Amnesty: Colombian president should stop false accusations against human rights groups

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Amnesty International

Colombian president should stop false accusations against human rights groups
20 November 2008

President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia should stop making false and dangerous accusations against human rights defenders, according to a joint statement released on 19 November.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) released the statement after both organizations were verbally attacked by President Uribe, for issuing reports in October criticizing his government.

After its report was released, President Uribe accused Amnesty International of "blindness", "fanaticism" and "dogmatism". He also publicly accused José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at HRW, of being a "supporter" and an “accomplice" of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

In the joint statement, both organizations have called on President Uribe to stop making accusations and to instead address the human rights concerns raised by the reports.

~snip~
HRW's report, Breaking the Grip? Obstacles to Justice for Paramilitary Mafias in Colombia assessed Colombia's progress toward investigating and breaking the influence that paramilitaries have over many state institutions. It also described how government actions were deliberately sabotaging those investigations.

Amnesty International's report, Leave us in peace! Targeting civilians in Colombia's internal armed conflict said that the Colombian government was in denial about its human rights situation. Despite increasing reports of forced internal displacement, attacks against social and human rights activists and killings by security forces, the Colombian authorities are attempting to convince the international community that the human rights situation is improving.




Read more: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/colombian-president-should-stop-false-accusations-against-human-rights-groups-20081120

[mojowork_n]

1. Amnesty is a little better than HRW, but that's not saying much.

If you scroll down to the end of this webpage:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Human_Rights_Watch

and go to the "external links" list, read some of the articles, you'll see what I mean.

On this particular issue -- the situation in Columbia -- I would venture to guess this is a form of political pressure directed against the Uribe government. Uribe spoke out against corporations that were sponsors for financial pyramid schemes, for the purpose of laundering drug money.

{Edit} -- That was in a three-paragraph report in my local paper, under the heading, "World." When I went to look for links to reference the story, there was more information:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7726069.stm

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/business/business_wire/story/390006.html

Thousands of angry investors gathered in the capital to protest the shutdown of DMG, Colombia's largest pyramid scheme, on suspicion of laundering drug money. Several-hundred were tear-gassed as they blocked a main street in support of DMG founder David Murcia, who was deported from Panama Thursday on money laundering and bribery charges. Six other DMG officials face similar charges.

Uribe suggested that the pyramid schemes not only launder the profits of drug trafficking - but that they also might have links to leftist guerrillas and rightwing paramilitaries. The president did not present any evidence for guerilla and paramilitary ties.

"We could be facing a blow from the drug traffickers, from the guerrillas, from the paramilitaries who try to launder money by tricking Colombians, and skillfully invoking unjust causes to create hate between Colombians," Uribe said Thursday.

Although they come from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, both Uribe and Bolivia's Evo Morales are on the same side when it comes to being honest about the role of the DEA in South America -- making sure that the "drug war" will never be 'won.'


If you have any doubts -- consider the timing. Uribe made his comments November 19th. The "joint" AI-HRW report was released the following day.

It's not like either organization hasn't been accused, before, of 'playing politics' with refugees, or even 'manufacturing' "human rights crises."

As far as I know, Human Rights Watch has never spoken out against the abuses at Guantanamo Bay, for example. They're remarkably selective about whose rights they stand up to defend...

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. All you have to do is look up "human rights watch" with Guantanamo on Google

and you get:

2002: Growing Problem Of Guantanamo Detainees

2004: Guantanamo condemned two years on

2005: Getting Away with Torture? Human Rights Watch Calls for Accountability Into U.S. Abuse of Detainees

2006: Rumsfeld Potentially Liable for Torture

2007: Mark Five Years of Guantanamo by Closing It

2008: No pardon for torture under Bush, says Human Rights Watch

[EFerrari]

3. Vivanco is dirty. But it's funny to see the even more dirty Uribe call him out.

With BushCo going out of power, both of them are looking at a bleak few years.

[mojowork_n]

9. You're right.

It's like the Mayor of Tiahuana.....

.....the character on Showtime's "Weeds" dramas, whose inamorata is the Ohhh-Sooo-Lovely Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker)

.....meets one of the evil masterminds from "Wag the Dog".

