Pentagon moves ahead with Colombian bases plan

[Judi Lynn]

Pentagon moves ahead with Colombian bases plan

Submitted by WW4 Report on Thu, 01/27/2011 - 17:26. US military agencies in September 2010 signed contracts for construction at Tolemaida, Larandia and Málaga bases in Colombia worth nearly $5 million, according to documents obtained by the anti-war group Fellowship of Reconciliation. US military contracts for Tolemaida in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 were larger than the last four years combined.

The contracts included two for an "Advanced Operations Base" for the US Southern Command special operations unit in Tolemaida, located south of Bogotá. The special operations unit, known as SOCSOUTH, has as its mission "the use of small units in direct or indirect military actions that are focused on strategic or operational objectives," including "provid an immediately deployable theater crisis response force."

Last August, Colombia's Constitutional Court struck down the agreement that would give the United States military use of seven bases in Colombia for ten years, because the agreement was never submitted for Congressional approval or judicial review. Yet, even after the agreement was declared "non-existent" by Colombia’s highest court, the Pentagon initiated unprecedented amounts of new construction on bases in Colombia. "The contracts place in serious doubt the Pentagon’s respect for Colombian sovereignty," writes Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Besides the contracts naming military bases, there were also military contracts for $2.5 million construction at unnamed locations in Colombia signed in September. The new contracts may have been signed in September in order to spend funds allotted for the US 2010 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. Another military construction contract described as being for "Talemaida Avaition" (sic) for $5.5 million was signed in October 2009, just days before the US and Colombia signed the military base agreement, and is scheduled to be completed by the end of this month.

More:
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9391

[Peace Patriot]

1. "US military planners have openly viewed Plan Colombia as a model for Afghanistan."

"From Bogotá to Kabul

On Sept. 30, the US military's Transportation Command signed two contracts for “Afghanistan rotary wing pax and cargo movement”, to be carried out by the Medellin-based Vertical de Aviacion Ltda. Writes Fellowship of Reconciliation: "The contract shows how the United States is using the Colombian military to support the war in Afghanistan, which has become unpopular in the US as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan." US military planners have openly viewed Plan Colombia as a model for Afghanistan." --from the OP (bottom of the article)

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I saw this parallel in the USAID planning documents concerning La Macarena, Colombia, in researching the mass grave found there, containing 500 to 2,000 unidentified bodies--the bodies that were discovered because they poisoned the local water causing children to get sick. There were suspicions that these bodies were Colombian military "false positives"--innocents slaughtered by the military and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerrillas (to up their "body count"--to earn bonuses and to impress U.S. senators)--and that may be true, but what the USAID plan lays out, if you translate the cheery corporate language, is that the military blitzes the area, decapitating local community leadership, then the USAID swoops in, in helicopters, and sets up a Bogota friendly local government; a residual force is left behind, to police the locals, and the whole war machine moves on to the next region where land, resources or slave labor are desired by Colombia's fascist elite, by their protected drug lords or by U.S. multinational corporations/war profiteers. They may well then dress up the carnage as FARC guerrillas but that ruse now has an additional purpose--to disguise this Vietnam-style "pacification" program as the "war on terror'/"war on drugs." And this horror is surely related to--indeed, the cause of--the displacement of five MILLION peasant farmers in Colombia. It was A PLAN, cooked up in Washington DC.

It struck me then, that this "pacification" program being used against Colombians was very similar to what the U.S. military was doing in Afghanistan. In both cases, the local people are usually not combatants but they may well sympathize with guerrilla fighters because the government is so-o-o bad--vile, corrupt, brutal, thieving fascist bastards. Local community leaders are therefore murdered, with a lot of collateral splatter, and the rest of the community terrorized into submission. And the puppet leaders are given power and money and closely monitored to "secure" the area for the "powers that be."

