In an televised interview on Noticias Uno in Colombia (H/T TeleSUR), the ex-information technology officer of Colombia's state intelligence agency the DAS stated that President Alvaro Uribe did in fact know of the agency's illegal spying activities, that various regional DAS directors were posted at the request of regional leaders of the right wing narco-paramilitary death squads, and further, that in his view, the DAS was a major method by which Alvaro Uribe shared governance with the right wing narco-paramilitaries -- simply a part of Uribe's "political war".
Can you imagine? Can you imagine the ex-IT officer of our Homeland Security alleging a similar thing and it not being big news?
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La pregunta obvia para Rafael García es si el presidente Álvaro Uribe conocía las actividades de él y de Jorge Noguera en el DAS...
Según García, el presidente sabía lo que estaban haciendo y lo impulsaba empezando por las chuzadas, que arrancaron en la administración Noguera... García invitó a las autoridades a verificar los hechos narrados por él.
Rafael García sostiene que las chuzadas han sido una herramienta de la guerra política...
Además de las escuchas ilegales, los escoltas asignados por el DAS también servían para espiar a quienes el gobierno consideraba potenciales enemigos.
Según Rafael García, los paramilitares obtenían información del DAS para atentar contra personas protegidas por el Departamento... El hombre que llevaba las listas negras al DAS, según García, se llama Álvaro Pupo.
Esas dos personas fueron asesinadas... El ex jefe de informática también asegura que las órdenes las recibía Noguera desde la Casa de Nariño, a través de Alberto Velásquez y de otros funcionarios, pero que en últimas provenían del presidente de la República.
García sostiene que presencio una reunión en la que Jorge Noguera se quejó ante el presidente porque el comandante de la Policía en el Magdalena estaba persiguiendo a los paramilitares.
También dice que varios directores regionales del DAS fueron nombrados en sus cargos por petición de los paramilitares.
Afirma que un tiempo después los paramilitares querían que Emilio Vence fuera removido del puesto, pero el presidente no quiso.
Así mismo, García asegura que a nombre del presidente, Jorge Noguera dio la orden de entregar información de una operación contra los paramilitares.
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The agency DAS has been mired in scandal for months since Semana magazine revealed that (the DAS) has been systematically and illegally using U.S. provided electronic surveillance equipment to provide secret information to paramilitaries, narco-traffickers, and to systematically spy on judges, prosecutors, the liberal-left political opposition, journalists, human rights workers, and god knows who else -- including a human rights observation mission from the OAS.
The last 5 directors of the DAS agency are all under arrest, and they are all appointed by the President, and yet President Uribe is still trying to play Mr. Clean Hands.
Let's return to one quote:
"García sostiene que presencio una reunión en la que Jorge Noguera se quejó ante el presidente porque el comandante de la Policía en el Magdalena estaba persiguiendo a los paramilitares."
or
Garcia claimed that he attended a meeting in which Jorge Noguera (former DAS director now under arrest & charged with helping paramilitaries murder 2 union organizers and a professor, and the 2005 re-election campaign director for Alvaro Uribe) complained to the President because the commander of the Police in the Magdalena Medio state was persecuting the paramilitaries.
Get that straight. Magdalena Medio was infested, run by right wing paramilitaries, and any human rights worker or social organizer operated under a pretty constant death threat from these assassins.
And Mr. Clean Hands Uribe was, according to Garcia, listening to the DAS director he, Uribe appointed, and who ran his re-election campaign (now shown to have been vastly manipulated by local paramilitary extortion), complain that the police in the most paramilitary-infested region was too hard on the paramilitaries.
I've been trying to say this, and Garcia is capturing it: for Alvaro Uribe, and really, his backers in the U.S., the right wing death squad narco-paramilitaries really were a strategy of governance, and not some sort of exception.
They chose to build up this mafia to kill guerrillas, the opposition, and anyone standing in the way of large landholders and large corporations, and then they integrated them into all levels of government, though being careful about doing so indirectly.
Even Time magazine is noticing that the ongoing conflict & pro-landlord land-clearing causes 3 million + internally displaced, impoverished internal refugees in Colombia, 2nd only to Sudan in IDP's.
Ordinary Colombians are going to pay for this mafia-infested notion of democracy for a long, long, long time, and if they ever come out of it, they will thank their independent judiciary (for how much longer, who knows), a small number of courageous journalists and news sources, and some courageous political leaders.
