Violence Returns to Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Violence Returns to Colombia
September 09, 2010
Despite gains against the FARC guerrillas, the country is now wrestling to quell local drug gangs terrorizing its cities.

http://www.newsweek.com.nyud.net:8090/content/newsweek/2010/09/09/colombia-wrestling-to-quell-local-drug-gangs/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.jpg/1284067146039.jpg

Raul Arboleda / AFP-Getty Images
A Colombian soldier guards a violent
neighborhood in Medellin

Although Colombia delivered some heavy blows in its war against the FARC guerrillas over the past decade, the country is facing violence on an entirely new front. Just three years ago, top U.S. officials were touring the city of Medellín to demonstrate how successfully then-president Alvaro Uribe had rescued the country from Marxist rebels and paramilitary drugrunners. But in August, Medellín’s mayor took to the streets to march with protesters through ghettos racked anew by gang warfare. And just last week, Colombia’s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, deployed troops to the city, where more than 1,200 murders have occurred so far this year, with 503 gang-related deaths in the first four months of 2010 alone—a 50 percent jump from the same period last year.

Alarmingly, Medellín is not alone. Across Colombia, cities that once served as symbols of the country’s turnaround, such as Bogotá and Cali, are witnessing a drastic increase in violence. In mid-August, a car bomb in Bogotá’s financial district injured nine people, and both the FARC and right-wing extremists have been blamed for the attack. The same week, three teens from the embattled Putumayo state in southern Colombia, whose names were on an online list, were shot dead, apparently the victims of gang violence. And Cali’s mayor has called on the national government to address the city’s spiking homicide rate.

Just as murders have increased, so have mass displacements: according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 3.3 million Colombians are now internally displaced, at a rate of 500 new people a day (that’s the second-highest internally displaced population worldwide). Meanwhile, the number of Colombian refugees pouring into Ecuador has spiked to 1,000 a month, and aid workers say many are fleeing gang warfare in the cities.

So why the new uptick in violence? While Colombia’s military has weakened the FARC, and the government has cracked down on the paramilitaries that once controlled the cocaine trade, these operations diverted focus away from local police forces, leaving a vacuum for opportunistic gangsters and loose criminal networks that rushed in to serve the ongoing demand for drug exports. “These successor groups have basically taken the reins of what the paramilitaries were doing,” says Maria McFarland, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch. The new groups, which number somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 members, are now operating in 24 of Colombia’s 32 states.

More:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/09/colombia-wrestling-to-quell-local-drug-gangs.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. The "New Penitentiary Culture": US Designs for Colombian Jails

The "New Penitentiary Culture": US Designs for Colombian Jails
How the USAID, Federal Bureau of Prisons and the School of the Americas Have Impacted Colombia's Prison System


By James Jordan
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
September 9, 2010

Amid much talk of human rights and improved conditions for those deprived of liberty, in March of 2000, the US ambassador and Colombia’s Minister of Justice signed the “Program for the Improvement of the Colombian Prison System.” Called the dawning of a “New Penitentiary Culture,” the US government, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), would redesign Colombia’s maximum and medium security institutions, providing millions of dollars in funding, advice and oversight. Central to this restructuring has been the building and expansion of as many as sixteen new jails designed to handle an influx of some 30,000 new inmates—an increase in capacity of more than 40%. The reason cited for building these new jails was to alleviate overcrowding as a necessary first step toward better conditions.

Have conditions improved significantly? Indications are that they have not, and the greater capacity seems to have motivated a surge in arrests and the exercise of social and political control rather than with the alleviation of overcrowding. According to some observers, prisons have been turned into fronts of war, and at least five of the sixteen new prisons have been or are currently directed by graduates of the infamous School of the Americas. According to the Colombian Coalition Against Torture, “It is of serious concern that Colombia’s prisons are increasingly militarized. Indeed, the majority of prisons visited by the Fundación Comité de Solidaridad con los Presos Políticos...are under the command of high-ranking members of the military and police forces, either retired or active, and lack the skills necessary to manage a prison.”

Besides detaining members of the political resistance, the dominant purpose for these new prisons appears to be the incarceration of large numbers of prisoners arrested for crimes arising from a worsening economic crisis coupled with a lack of social investment. The Colombian government is following a playbook based on the US experience. The US puts a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other nation on Earth.

The growth of the prison population has been phenomenal since the inception of the new US/Colombian prison program. One Ministry of Justice document from Dec. 2007 shows a prison population of 63,603. An INPEC document from January, 2010 puts the population at 76,471. Just over three months later, an article in the Colombian daily, El Tiempo said that there were 106,000 prisoners under the custody of INPEC.3 If these figures are all true, then the increase in the prison population has already exceeded the new spaces being built. So much for the stated purpose of relieving prison congestion.