There is also this: Some months ago, I saw a news article that said that the State Department had "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" (don't know who) IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." I don't believe the word "unauthorized," and I suspect that these were "turkey shoots"--Blackwater training assassins using random local people or specific targets--local leaders, trade unionists, human rights workers, etc.--identified by Uribe's illegal domestic spying program, which was likely aided and supplemented with U.S. military high tech surveillance.

I suspect that the "fine" and the word "unauthorized" are part of a cover up of Bush Junta complicity in this horror.

This may explain why the U.S./Colombia military agreement was so secretive. Among other things, it provided "total diplomatic immunity" for all U.S. military personnel AND all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia. It was secretly negotiated and secretly signed in 2009, which is strange in itself, since the U.S. military has been operating in Colombia since the Clinton administration, at least. Why did they suddenly need a signature on "total diplomatic immunity"?

The signature was that of Colombia's criminal president Alvaro Uribe (since retired by the CIA) negotiated by the Bushwhack ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, whom the Obama administration left in place until he got this done--and had also arranged the midnight extraditions of the death squad witnesses, over the objections of Colombian prosecutors (with these cases then completely sealed in U.S. federal court in Washington DC and the witnesses "buried" in the U.S. federal prison system). Then, Uribe was given posh academic sinecures teaching (ahem) international law at Georgetown and Harvard (where the law school teaches its students to "look forward not backward" when it comes to the crimes of the rich and the powerful) and a prestigious appointment to an international legal commission (the one investigating Israel's firing on an aid boat).

FURTHER, the U.S. recently arranged for the swift removal the chief spying witness against Uribe, with unusual overnight asylum granted by another U.S. client state, Panama. Uribe--coddled and protected by the U.S.--is now "out of the woods" as to prosecution for his many crimes in Colombia, and will be under no pressure to disclose what he may know about Bush Junta complicity in those crimes.

What this article reveals are hints of the long term Pentagon plan for operations in the Far East 'theater' (probably including China) from the western region of Colombia, in addition to its use of Colombia as a training ground for special ops and other forces and a testing ground for strategies, systems and weapons. This is quite convenient since Colombia's fascist elite gives not a crap about is poorer citizens and wants to be rid of some of them.

I was aware of the "pacification" of regions in Colombia near the Venezuelan border, and installation of new U.S. bases/"forward operating locations" in Colombia and in the Caribbean that could surveil/attack Venezuela's oil coast on the Caribbean and its northern oil provinces. (The $2.5 million construction at "unnamed locations," mentioned in the article, may be for the new base that the Colombian military announced would be built overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela, only 20 miles from the Venezuelan border*). But I didn't know what was going on in Colombia's western areas near the Pacific coast. Tolemaida is near Bogota in the west. Larandia is rather close to the Ecuadoran border in the west (i.e., close to Ecuador's oil region). Málaga is very close to the Venezuelan border and its northern oil provinces.

This helps us see beyond the Pentagon's obvious Oil War II plan against Venezuela (and Ecuador), and even beyond SouthCom's "full spectrum" military activities in Latin America, to "grander delusions" in Asia. What does the Pentagon need a base for near Bogota in the west? (And how many U.S. bases are there/will there be near Colombia's Pacific coast?)

Meanwhile, Social Security is now on the chopping block. What next will we be deprived of, to feed this great, oil-thirsty, hijacked war machine, that serves the interests of multinational corporations? How will we ever throw this monster off our backs?

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*(When the Colombian military announced plans for this new base overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela, the spokesman was careful to specify that it would be built with Colombian money. This was likely a tipoff that the opposite is true--it will be funded by us and the location was chosen by the Pentagon. In any case, the U.S. has larded the Colombian military with $7 BILLION of our tax dollars, so what's "theirs" and what's "ours" is rather a fuzzy point. Probably the $2.5 million--which isn't a lot of money in Pentagon terms--is for some specific capability that the Pentagon wants at this Venezuela surveillance base or maybe it's just gravy for somebody.)