They should also thank the thousands and thousands of civil, social, and human rights workers and lawyers putting their lives on the line every single day, often threatened by either narco-paramilitaries, the local army & police -- excuse me, 'heavily armed men in civilian clothing' I think is the preferred obscuration -- or even the narco-guerrillas. But almost no one ever thanks them.http://www.borev.net/2009/09/the_counter-revolution_will_no.html#comments-----------------------------------------------------------
One problem I see on the horizon is that the alternative to Uribe (who is trying to rig up another term as president) is former Defense Minister Santos--the "Donald Rumsfeld" of South America--who is chafing at the bit to invade Venezuela and Ecuador, kill all the leftists and grab all that oil for Exxon Mobil & brethren. Santos is running for president. Uribe's death squad and narco-trafficking activities--horrendous as they are--will look like minor corruption compared to what Santos is capable of doing. Iraq War II, South America. This may be why Colombia's political establishment 'winks at' Uribe's murderous corruption and has not put him behind bars. A military dictatorship under Santos would be worse.
It's very like South Vietnam, circa early '60s. Diem vs Thieu/Ky. Diem was very corrupt and associated through his brother with violent repression, but just before he was assassinated (by CIA operatives in the CIA-created South Vietnamese military), he was seeking "neutral status" for Vietnam in the Cold War and detente with North Vietnam.* He did not want a full-scale fratricidal war. Thieu and Ky, on the other hand, who followed Diem into power as heads of the South Vietnamese government, presided over the dramatic escalation by the US into a full-scale war that ultimately killed 2 million Southeast Asians and more than 55,000 US soldiers.
Uribe is an unsavory character, to say the least. But, even though he recently invited the US to establish
seven new US military bases in Colombia, he did it sort of apologetically, vis a vis the other leaders of South America (who are very alarmed by it). Santos would not have bothered even to persuade them that this US escalation is benign. And it would be with no apologies whatsoever that Santos would oversee a Vietnam-type conflagration in South America.
I don't mean to minimize the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Colombia, at the hands of Colombia's military and rightwing paramilitary death squads, most of which were entirely peaceful people--non-combatants in Colombia's 40+ year civil war with leftist guerrillas. 25 union leaders have been killed by the death squads this year alone, and the total of union murders is in the thousands over the last decade. Community organizers, political leftists, human rights workers, small peasant farmers, journalists--all manner of people have been killed. It is a heinous series of crimes that Uribe and the right have ridden to power. Uribe nevertheless is "better than" Santos--given the limited and ill choices in US "war on drugs"-ruined Colombia--as Diem was "better than" Thieu and Ky, in CIA-ruined Vietnam.
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*(James Douglass' recent book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," lays out a compelling case for JFK's intention to remove Vietnam from the "Cold War" and obtain "neutral status" for it, as with Laos. The CIA ordered Diem's assassination (over which JFK was extremely distraught) to prevent this, for they were planning a war. The dispute between the CIA and JFK began with JFK's refusal to provide US military support of the CIA's "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba (for which JFK fired the head of the CIA and threatened to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces" after the 1964 election). This dispute was further escalated when JFK refused to launch a nuclear war against Soviet Russia over the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. JFK and his brother RFK stood virtually alone against the entire "military-industrial complex" on that decision. The Joint Chiefs believed that they had the advantage of Russia on nuclear weapons at the time, and could utterly destroy them, with "only" 300,000 casualties here, and urged JFK to do it, and were furious when he would not. He instead opened backchannels to Krushchev and Castro, worked out a compromise and began taking many initiatives to de-escalate the "Cold War," to promote nuclear disarmament and to create world peace. Among these initiatives was his effort to head off the war that the CIA was preparing in Vietnam. The assassination of Diem was a blow to this effort. Barely a month after Diem was assassinated, JFK himself was assassinated, and three days after that, his successor, LBJ, said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of Vietnam--and "they" were the CIA and the Joint Chiefs and associated war profiteers. Douglass doesn't believe that LBJ conspired on Kennedy's assassination, but did conspire on the coverup, because the CIA had lain the false trail to Russia with the object of forcing LBJ to nuke Russia in retaliation for JFK's murder. LBJ found out about this, and opposed nuking Russia (because they were not responsible for the assassination; the CIA was). But he did not oppose lesser scale wars like Vietnam. Vietnam thus became a pawn in our Corporate Rulers' "Cold War" game against communist revolutions--and an excuse for vast escalation of war spending--and millions of its people died, and tens of thousands of our own.
It all started with the CIA creation of a puppet government in South Vietnam which welcomed US military bases and troops--as Diem did, and as Uribe is doing now in Colombia. If Uribe, like Diem, changes his mind, or is too weak to accomplish our Corporate Rulers' purposes, he will be replaced by a more willing and more single-minded US operative--likely Santos. There is a bit of evidence already that Uribe may be ambivalent about his pact with the...um, Pentagon. Besides his apologetic posture toward other Latin American leaders, he himself disclosed what were supposed to be secret negotiations for the new US bases. He is the leaker. It's not enough evidence yet--just a hint, a maybe. It's possible that he feels lured by the prospect of trade within the new South American "common market," UNASUR, which has condemned the new US military bases. In any case, I am more and more struck by the parallels between this situation and Vietnam, especially given the recent precedent of the US military slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq to steal their oil.
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