I did not know that Uribe -- for all his anti-drug posturing on camera and in the press -- was actually the Mayor of Medellin during the early 80's, the heyday of Pablo Escobar.

And Vivanco -- the Latin American director of Human Rights Watch -- cut his teeth as Pinochet's chief apologist in the 80's, who defended him against the Inter-American Human Rights Commission:

Posted at both these links:

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3841

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:noWnvFTIoxQJ:www.hollow-hill.com/sabina/fascism_without_swastikas/+vivanco+columbia+rawstory&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us

José Miguel Vivanco served as a diplomatic functionary under the bloody Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet between 1986-1989, serving no less as the butcher's rabid apologist before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His behavior was particularly egregious during the regime's brutal repression of a mass popular uprising in the squatter settlements of Santiago in 1986-1987. With the return of electoral politics (democracy) in Chile, Vivanco took off to Washington where he set up his own NGO, the Center for Justice and International Law, disguising his right-wing affinities and passing himself off as a 'human rights' advocate.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Mayor of Medellin, associate of Pablo Escobar.

A HARSH LIGHT ON ASSOCIATE 82
A DECLASSIFIED PENTAGON REPORT CLAIMS URIBE ONCE WORKED FOR PABLO ESCOBAR
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Aug 9, 2004

In September 1991 the U.S. Department of Defense compiled a list of individuals believed to be associated with Colombia's notorious Medellin drug cartel. There are 106 names on the newly declassified intelligence document, and they read like a who's who of thugs, assassins, midlevel traffickers and crooked attorneys. The cartel's ruthless kingpin, Pablo Escobar, was prominent on the list, of course, along with the former Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. But the real head turner is item No. 82, which reads as follows: "Alvaro Uribe Velez--a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S.... Uribe has worked for the Medellin cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria."

The Pentagon report portrays Uribe in a light sharply at variance with his current image as Washington's main ally in the U.S.- financed war on drugs in South America. But in those days, he was among dozens of Colombian pols who openly opposed the extradition of their drug-trafficking countrymen. Uribe has since changed his views--and, in fact, his government has sent scores of drug traffickers to the United States for prosecution since he took office.

The report was obtained by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based nongovernmental research group. The identity of the document's author was removed by Pentagon censors. The detailed thumbnail descriptions of the Medellin cartel's associates suggest that the data came from Colombian or U.S. counter-narcotics officials, and the text states at the beginning that the report "forwards profiles on the more important narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels." It is stamped CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN WNINTEL, meaning that its contents shouldn't be shared with foreign nationals. The U.S. ambassador to Colombia in 1991, Morris Busby, does not recall the document, and efforts to reach the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency liaison officer in Bogota in 1991, retired Army Col. James S. Roche Jr., failed to elicit a response. In a two-page written statement, the office of the Colombian president denied that Uribe had links of any kind to a business in the United States as asserted in the 1991 report. But the statement did not address the allegations that Uribe had worked for the Medellin cartel and was a close friend of Escobar, who was killed in a 1993 police raid.

In September 1991 the U.S. Department of Defense compiled a list of individuals believed to be associated with Colombia's notorious Medellin drug cartel. There are 106 names on the newly declassified intelligence document, and they read like a who's who of thugs, assassins, midlevel traffickers and crooked attorneys. The cartel's ruthless kingpin, Pablo Escobar, was prominent on the list, of course, along with the former Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. But the real head turner is item No. 82, which reads as follows: "Alvaro Uribe Velez--a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S.... Uribe has worked for the Medellin cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria."

The Pentagon report portrays Uribe in a light sharply at variance with his current image as Washington's main ally in the U.S.- financed war on drugs in South America. But in those days, he was among dozens of Colombian pols who openly opposed the extradition of their drug-trafficking countrymen. Uribe has since changed his views--and, in fact, his government has sent scores of drug traffickers to the United States for prosecution since he took office.

