebels who actively oppose Uribe’s conservative government.

In Latin America there is a long history of home-grown leftist opposition to government collusion with Yankee-led business interests. Labor unions in the rough and tumble country of Colombia are even less popular with Big Business and Big Government than they are in the United States. At least, these days, in the U.S., business and government interests combine to litigate or legislate a union to death, not murder it outright.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray04222008.html

[Judi Lynn]

126. For general interest, for DU'ers who normally read Colombia threads:

Genocidal war in Colombia parallels Guatemalan atrocities
By Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales, Fresno Bee, Monday 8 March 1999

~snip~
When this was happening, as a society we didn't listen to the pleas of Rigoberta Menchu, nor to the horrific screams of tortured campesinos, raped nuns, murdered priests or assassinated bishops. We didn't hear the sounds of millions of feet, as displaced Indians and campesinos of the region fled the scorched-earth policies of the military. Many wound up in the United States. While here, most lived in fear, staying one step ahead of immigration and State Department officials who accused them of lying about the condition of their homelands.

The commission recommended reparations for those traumatized by the war, for the loss of homes and the systematic land theft. What is left to ponder is, What role should the United States play in all this, for having financed this war?

Now from a point south comes another plea: Cecilia Zarate of Colombia has said, "What happened in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s, is happening in my country today."

She unequivocally characterizes the war in Colombia as genocidal. "Anyone who supports the poor is eliminated."

The difference between Guatemala and Colombia, noted Zarate, who heads the Colombia Support Network in Madison, Wis., is that in Guatemala, the genocide was in large part racially motivated. In Colombia, the genocide against the poor is indiscriminate and includes indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, campesinos and anyone who expresses political dissent. In Colombia, the military and paramilitary troops are primarily responsible for perhaps 85% of the human rights violations, but even the opposition guerrillas are implicated, particularly in kidnappings.

The 1998 Human Rights Watch report, "War Without Quarter," estimates that in the past 10 years, more than 30,000 people have lost their lives in Colombia's armed conflict. And it estimates that the majority of the casualties have been not victims of a drug war, but rather, victims of the military and paramilitary groups that jointly roam the country with abandon and impunity, terrorizing their political opponents. The report asserts that they do this while protecting the multibillion-dollar enterprises of the nation's drug barons, and that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia also profits from the trade by levying taxes upon drug barons to the tune of $ 350 million per year. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/163.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As you can easily determine, the elements of this article remain constant, and these dynamics continue, and won't be changed until the Colombian government itself changes.

If the age of the article terrifies one poster here, sorry, but the story is going to be the same until it changes, and that won't happen by simply killing everyone who isn't a supporter of the evil done by the Colombian oligarchy.

There are some principles one just doesn't betray, and you can't support monsters. The right-wing approach seems to be kill everyone who won't be compromised, or bribe them, or coerce them. Torture them! Hey, even have fun with it, as was witnessed in one of the Central American countries, by another fascist death squads: kill the family, then place them around their humble dinner table, sitting in their chairs, with THEIR HEADS on the table in front of them, so when they are discovered, the people of their village will be traumatized beyond mind itself.

That's why so many Latin American countries are light thousands and thousands of perfectly good people now.

[struggle4progress]

132. When Colombian authorities call someone a liar, it's a threat

... In 2007 President Uribe once again made statements attacking the media for its coverage of public issues .. Another prominent journalist, Daniel Coronell, who had only recently returned to Colombia after nearly two years in exile, also received a death threat after Uribe publicly accused him of being a “liar” ... http://www.hrw.org/englishwr2k8/docs/2008/01/31/colomb17754.htm

English PEN is alarmed by reports that Gonzalo Guillén (born Bogotá, 1952), author and correspondent for the Miami-based daily Spanish language newspaper El Nuevo Herald, has fled Colombia in fear for his life after receiving numerous threats apparently stemming from his investigation of links between the Uribe administration, paramilitarism and drugs trafficking ... On 2 October 2007 the President called national radio stations Caracol and RCN ... On air, the President accused Guillén of being "a professional slanderer" who had "dedicated his journalistic career to infamy and lies" and was systematically trying to damage his reputation both in Colombia and abroad .... in the three days following the President's statement Guillén received 24 death threats and on 4 October it was reported that he had decided to leave the country for his own safety ... http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/bulletins/colombiaauthorfleescountryfollowingdeaththreats/


For additional cultural context:

New York criminal defense lawyer Thomas Liotti ... took the unusual step of issuing a press release criticizing the federal Drug Enforcement Agency for what he said was a tepid response to a death threat against him and other lawyers who defend Colombian drug traffickers. The threat came from an anonymous letter from Colombia that named 22 lawyers, 7 in New York and 15 in Colombia. The letter said any American lawyer found in Colombia would be “captured and executed.” ... Next to his name, it reportedly said: “Incompetente, Desleal, Mentiroso, Traidor, Sin Excrupulos” ... http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/03/20/ny-criminal-defense-lawyer-criticizes-feds-for-soft-response-to-death-threat/

[Judi Lynn]

133. Our own media has been mute on the subject of Colombia's treatment of female union workers.

You'll find the moment scanning this statement will give you a view you probably haven't heard about, just as our own media refused to report on _Bush ally, Islam Karimov's history of boiling his political prisoners alive:

Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman trade unionist. In the past year it has become even more so, with a dramatic increase in the number of abuses committed against women. Those responsible for the vast majority of the attacks are paramilitary death squads that work with the Colombian Army.