More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4200.html

[bemildred]

2. I didn't know it ever left.

I thought that was all Uribe's self-serving bullshit and lots of money spent on keeping the ruling classes somewhat more secure.

And who knew that people would step in to manage the lucrative drug trade if we eliminated the previous management?

This whole thing reads like something written by a gullible tool.

[Judi Lynn]

3. It's not new violence, not new groups, it's the SAME THING, described by an idjit at Newsweak.

It does help, however to get this information into mainstream publications like Newsweak since they all have been suppressing the truth about Colombia forever.

These are NOT new groups, as human rights groups have stated long ago, LONG ago. They are the same paramilitary narcotraffickers, carrying on business as usual, not having missed a beat, have reshifted, and taken new names for themselves, but are exactly the same as before.

They're probably BETTER off since some of them were given sweet deals for their previous crimes, and their confessions, and promises to not do it again, which would amount to a short time in jail, if any, and a closed record on their past which might contain treasures like massacres, assassinations, etc. All forgiven, cases closed.

The "successor groups" are the same people. Of course, young men may have joined them who were children a few years ago, some have died, some have probably stepped into open manholes, so in that respect you could say they have "new people."

Even any information at ALL, no matter how warped, or twisted getting out about Colombia is better than nothing!

You do notice this article is almost totally hollow, holding almost no details, actual events, or anything. What makes it worthwhile is its claim violence is growing, it's bad, it's really bad, there's a heavier police presence, and they did mention the displace people, which they did so casually a lot of people forgot it as soon as they "read" it. They forgot to mention it's the paramilitaries who drive people off their land, out of their homes with the direct threat of violence, cut them loose from their only known form of survival, and shelter, and send them out to fend for themselves elsewhere, take their pick. They either wander around in the void, or they head for cities to find jobs and housing, creating a glut in homeless there, increasing VIOLENCE, desperation, etc., or they head for the borders to Venezuela (NOT MENTIONED in the article) or Ecuador, where they become wards of the state. From what I've heard, those two countries do try to help them as well as they can.

The author totally neglects to mention how those people become homeless, and what happens to them, with it's all a COLOSSAL crime against humanity. A lot of their land has ended up in the hands of the government, some of it going for pennies to people like former President Uribe's cousin, Mario Uribe, and other wealthy assholes who can buy it from the paras or the government, even though it was the homes of Colombian citizens for years, even generations before that.

Crazy, isn't it? It probably takes them more energy trying to AVOID writing the truth than to break down, do their research and write the damned stories. But that would get this government and the Colombian government wild, apparently, as it's none of our business. We're only supposed to cough up our taxes every year so the U.S. government will continue sending well over $500,000,000.00 annually to the Colombian government.

[gbscar]

4. Speaking of neglecting details, how about your forgetting FARC also displaces people? nt

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

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

[naaman fletcher]

6. let me understand your logic:

You made a post about paramilitaries displacing people.

somebody responds and says "FARC also displaces people."

Your response to that is a bunch of posts about paramilitaries displacing people.

Note, the person who responded to you did not deny that paramilitaries displace people, just said that FARC does also.


By normal standards of logic, you have not yet addressed that. Does FARC also displace people or not?

You have lectured me repeatedly that this is a forum for discussion and sharing information.

We all agree here that paramilitaries displace people. We now have an opportunity, in the great spirit of this forum, to educate each other and come to an understanding. Does FARC displace people or not? You have a lot of knowledge about Colombia, what is your opinion?

[Judi Lynn]

7. Some useful information on displacement and land theft, only scratching the surface, obviously:

(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)

January 12, 2008
Fear, Impunity and State Power
Colombia's paramilitary regime and social movements
by David Parker

MONTREAL -- In August of 2007, Paola, a mother, university student and teacher, received a written death threat. She is a member of the Committee for Solidarity for Political Prisoners, a group that struggles for the rights of political prisoners in Colombia. It is a country where state repression has broken the social fabric, where being a human rights defender can have dangerous consequences; since 2002, there have been 955 assassinations committed by the Armed Forces, the highest level of politically motivated homicide in the Western hemisphere.

In a country where repression of social organizations involves selective and collective assassinations, disappearances, detentions and massacres, fear of death is part of daily life. On the bus on the way to the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga, Paola handed me a note sent by the paramilitary organization known as “Aguilas Negras” to 11 student organizers, accusing them of being linked to networks of the FARC and ELN, Colombia’s two largest guerrilla groups. The death threat assured their recipients that their actions were being monitored and their days numbered. "You and the organizations you represent are a problem for Colombia... The plan to annihilate you all will begin with the very next student strike."

