Colombia Urgent Action: Black Eagle Death Threats in Santander

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Solidarity, Amnesty International

Colombia Urgent Action: Black Eagle Death Threats in Santander
Report by Colombia Solidarity, Amnesty International
Published: 24/06/08

~snip~
A paramilitary group has threatened to kill the trade unionists and social activists named above who live or work in the city of Bucaramanga, Santander Department. Their lives may be in danger.

On 19 June unknown men left a letter containing death threats in an envelope at the housing complex where trade unionist Belcy Rincón lives in the municipality of Floridablanca, Santander Department. Her home and mobile telephone numbers were written on the envelope, as well as her address. The letter accused Belcy Rincón’s trade union, Sintraclínicas, which represents health workers, of being “a burrow of guerrillas” (una madriguera de guerrilleros). The letter also said that the union’s members would soon be “exterminated like cockroaches” (pronto serán exterminados como cucarachas). The death threat was signed by the Black Eagles (Águilas Negras) paramilitary group.

On 11 June a man on a motorbike stopped in front of the house of César Tamayo, president of the peasant farmers’ trade union Asociación Agraria de Santander, Agrarian Association of Santander. When Tamayo’s 11-year-old son answered the door, the man, his face hidden by his helmet, handed him an envelope containing an announcement of the death of César Tamayo and the others named above, apart from Belcy Rincón. Beside each name there was a cross.

The note declared them to be military targets and accused them of being guerrillas and of promoting antipatriotic marches against “decent people who produce wealth in the city and in the countryside” (la gente de bien que produce riqueza en la ciudad y el campo). The note also read, “a Colombia free of guerrillas - yes! NGOs, defenders of narco-guerrilas, NO! RIP!” (Colombia libre de guerrilleros…Sí, ONGs Defensoras de losNarcoterroristas NO! QEPD!). This death threat was also signed by the Black Eagles.

For the last three months trade unions and human rights NGOs in Bucaramanga have been organizing and taking part in demonstrations supporting workers’ rights. They have also been publicly condemning the activities of the Black Eagles (Águilas Negras) in Santander Department. This has made them targets of paramilitary death threats.



Read more: http://www.labournet.net/world/0806/colomb1.html

[fasttense]

1. Only the government targets Union Leaders. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

3. It's a very old story in Latin America, isn't it? It's been an oligarch's paradise. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

2. Two views of this Colombian city:

Bucaramanga, top arrow



Construyendo Visión means “Building Vision”.

We look for strengthening the community organization and the institutions of the State and to ourselves, we develop strategies to build with social responsibility and community autonomy. We strengthen and promote nurseries, committees, associative forms, investigation groups, and media.

Our main goals are the appropriation of diverse topics (as Peace, Human Rights, Environment, Childhood, Gender and Reconciliation) because they give us a wide vision about the reality, and to generate conscience and sensitization in front of the different problems of our country.

Our main headquarters is in the city of Bucaramanga – Colombia (South America). Bucaramanga is the capital of Santander province, northeast of Bogotá.

www.construyendovision.org/cv/en/main.htm



Olga Lucia with girls from her local community on the outskirts of the Colombian town of Bucaramanga. © UNHCR/G.Valdivieso

~snip~
Five years later, Olga is a community leader in the Doce de Octubre neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Bucaramanga, home to a large internally displaced population. She has witnessed more horrors of the armed conflict and has received threats from irregular armed groups. But, she also has acquired a great understanding of the effects of displacement on the lives of the more than two million internally displaced people (IDPs) in Colombia and of the difficulties displaced women face daily.

More:
http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/440f04774.html

[sourmilk]

4. This is what the AUC is currently morphing into.

They call themselves the "New Generation" and the "Black Eagles," but they started off as Pablo Escobar's private army. They have worked for the USA as "BlackOps" in the past but mostly have been employed by Columbian RW governments for the last 15 years. Many were trained and continue to train at Fort Benning, at SoA (School of the Americas).

[redqueen]

6. Welcome to DU!

Nice to have new members who are aware of these things.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Our tax dollars at work! $5.5 BILLION in U.S./Bush military aid to Colombia,

which utilizes rightwing paramilitaries to terrorize the poor. This is a DISGRACEFUL and CRIMINAL police state/military boondoggle!

[sourmilk]

7. Shhhhh...They don't like the term "paramilitaries."

They prefer either "United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia" (AUC), "Central Bolivar Bloc" (The Coca Wing of the AUC - separated when Castaño left AUC in 2001), "Black Eagles" (BlackOps - US-Trained) or "New Generation" (Youth Wing of Central Bolivar Bloc).

These two new ones apparently operate complicitly and in concert with local police against anyone threatening corporate dominance in Columbia.

Uribe is a FILTHY ANIMAL.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Those names sound so fresh, so official, don't they? You'd never associate groups with names like

that torturing entire villages, chainsawing them to death to imprint the terror totally in the minds of any survivors lucky enough to escape.

They sound like such nice young men. "New Generation" is especially catchy.

[Judi Lynn]

9. Adding an article actually published in 1 of the 2 large dailies in Bogota, El Tiempo:

Murder Training: Colombian Death Squad Used Live Hostages
April 29, 2007 By El Tiempo

El Tiempo, Bogota -- "Proof of courage": that is how the how the paramilitaries would term the training they imparted to their recruits so that they learnt how to carve up people while they were still alive.

Initially, the authorities rejected this version of the farmers who reported the practice... but when the combatants themselves started to admit to it in their testimonies before the prosecutors, the myth became a harsh crime against humanity.

~snip~
Villalba claims that in order to learn how to dismember people they would use farmers they gathered together in the course of taking neighbouring settlements. As he describes it, "they were aged people whom we brought in trucks, alive and bound up". The victims arrived at the ranch in covered trucks. They were lowered from the vehicle with their hands tied and taken to a room. There they were locked up for days in the hope that the training would start.

"The instruction of courage" would start later: the people would be divided up in four or five groups "and there they dismembered them", says Villalba in his testimony. "The instructor would say to each of them: 'You stand there, so-and-so over there and provide security to him who is doing the dismembering'. Every time that a settlement is taken and someone is going to be dismembered, security has to be offered to those doing the job".

The women and men were taken out in their underwear from the rooms where they had been locked up. Still with their hands bound, they took them to the place where the instructor was waiting to start the first lessons: "The instructions were to chop off their arms, the head, to dismember them alive. They were usually crying and asked us not to do anything to them, that they had families."

Villalba describes the process: "They were opened up from the chest to the belly and the intestines, the remains, taken out. The feet, arms and head were removed. It was done with machetes or with knives. The rest, the remains, was done by hand. Those of us in training took out the intestines." The training demanded it, according to him, to "prove the courage and to learn how to make people disappear".

More:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15551



A.U.C. death squad leader, Carlos Mario Jimenez ("Macaco")





Some of his troops, after arrest.