Since the rightwing president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, took power in August 2002 there has been a 600 per cent increase in human rights violations perpetrated against women trade unionists and 68 female trade unionists have been assassinated. The facts speak for themselves. Last year 70 trade unionists were killed, 260 received death threats and three have disappeared.

Many of those targeted were also tortured and mutilated by the paramilitaries. Some of the women were killed in front of their children. In other cases the paramilitaries threatened the children in an effort to force their mothers to abandon their union activities.

Women are targeted for a number of reasons – to sow terror within communities, to force people to flee their homes and to dissuade others from getting involved in trade unions.

To make matters even worse, the army are increasingly using sexual violence against women. According to Amnesty International rape and sexual mutilation are frequently used by the security forces and their paramilitary allies as part of their terror tactics.

Colombia’s prisons currently hold approximately 320 female political prisoners. Many of them are trade unionists.

The conditions in Colombia’s jails are dire and inhumane. There is inadequate medical care, over-crowding, insufficient sanitation facilities, and prisoners are denied access to educational and reading materials.

Some prisoners (we currently know of 28 cases) have had their infants imprisoned alongside them. These children are not recognized by the prison authorities as separate inmates, so mothers are forced to share the already scarce food rations with their children, leading to malnutrition and other health problems.
(snip)

“The woman who initially acted as leader for the group of prisoners I sat with was a teacher and union member. They created a false case against her and she has been in prison for nine months accused of rebellion. She knows that there is no evidence against her but there has been no progress on her case.

“Many of the prisoners have been here for four years without trial and 70 per cent on this patio have not been convicted. There are nearly 80 prisoners and most are accused of rebellion – all are accused of crimes they have not committed.

"Half of the women are here simply because they live in areas where paramilitaries operate and control. They told us of whole communities being arrested. They told us of massacres where those that are left alive are arrested and put in prison.

“They told of Uribe’s policy to pays informers. Ex-guerrillas and paramilitaries are encouraged to inform on five other people, accuse them of being guerrillas (without any evidence) and then to have impunity from arrest themselves.

“The poor sell themselves to the state with false information but the authorities don’t care as Uribe has to produce ‘results’ to show the Pentagon how his policy of fighting the terrorists is working. He can say that they have arrested and imprisoned x number of guerrillas when in fact they are innocent people, and Uribe will continue to receive the US military aid.

“Over 40 per cent of the women here are heads of household are many are denied visits from their children as they cannot afford to travel to see them. Some women haven’t seen their children in for five years.

“We were told that torture, both physical and psychological, was a regular feature, particularly in the period between arrest and being put in prison and included ripping out finger nails, semi-drownings and being beaten. They believe there is a lot of drug abuse among the armed forces and many seem crazy on drugs when carrying out these crimes.

“One woman said she had a bag put over her head to asphyxiate her until she passed out, they then revived her and repeated the process five times until she confessed to something she hadn’t done.

“Torture is commonplace and if you do get to trial and you say you confessed under torture the authorities say that’s what all the guerrillas say, therefore you must be a guerrilla.

“We heard from another woman who had been beaten and tortured when she had been locked up for five days with no legal help. She hid the scars over her back from the beatings from the authorities and demanded medical help. If they knew she had injuries that could be seen they wouldn’t allow her to see a doctor. Prisoners are forced to sign that they are treated well.

“There were so many tragic personal testimonies that the women gave. It seems a place where no-one can be trusted. A woman was taken from her home by police after being informed on by a 16 year old boy who had been living in her house. This, once very poor young man, is now known to be studying at university – having been paid for informing.

“Being informed on after personal dispute, especially after a fall-out between lovers is commonplace. There were two women who had six-year sentences after their lovers had informed on them.”

More:
http://www.amicustheunion.org/default.aspx?page=3768

[Judi Lynn]

134. Killings of trade unionists on the rise in Colombia

Killings of trade unionists on the rise in Colombia
30 April 2008

“We do not want marches crying for the dead, nor 1 May protests” - taken from a paramilitary death threat sent to trade unionists in the department of Santander on 22 April 2008.

Across much of the world, May Day – International Workers’ Day – represents an opportunity for workers to celebrate their rights and stand together in solidarity. May Day rallies are held from London to Moscow to Jakarta to Caracas to Cape Town.

Across the world, trade unionists face violence and oppression. Despite nearly 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, in Article 23, guarantees everyone the right "to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his/her interests", this right is widely violated.

Year after year, Colombia has symbolised the most serious and consistent abuses of this human right. In Colombia, participating in May Day marches or engaging in other legitimate trade union activities cannot be taken for granted.

So far this year, some 22 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia, a significant increase on the number killed in the same period last year. Despite the setting up in Colombia of a permanent office of the International Labour Organization and a specialist unit to investigate human rights abuses against trade unionists, the security of trade unionists remains precarious.

On 17 April 2008, the body of Jesús Heberto Caballero Ariza, a leader of the Union of SENA Public Sector Employees (Sindicato de Empleados Públicos del SENA, SINDESENA) was found in Sabanalarga Municipality, Atlántico Department. His body was reported to bear signs of torture. Prior to his death, he was reported to have received death threats made by the “Aguilas Negras” paramilitary group.

His death occurred a few days before a death threat signed by “Aguilas Negras”, dated 21 April 2008, was circulated in Atlántico Department by email to trade union and human rights organizations. Jesús Heberto Caballero was reported to be exposing corrupt practices within the SENA, the National Apprenticeship Services (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje).

More:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/feature-stories/killings-trade-unionists-rise-colombia-20080430