The report was obtained by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based nongovernmental research group. The identity of the document's author was removed by Pentagon censors. The detailed thumbnail descriptions of the Medellin cartel's associates suggest that the data came from Colombian or U.S. counter-narcotics officials, and the text states at the beginning that the report "forwards profiles on the more important narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels." It is stamped CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN WNINTEL, meaning that its contents shouldn't be shared with foreign nationals. The U.S. ambassador to Colombia in 1991, Morris Busby, does not recall the document, and efforts to reach the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency liaison officer in Bogota in 1991, retired Army Col. James S. Roche Jr., failed to elicit a response. In a two-page written statement, the office of the Colombian president denied that Uribe had links of any kind to a business in the United States as asserted in the 1991 report. But the statement did not address the allegations that Uribe had worked for the Medellin cartel and was a close friend of Escobar, who was killed in a 1993 police raid.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/54770

~~~~~~~
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"

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

~~~~~~~
Truly interesting news finally reaching daylight about José Miguel Vivanco. It was well buried, wasn't it? It has made people deeply suspicious that he has finally spoken out against Uribe, after all these years, so many, MANY helpless victims' deaths later, so many intimidated voters later, so many labor union workers, human rights workers, indigenous people, journalists dead and buried later, so many dead campesinos, even official Peace Community citizens later!

[mojowork_n]

4. And if you enter HRW + criticism

you get a fairly lengthy Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watch

Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, and George Szamuely argue that despite constructive efforts, Human Rights Watch "has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government's agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment". They charge HRW "accepts the NATO-friendly view that civilian deaths from high-tech warfare such as in aerial bombings and missile strikes are not prima facie "deliberate" as are face-to-face and low-tech killings of civilians". They further charge that "HRW facilitates the supreme international crime " by "virtue of biases which regularly underrate U.S. and allied human rights violations and inflate those of their targets.

David Peterson asserts that Human Rights Watch "was training its 'human rights' binoculars at the Sandinistas far more earnestly than at the foreign power seeking their overthrow by sponsoring armed guerrilla and terrorist campaigns against them" during the 1980s in Nicaragua...

...ZMag has criticized HRW for not condemning the situation in Haiti strongly enough and stated that Human Rights Watch "has assisted the US in its efforts to crush democracy in Latin America."...

...

Edit PS -- I did follow your links, and it was good to see the executive director of HRW, Ken Roth quoted as saying, "...The US constitution gives an outgoing president the right to grant pardons, including to himself. But Human Rights Watch hopes that those responsible for allowing torture, including so-called “cruel and unusual punishment” such as simulated drowning, or “waterboarding”, will be prosecuted.

'It should not be swept under the rug simply because the person who happened to authorise it might have been the President or the Vice-President of the United States,' Roth says."



Michael Barker examined the question in Z magazine:

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/14804

In our increasingly public relations-driven world, it is of little surprise that cynical political elites regularly use the rhetoric of democracy, peace, and human rights to disguise their overtly anti-humanist policies. Why should we expect less of our leaders in a world where the corporate media wages a relentless war to manufacture our consent for ruling demagogues? Thus it seems a logical assumption that budding mind managers will attempt to pervert the very concepts that their voters/targets hold most dearly. That this doublespeak is rendered invisible in the mainstream media is a given, but the lack of debate about this process in the alternative media is more worrisome.

Writers in the alternative press, of course, regularly question the rhetoric of our anti-democratic leaders, but the number of researchers investigating their cunningly misnamed (imperial) organizations - like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) - are few, and the number examining the democratic credentials of what are taken to be progressive organizations are even less still. This is disturbing in many ways, because if say for example I was a neoconservative and had identified this void of critical inquiry, then I would see the obvious utility of infiltrating and hijacking (or even creating) such unaccountable organizations so that I could use them for my own political purposes.<1> Thus if we are truly interested in creating progressive democratically run group's within society, then it seems like a no-brainer that we should ensure their accountability through undertaking ongoing critiques of their work. While such activities are less necessary for organisations that invite a high degree of local participatory control, it is vital for national or internationally orientated groups that for the most part are privately run, with public involvement usually limited to monetary support...

..."he NED was created in the highest echelons of the US national security state, as part of the same project that led to the illegal operations of the Iran-Contra scandal. It is organically integrated into the overall execution of US national security and foreign policy. In structure, organization, and operation, it is closer to clandestine and national security organs such as the CIA than apolitical or humanitarian endowments as its name would suggest. The NED has operated in tandem with all major interventionist undertakings in the 1980s and 1990s."