The death threat is a common tactic from this nationwide right-wing paramilitary group. Weeks ago, the local office of SINALTRAINAL, a national union of food workers, received a written death threat under the front door. Fear courses in the veins of the country; a legitimate fear, a well-sanctioned and reasonable fear for the safety of human rights defenders, unionists, peasant leaders, Afro-Colombians, indigenous leaders and community members.

Paramilitary and military forces have honed a method of instilling fear and producing forced displacement throughout the country. Jose Antonio knows this tactic well. An Afro-Colombian peasant, a subsistence farmer until his forced displacement and the theft of his lands in 1997, he and his family have lived it first-hand. As we walked through the African Palm plantations in Choco, Jose Antonio showed me the former location of his community. Ten years ago, under Operation Genesis, the whole region was attacked by air, water and land, a concerted military and paramilitary operation that massacred, tortured, assassinated and forcibly displaced over 4,000 traditional communities living ancestral lifestyles. He showed me the former location of his brother's small farm, which is now rows of African Palm trees.

More:
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1598

~~~~~
Colombia: Oil palm grows by the force of violence

Since the beginning of the decade, all the areas of expansion of oil palm plantations have coincided geographically with areas of paramilitary presence and expansion, to the extent that some of the new plantations being developed have been financed as farming projects for the same demobilised paramilitary from the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-Defence Force of Colombia) who had previously made incursions into these very areas.

This strategy of territorial control through the expansion of oil palm is reinforced by government policies supporting and providing incentives for the planting of oil palms, also clearly in a quest for economic, political and military control of large areas of Colombia currently outside state control.

These state policies are reinforced by the investment strategies of international bodies. An analysis of the investment plans of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) illustrates this: “For the IDB, medium and long-term crops have greater export potential, a greater capacity for surviving in an open economy, yield greater benefits in terms of the pacification process and generate sustained growth of the agricultural sector, thereby overcoming the problems of long-term financing of farming. (…) And in accordance with the Country Document (IDB), the programme focuses its activities on the zones and important projects from the perspective of pacification efforts. In general, the IDB regards investment in medium and long-term crops as strategies for governability or territorial control in the face of problems such as guerrilla conflict, political violence, common criminality and drug crops. Extensive farming provides a genuine alternative for the occupation of territory and for the creation of employment in conflict areas.”

Ultimately, all these policies share the idea that oil palm cultivation is a type of economic development useful in the pacification of the country. This confluence of illegal and criminal acts, government policies and international investment forms the Colombian oil palm model.

More:
http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/132/Colombia.html

~~~~~
Colombia: The Violent 'Agrarian Counter-Reform' Conspiracy
by Constanza Vieira* (bogota)Saturday, August 21, 2010
Inter Press Service

An unknown number of agribusiness owners and public employees at all levels, as well as far-right paramilitaries, have a common link with rural people who have been forced off their farms or killed in Colombia: the land stolen from the latter group in the armed conflict.

'It was a conspiracy. There were the ones doing the killing, others who would follow behind, buying up the land, and the third wave, who would legalise the new ownership of the land,' said former paramilitary chief Jairo Castillo or 'Pitirri', who has lived in exile for 10 years and is serving as a key protected witness in the trials of legislators and other political leaders implicated in the 'parapolitics' scandal for their ties to the paramilitary groups.

Pitirri is one of those asking the justice system why it is only focusing on 'the ones doing the killing'; why it is not inquiring into who seized 5.5 million hectares of land, according to figures from the Commission to Monitor Public Policies on Forced Displacement, set up on the initiative of civil society groups.

The testimony of Pitirri was presented Thursday in a congressional debate on political control over land, paramilitarism and forced displacement, by leftwing legislator Iván Cepeda.

