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and their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads are responsible for the other half, according to Amnesty International.
The Colombian military has been funded by $7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayer money from the Bush Junta.
In addition to murdering trade unionists, they have also murdered human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, political leftists and many peasant farmers and have driven 5 million peasant farmers from their lands with terrorists tactics.
On top of this, the Colombian military had an official policy of encouraging military units to up their bodies counts by providing bonuses and promotions on a body count basis, in their war with other Colombians, the leftist FARC guerrillas (a civil war that has been going on for 70 years). The military lured young men with promises of jobs, murdered them and dressed their bodies up like FARC guerrillas--in the infamous "false positives" scandal.
Often atrocities like this are made up or exaggerated to demonize one side in a war. These atrocities are not made up or exaggerated. In fact, this description downplays the horrors of these many thousands of murders. In La Macarena, Colombia, for instance, a mass grave with 500 to 2,000 bodies was discovered because local children became sick drinking the water. The many decaying bodies were poisoning the local water supply. Local people say that the bodies are of local family and community members--"false positives" murders or targeted murders of community activists.
This was in area of an intense, Afghanistan-like, "pacification" program designed by the USAID and the Pentagon, near a U.S. military base in Colombia. The murders were paid for by you and me, and this "killing field" is one that I suspect had U.S. participants.
Early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't believe the word "unauthorized." I think this is a cover up.
In 2010, the U.S./Bush Junta ambassador to Colombia and the Bush Cartel-connected mafioso who was running Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, secretly negotiated and secretly signed a U.S./Colombia military agreement that, among other things, granted total diplomatic immunity to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia. The U.S. military has been in Colombia for a decade. Why did they need "total diplomatic immunity" in a secret agreement in 2010?
The Bush Junta and Uribe created an atmosphere of lawlessness that encouraged and rewarded murder and mayhem. Uribe himself was spying on everybody--judges, prosecutors, trade unionists, human rights groups, political opponents and others, and the spying on trade unionists may, in particular, have been for the purpose of drawing up "hit lists" for the Colombian military and its death squads.
Some seventy of Uribe's closest political cohorts are under investigation or already in prison for ties to the death squads, drug trafficking, bribery and other corruption, and for illegal domestic spying. The U.S. government has been actively protecting Uribe from prosecution in Colombia, and is helping to "launder" his image with academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard and appointment to a prestigious international legal committee. I believe they are doing this because of what he knows, and might expose under pressure of an investigation, about U.S. crimes in Colombia. This has also been their M.O. for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and other Bush Junta criminals--immunity. "We need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the very rich and the very powerful.
Uribe has been summoned to give a deposition in a Drummond death squad case in the U.S. brought by survivors of the victims--trade unionists whose murderers were paid by Drummond excecutives. Uribe ignored the summons, claiming "sovereign immunity"--as if he were an ex-king--and applied to the U.S. State Department for this novel immunity. They did not grant it but they wrote to the judge that all other avenues of information gathering should be pursued before Uribe is forced to testify and that this is a "sensitive" matter re U.S. foreign policy. Uribe's lawyer tried the same thing with the court--that Uribe has "sovereign immunity" and is not required to testify even though the Drummond plaintiffs had limited their questions for Uribe to items that were not official acts while he was mafia chief...er, president...of Colombia, and had exhausted other avenues of information gathering. That's where things stand at present, as far as I know.
The State Department's failure to grant Uribe immunity (other than their effort to cow the judge) may signal their desire to distance themselves from Uribe. He is extremely dirty. But they have the problem of protecting Bush and his junta. They got death squad witnesses out of Colombia in 2009--they were extradited (by Uribe and the Bush Junta/U.S. ambassador) to the U.S. on mere drug charges, and "buried" in the U.S. federal prison system, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections. Then, a few months ago, the chief spying witness against Uribe was spirited out of Colombia and given instant asylum in the U.S. client state of Panama--which I believe the U.S. government arranged or had a hand in. This put another witness against Uribe out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors, and the instant asylum was granted over their objections. They have now issued an international arrest warrant for that witness. These removals of witnesses--clearly aided and abetted by the U.S. government, in the first instance, and probably in the second--may be sufficient to protect Uribe from prosecution. It remains to be seen.
Uribe attended a small friendly meeting--a vacation, it was said--with Daddy Bush and Bush Jr., and several Latin American fascists, in February of this year. Something tells me that Uribe will never see the inside of a jail cell. He has very high level protection, indeed--far more powerful than the U.S. government.
One other item of note: Our U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, was the attorney for Chiquita Inc. execs who were accused of the same thing as Drummond execs have been, some years ago--hiring death squads to take care of their "labor problem." Holder, as a private attorney, arranged a deal by which they paid $25 million to the Bush Junta (a slap on the wrist for Chiquita) and nothing to the victims' relatives, and made the case go away. Whenever I am inclined to feel sorry for our current president--and I think there are a lot of reasons to feel for him, including the deals I think he felt obliged to make to obtain limited power--I think of those victims' families and how little they count to anyone in the "halls of power."
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