...some of HRW's Americas Advisory Board are directly promoting the agenda of the NED-linked 'democracy' establishment, while many others are closely linked to its most influential proponents. For reasons of concision, however, the author has chosen to focus predominantly on the 'democratic' affiliations of HRW's Americas Advisory Board members, and so does not concentrate on each individual's links to what appear to be genuinely democratic organizations. This decision has been taken because the primary purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the close interlocks that exist between the human rights and the 'democracy promoting' communities. That many of the people working with HRW are also invited to work with progressive groups' is a given (especially considering the lack of attention paid to their activities), but this should surely also indicate the depth of the problem facing progressive activists who endeavour to promote a democracy based on participatory principles, not imperialism. (In most cases progressive links are not highlighted, although many of them can be found at SourceWatch.)

Edit PS -- I did follow your links, and that last one was pretty good, the executive director of HRW, Ken Roth, saying:

The US constitution gives an outgoing president the right to grant pardons, including to himself. But Human Rights Watch hopes that those responsible for allowing torture, including so-called “cruel and unusual punishment” such as simulated drowning, or “waterboarding”, will be prosecuted.

“It should not be swept under the rug simply because the person who happened to authorise it might have been the President or the Vice-President of the United States,” Roth says.

Maybe some of the criticism has rubbed off, and they're trying to make up for some of the ways in which they've been misused, in the past.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. If ZMag is your preferred editorial stance , I'm amazed you're defending Uribe

My main purpose was just to show that HRW has criticised and denounced Guantanamo over the years, which you've remained unaware of; but if it's a question of throwing doubt on HRW's motivation for existence, or for their criticism of Uribe, we ought to look at Uribe's background too:

Uribe's Dictatorial Rule Suits Oil Companies
Uribe in Wonderland
Alvaro Uribe Velez and 'Democratic Security'
Declaration of Carlos Gaviria (PDA) on Uribe's declaration of a 'Populist Dictatorship'
The Para-Uribe Regime, the Extraditions, and Justice in Colombia

I couldn't make head or tail of your claim than Uribe is 'honest' about the role of the DEA. Uribe is Bush's favourite South American leader, and cooperates with the US extensively on drugs (unless the accusations about his personal alliances with drug dealers are true, of course). I can't see what is similar about his and Evo Morales' approach. What are you saying that Uribe has said about the DEA that is at all critical?

And your claim that that was 'retaliation' for Uribe denouncing a pyramid scheme in Colombia is laughable. Amnesty and HRW stated clearly what they were doing - replying to Uribe's rejection of their reports about human rights abuses in Colombia, in which the government is one of the principal abusers. It's got nothing to do with a pyramid scam. I can't work out why you wanted to muddy the waters with that.

HRW never claimed to be a far left organisation; that ZMag doesn't like what they say about Palestine doesn't mean they are unable to criticise Uribe.

[mojowork_n]

6. While I was still on my first cup of coffee this morning, I happened to

read this fragment of a paragraph in a work of fiction, a novel:

Talking about the big history text book that gets passed out on the first day of school, one of the book's characters says, "...Every historical era had a color-coded section, and the teacher encouraged us to believe that -- at a certain date -- everyone stopped acting medieval and decided they were in the Renaissance.

Of course real history isn't like that. Different worldviews and different technologies can exist side by side. When a true innovation appears, most people aren't even aware of its power or implications for their own lives..." (1)

Thanks for the zmag links that all (I'm sure, quite accurately) describe Uribe's sordid "Dark Ages" associations, and political history -- but on a complex, many-sided issue like the role of the DEA in Latin American Drug Wars -- I'm willing to suspend critical disbelief, for just a minute, of Bush's 'favorite populist dictator.' It's not as if there's any sort of commonly understood, 'enlightenment' position, on that whole question, just yet. (Who's been doing what, where, why, for how long, for whose benefit?)

I have a definite suspicion that there's, like, this ongoing, large-scale, major crime scene going on down there, so for just a minute, if Uribe is going on the record using the words "laundering drug money" and "pyramid scheme" in the same sentence, I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt, for the purely forensic sake of 'evidence-gathering.'

I may be overdrawing the comparison with Morales in many ways, but 'money laundering' and 'drug running' are two sides of the same coin, so I do equate criticism of one, with speaking out against the other.