More:
http://www.globalissues.org/news/2010/08/21/6687

~~~~~
Forced Displacement, Land Reclamation, and Corporate Power in Colombia
By Eustaquio Polo

~snip~
Thank you for letting me address you tonight. Please receive a warm welcome from the Chocó county of Colombia and from myself, Eustaquio Polo Rivera. I am Vice President of the Major Council of the basin of the Curvaradó River, and legal representative of a smaller council.

I come here with the grace of God and the support of the church of Justicia y Paz and also with help from Molly and Jake. I have been asked to tell you a little bit about the human rights abuses that the people of the Chocó territories are suffering.

~snip~
In the year 2000, a group from the police collected signatures from members of paramilitaries and some peasants left in the area. They said they were collecting the signatures to get three military bases in the area, and they claimed that this was so peasants could return to their land. This was not the case. These signatures were used by businesses to take over the land and implement the planting of African palm plantations in the collectively-titled territory. They used them to prove that peasants were in agreement with the planting of the palm, but the peasants were actually outside the territory, fled to the hills.

In this year 2000, we realized that their goal was not to take the guerrilla out of our land, but to take our land from us, to take our communities, and to implement in our territory the monoculture of palm oil and cattle ranches. In that same year they sent some commissioners to different parts where there were still peasants living on big farms. They told us that we should sell to them, and that if we didn't want to sell to them, our widows would sell cheaper. Through those tactics of intimidation they acquired parts of the territory, because people were afraid to lose their lives.

Also they would say that we had to sell, that the land was needed by the bosses. It is dangerous to say this because our lives are under threat, but I feel that I must: the bosses were Carlos Castano, "the German," Mancuso—these are all names of paramilitaries.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/forced-displacement-land-reclamation-and-corporate-power-in-colombia-by-eustaquio-polo

~~~~~
Colombia: Paramilitaries Don't Want to Take the Blame Alone
by Constanza Vieira (bogotÁ)Sunday, July 11, 2010
Inter Press Service

The so-called para-politics, para-institutions and para-economy in Colombia 'have their place in the dock' among the accused, said eight former leaders of ultra-right armed paramilitary groups, now demobilised and charged with crimes against humanity in the nation's decades-long civil war.

From prison, the eight sent a letter last week to those who were once among their potential military targets: the leaders of the centre-left Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA), Gustavo Petro, former presidential candidate for that party, and Iván Cepeda, congressman-elect and spokesperson for the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE).

~snip~
The former paramilitaries wrote that the 'real truth' is not yet known about the war they joined more than 25 years ago. Their archenemies, the leftist guerrillas, emerged 46 years ago.

They write that their demobilisation and disarmament, and 'the half truth and half justice,' will be 'worth nothing' if those who 'personify' the paramilitary phenomenon remain invisible in political and economic power, 'evading, at any price,' their responsibility.

The armed groups are merely 'the shock force,' 'the tip of the iceberg,' of the 'macro' phenomenon of paramilitarism, they said, noting that as long as the 'true scope' remains hidden, 'paramilitarism, offspring of consented impunity,' will reproduce.

Below their signatures they put their fingerprints, in the style of the messages from the now-dead Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (1949-1993).

More:
http://www.globalissues.org/news/2010/07/11/6262

~~~~~
Land grabs by narco-traffickers and paramilitaries: Colombia's death squads get respectable
November 10, 2005

The United Nations and other organisations have condemned a new Colombian law that will grant former members of death squads near-immunity and allow their leaders to retain their loot and drug profits. Is this demobilisation or legitimisation?

Carlos M. Gutiérrez

THE justice and peace law passed by Colombia's parliament on 21 June allowed the president, Alvaro Uribe, to claim he had made peace with, and demobilised, the extreme-right paramilitaries. There was widespread and varied reaction from multilateral bodies, politicians, human rights campaigners and the press. An editorial "Colombia's capitulation", on July 4 in the New York Times suggested: "It should be called the impunity for mass murderers, terrorists and major cocaine traffickers law."

The Colombian congress knows how the paramilitaries came into existence, what they have done and who has been, and continues to be, behind them. It has given them political status without the approval of the international community or the prior national consensus that the law's promoters had sought. As the director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, remarked a week before the law was passed, "it is not a good idea to treat paramilitarism as a mere political misdemeanour" (1).

The government may deny parentage, but the extreme-right groups are happy to admit that they are the children of the state. "We were born paramilitaries," says one of their most prominent leaders, Ernesto Báez. "The weapons sent to us in June 1983 at Juan Bosco Laverde, San Vicente de Chucurí and Puerto Boyaca and in the Magdalena Medio region, had government stamps on them."

Shortly before the law came into force, several Democratic members of the United States Senate wrote to Uribe to express their anxiety about "the very negative impact that this law could have on peace, justice and the rule of law in Colombia" (2). Earlier, a group of their Republican opposite numbers had declared their support for efforts to achieve peace in Colombia, provided that "such a process is conducted pursuant to an effective legal framework that will bring about the dismantling of the underlying structure, illegal sources of financing and economic power" of terrorist organisations. "It is also critical," they added, "that the provision of benefits to leaders be conditioned on the groups' compliance with the ceasefire and cessation of criminal activity" (3). Uribe promised to take their demands into account and then ignored them.

More:
http://www.landaction.org/display.php?article=365

ETC.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

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

[Downwinder]

9. Leadership sets the example. If leadership is lawless, can you expect

any difference in the rest of society?