If you don't believe me, take a look at Catherine Austin Fitts' blog at www.scoop.nz -- "the Real Deal," and her series of articles on "Narco-trafficking for dummies."

So while it is tempting to want to root for any statement that has the color-coded imprimatur of approval from the nerds at "Human Rights Watch," (as it is to want to doubt any fatwa issued by Uribe), I'm just saying that I'm not sure what's really going on, and it's probably worth giving all sides a fair hearing.

I do have to read more about the specific situation in Columbia, but I suspect it's kind of mixed-up, and that the real, human emotions and responses of individual human beings are playing a big role, as events unfold from day to day.

I could really care less what HRW had to say about Palestinians in Gaza. I just know that they depend for their funding on the same inter-locking "boards" and endowments that also sponsor the NED and FIDA. I know their individual members and supporters mean well, but they've also been trotted out to 'justify' some pretty outrageous behavior, and they've mostly gotten a pass on it. (If you ask me, the 3-month bombing campaign of Serbia and Kosovo, on the basis of "human rights" abuses, was the test case for justifying the Iraq War on the basis of an equally bogus "WMD" threat.)

__________________________________________
(1) "The Dark River," by John Twelve Hawks,
Vintage Books, 2007, page 245

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. But there's nothing there about Uribe accusing the DEA of anything

Yes, drug dealing and money laundering are linked - but Uribe is accusing the "leftist guerrillas and rightwing paramilitaries" of doing them. Uribe has always attacked those groups. And I still can't see why you think that Amnesty and HRW replying to Uribe must be connected with what he says about the pyramid scheme - the groups had criticised him in October, he denied he was doing anything wrong, and this is their reply.

[mojowork_n]

8. Why I think AI and HRW are linked to the pyramid/Uribe scheme

...because they're the nerds/chess club/"mathletes" in this little drama -- as they are in most of the theatrical productions in which they have a role -- and the rest of the cast, most all of the other dramatis personae, are unscrupulous, unprincipled opportunists. (On whom the nerds depend for funding.) Of course they're going to be "used."

The timing of the whole thing is just too suspicious. Bush's favorite Latin American poodle....

(the Saakashvili of Columbia, Uribe,:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kid379OjuC0 )

....pops off the leash, starts yipping and barking and pee'ing on the carpet, about "laundered" drug profits.

The very next day -- whether or not it was intentionally speeded-up, or not -- there's this reaction from the American 'pro-democracy' front group! It's worth noting the possibility that someone was pissed off.

As far as making sense of the politics and ideological under-pinnings of the whole thing -- right-wing paramilitaries and/or leftist guerilla groups -- I'd just as soon not under-estimate anyone's potential for corruptibility.

Just consider the example of the "Uribe" of Asia Minor, Georgia's Saakashvili:

Thinking that he was going to cash in big-time for having supplied I.E.D. fodder for the Iraq War (our number two ally, right after Great Britain), and for helping to pull off the great Caucasus oil pipeline end-around, around Iran and Russia, Saakashvili actually attacked the Russians, in Abkazia and South Ossetia, violating a cease-fire agreement in the middle of the night, with an all-out artillery assault on civilian, residential areas. (Curiously, after Cheney's man had just left the scene; maybe with additional assurances from McCain's foreign policy advisor, Schoeneman, Georgia's top lobbyist in the United States.)

...That really hasn't worked out too well for Saakashvili, at all:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7715735.stm

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-142519

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Georgians_demonstrate_against_Saaka_11072008.html


I'm guessing that the Bush Foreign Policy Team may have had similar success, in Columbia, with what they'd previously gotten Uribe to agree to.

In any event, not to stray too far off topic, all of this makes a lot more sense if you actually take a minute to read through the collected articles that explain the 'narco-dollars for dummies' back-story.

The 3rd one in the series addresses that left/right issue, specifically, if that's all you have time for:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00069.htm

The Ultimate New Business Cold Call

"...In late June 1999, numerous (wire) services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.

The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.

Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine...

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. Uribe has not 'popped off the leash'

You seem to think that the only people in the whole world capable of laundering drug money are the American government and New York Stock Exchange - so that when Uribe said the pyramid scheme was being used to launder drug money, he meant that the DEA was behind the scam.

But he didn't. He said Colombians - FARC and/or the right-wing paramilitaries - were. Money can be laundered in this world without the American government being involved. So, when Uribe attacks the pyramid scheme, he's not attacking the American government in any way. Your claim that Amnesty and HRW are trying to retaliate against him for him 'peeing on the carpet' of the American government makes no sense whatsoever. There's no reason to connect the story about the pyramid scheme and the (pre-existing) criticism of Uribe by Amnesty and HRW.

[mojowork_n]

12. Puh-leeeze, it's not cowboys in White Hats vs. others in Black

I mean, uh, it's the decades-long, never-ending "War on Drugs." The slightly stooped-over, gnarly and twisted but still proud-and-kicking grandparent of the never-ending "War on Terror."

Nothing ever changes. The whole point of both is to "sustain the battle" indefinitely; damn the human, moral, and economic toll.

Sure, there are local intermediaries involved. But just as in Mexico (where tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people were marching in candle-lit protest marches this summer to protest the more than 3,000 people killed in drug violence this year alone) -- the laundered sum of money (try adding up the volume of business over the decades) -- begs the question, "why does media coverage of 'the source of the problem' STOP at the Rio Grande?"

It's always assumed to be the fault of some of those people, caricatured in films as speakers of heavily accented English. (Think "Scarface", where even Al Pacino stooped low to fit the typecasting.)

The silence is deafening.

The original poster's reply (#10) to my post about the **Mayor of Medellin** (#9) might shed a little more light on that, as does the provenance of the Latin American director of HRW.

You didn't want to accept that Columbia's president (Bush's favorite) deserved to be mentioned in the same breath with Morales, and in many (most all) ways you're right. But, like I said, this is the Drug Biz. Some of the actors have been known to "flip" sides, from time to time, or even to play the "triple cross" game.

Who knows where the bodies were buried, and by whom; in how many different places, better than Uribe?

...All I'm trying to suggest is that the more poking around for sources (and actual reading of some of those sources) that you do, the less likely you may be to suggest that "it makes no sense whatsoever" that it's not solely "those people's" fault.

Edit PS:

For further reading:

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/vm,garywebb,12,014,04intothebuzzsaw.htm

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00054.htm

Possibly related to:

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11212008.html

[Judi Lynn]

13. Colombia's Laboratory of Failure (The NYT Comes Out for Corporate Profits Over Human Rights)

November 21 / 23, 2008

The NYT Comes Out for Corporate Profits Over Human Rights
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure
By JAMES McENTEER

The New York Times November 18 editorial urging passage of a free-trade agreement with Colombia is factually challenged and wrong-headed – politically, economically and morally – in many ways. The editorial’s expressed sense of false urgency (“There is no more time to waste”) sounds like the Bush administration beating drums for war in Iraq. Remember the administration mantra: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”? There was no smoking gun in Iraq. And there is no pressing need to pass a free-trade agreement with Colombia. Quite the contrary.

The Times says that rejecting the trade pact “would send a dismal message to allies the world over that the United States is an unreliable partner…” But the world already has the message that the United States is willing to support a corrupt, murderous regime – such as that of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe – as long as their own largest corporate sponsors (e.g., Coca Cola, Occidental Petroleum, Chiquita Brands) – can make big profits there.

Hollow U.S. rhetoric has achieved new hypocritical heights under the Bush-Cheney junta. A free-trade pact would only license the Uribe regime to continue its human rights abuses, ceding any leverage to pressure Colombia for positive change. The U.S. has long abetted the crimes of its own companies, supplying Occidental with funds for their own paramilitary troops. Chiquita Brands paid a $25 million-dollar fine last year for hiring paramilitaries to kill union leaders who wanted better wages and working conditions. Such practices send a “dismal message” indeed.

The Times claims falsely that the murders of trade unionists are “down sharply,” whereas in fact, by August 2008 the number of union leaders assassinated in Colombia had already surpassed the 2007 total. “Washington must keep pressing Bogota to reduce abuses by Colombia’s Army, ensure the prosecution of paramilitary thugs and further rein in violence against union members,” says the paper of record. But a free-trade agreement would forfeit that pressure. Instead, the U.S. should make its ongoing “$600 million a year in mostly military and anti-narcotics aid” contingent upon radical government reforms in Colombia. Time for the moral stick, not more financial carrots.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcenteer11212008.html

[mojowork_n]

14. OK, the exception that proves the rule.

"The silence is deafening" -- except for Counterpunch, and other 'free' news sites on the web.

Great article, especially these comments a little farther down from your excerpt:

Despite eight years and hundreds of billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. under Plan Colombia, the flow of cocaine from that country to ours has only increased. The War on Drugs is actually a war on common sense. Government-enabled drug cartels – including Uribe’s family and friends – are making enormous profits from this illicit trade. So-called coca eradication campaigns are driving small farmers, including many indigenous people, from their traditional lands. Colombian anti-drug policies have created millions of newly-impoverished internal migrants, forced into cities to try to survive. What will a free-trade agreement do for them?

...What we need in Colombia and throughout Latin America is a new spirit of co-operation from the United States, not domination; based on moral strength and mutual respect, not force of arms. The Obama administration must restore credibility to U.S. foreign policy and declarations of support for human rights.

Colombia has been a laboratory for the failure of corporate over human values. Under cover of a war on drugs, the United States has fueled the flames of civil war, supplying a huge arsenal of U.S.-supplied weaponry to a burgeoning military and often unaccountable paramilitary forces. Drug traffic has only increased. Yes, the armed leftist FARC exists, but seems to function more as justification for severe repression than as a threat in itself. If such a force didn’t exist, Uribe would have to invent it.

A few months ago I happened to read the original 'free' news report on actual happenings in Central and South America.

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by the first Bishop of Chiapas, Bartholome de los Casas. The editor of Christopher Columbus' journals.

Anyone interested in "a new spirit of co-operation from the United States" would find their time well-spent, in making an effort to track down a copy {the Google.books.com 'limited version' doesn't include much of the primary source material -- the story of Prince Hatuey is missing from all of them} and compare the situation today, with the unscrupulous, unprincipled exploitation of the first, original, native population.

There's a continuous pattern of exploitation there, for anyone to see, that's remained unbroken, for centuries. This thread is just one more echo of the original debate, between Los Casas and Sepulveda (the defender of 'Colonialism') that continues to resonate.

Edit Postscript -- A Suggestion for the Obama administration:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11202008.html

[fascisthunter]

15. Uribe is a Right Wing Fascist... his day will come

I'm sure of it...

[Judi Lynn]

16. Hoping you are right, fascisthunter. He has lived a charmed life so far.

His is the last country to hang onto murderous right-wing abuse of the population, with deep suppression of ALL organized dissent.

He has had his protectors in Washington to look out for his interests. Had there been a mentally, ethically healthy management in this country Uribe would not have felt so empowered to make a living hell of Colombia for the poor, for indigenous Colombians, African Colombians, for union workers, and people so traumatized by prior life experiences they joined official Peace Communities, seeking protection from the government, only to find to their horror they could be found and massacred there, too, by death squads with military corespondants assisting them.

You can be sure this guy believes there will never be a day of accounting for his crimes against humanity, or he never would have gone this wildly over the line into the very dark side of life. He's the Neo-Pinochet.

He definitely has a dramatic karmic lesson coming.



Early associate of Álvaro Uribe, Pablo Escobar
as captured by Colombian painter, Fernando Botero

[mojowork_n]

17. Yes, Uribe is

...a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Man, by universal acclamation of both the living and the dead.

But he's not the Cause, the Prime Mover of the Drug Evil, in this hemisphere.

[Judi Lynn]

18. The violent struggle in Colombia predates major drug trafficking completely,

going back in an unbroken line to the 1940's, when the first well known leftist Presidential candidate was assassinated. The struggle has ALWAYS been there, long before drug trafficking. Before drug trafficking coffee was the focus.

Any attempt to trivialize the real suffering and struggling going on there should fall on totally deaf ears.

Here's a quick, easily grasped reference to what happened in 1948. DU'ers who have relied upon corporate media to tell them about Colombia's history will find more than enough to keep them reading for ages, once they assume control and start educating themselves on the subject:

Revolution in Colombia, part one: historical background
By Louis Proyect, 24 July 1999

~snip~
The two parties saw each other as rivals, but their real rival were the popular classes. The Liberals sought to modernize the state and reduce the influence of the Catholic Church, while the Conservatives sought to maintain the status quo. No matter how much they disagreed with each other, even to the point of resorting to arms, they agreed on the big question, which was how to exploit Colombia's agricultural wealth without allowing the mass of peasants ownership or control over the land, or the right to share in its benefits.

The fundamental contradiction in Latin American capitalism is this: Capitalist agriculture for the export market requires preservation of the hacienda system, which provides the social base for the Conservative Party and semifeudal reaction. On the other hand, the modern state requires tax revenues and democratic participation from a mass social base of small proprietors, such as the shopkeepers and peasants who provided the shock troops of the French Revolution. Since Colombia, and no other Latin American country, can resolve this contradiction, tensions persist and periodically erupt in bloody conflicts where the two bourgeois parties become surrogates for deeper class antagonisms.

~snip~
"The violence began with a confrontation between Liberal and Conservative parties, but the dynamic of class hostilities steadily sharpened its class-struggle character. The Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán--known half contemptuously and half fearfully to his own party's oligarchy as "The Wolf" or "The Idiot"--had won great popular prestige and threatened the established order. When he was shot dead, the hurricane was unleashed. First the spontaneous bogotazo--an uncontrollable human tide in the streets of the capital; then the violence spread to the countryside, where bands organized by the Conservatives had for some time been sowing terror. The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants' mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women's bellies, and throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points--the order of the day being 'don't leave even the seed.' Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestos, or went into exile abroad. It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance. New ways of killing came into vogue: the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck. Rape, arson, and plunder went on and on; people were quartered or burned alive, skinned or slowly cut in pieces; troops razed villages and plantations and rivers ran red with blood. Bandits spared lives in exchange for tribute, in money or loads of coffee, and the repressive forces expelled and pursued innumerable families, who fled to seek refuge in the mountains. Women gave birth in the woods. The first guerrilla leaders, determined to take revenge but without clear political vision, took to destroying for destruction's sake, letting off blood and steam without purpose."

This counter-revolution resulted in the murder of 300,000 people, one of the great bloodbaths of Latin American history. Was this bloodbath necessary? One of the things that is difficult to gauge in Colombia is the extent to which such excesses are a function of bourgeois "over-corrections" such as the kind that ideological frenzy often leads to. Would Colombia have been better off if the Conservatives had been open to the idea of allowing Gaitán's populism to prevail? Certainly he did not intend to abolish the capitalist system, but only to eradicate some of the more glaring injustices. In this, he was no different than Guatemala's Arbenz, or any other middle-class reformer who has emerged in the past half-century. Suffice it to say that right-wing anticommunism involves a level of fanaticism that once unleashed is difficult to bottle back up like a genie. When the history of this barbarian epoch is finally written, anticommunist fundamentalism will be recorded as much more demonic and violent than anything ever encountered in the middle ages.

More:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/059.html

[mojowork_n]

19. My Bad, if

you think I meant to 'trivialize' anything about Columbia's history.

No.

It's just a trick of perspective. My lens is so much wider-angled, after having read the Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. (By the editor of Columbus's Journals, Bartolome de los Casas, the first Bishop of Chiapas.)

That was really an eye opener for me.

Whether it was the sugar trade, gold and silver mining, the colonial obierto (garment sweatshop slaves), or growing bananas, or raising pharmaceutical crops more recently, it looks to me like it's been the same story:

New boss, same as the old boss, all over the America's.

The only new twist on the old pattern has been that formerly, national boundaries strictly defined the direction of exploitation.

Once upon a time, when the King of Spain turned a blind eye on what was being done to the indigenous population in the America's, maintaining the solvency of the King's Treasury outweighed any moral qualms or rumblings about the fate of folks who lived too far away to matter.

But where formerly, the "painful compromise" affected only people-not-like-us, in faraway colonies; today, with our own government just as motivated to maintain the solvency of our own Treasury, the needs of the few still outweigh the needs of the many...

Now it's OK to broaden the pattern of exploitation,

...to include Americans living in places "the few" don't care about.

My neighborhood, for instance -- 'the Hood.'
______________________________________________________________________________
Read that "Mighty Wurlitzer" link, upthread (from "Into the Buzzsaw"), please.