Colombian Paramilitaries’ Successors Called a Threat (Human Rights Watch)

[Judi Lynn]

Source: New York Times

Colombian Paramilitaries’ Successors Called a Threat
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: February 3, 2010

CARACAS, Venezuela — Criminal armies that emerged from the ashes of the Colombian government’s attempt to disband paramilitary groups are spreading their reach across the country’s economy while engaging in a broad range of rights abuses, including massacres, rapes and forced displacement, a human rights group said Wednesday.

A report by the group, Human Rights Watch, detailed the activities of the paramilitary successor groups, which feed off Colombia’s cocaine trade. The drug trade remains lucrative despite Washington’s channeling of more than $5 billion of security and antinarcotics aid to Colombia, making it a top recipient of United States aid outside the Middle East.

“One major reason why combating these groups is not a priority is that it’s hard for the current government to acknowledge that a significant part of its security policy is failing,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, speaking in Bogotá, Colombia.

Seeking to influence the Obama administration’s policies toward Colombia, the group recommended delaying ratification of a long-awaited trade deal until Colombia’s government vigorously and effectively confronts the criminal groups, which succeeded paramilitaries formed by landowners decades ago to combat guerrillas.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/americas/04colombia.html?ref=world

[bemildred]

1. Gee, who could have predicted this? nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. United States’ Policies in Columbia Support Mass Murder

United States’ Policies in Columbia Support Mass Murder

Over the past two years, Colombia has been Washington’s third largest recipient of foreign aid, behind only Israel and Egypt. In July of 2000, the U.S. Congress approved a $1.3 billion war package for Colombia to support President Pastrana’s “Plan Colombia.” Plan Colombia is a $7.5 billion counter-narcotics initiative. In addition to this financial support, the US also trains the Colombian military.

Colombia’s annual murder rate is 30,000. It is reported that around 19,000 of these murders are linked to illegal right-wing paramilitary forces. Many leaders of these paramilitary groups were once officers in the Colombian military, trained at the U.S. Military run School of the Americas.

According to the Human Rights Watch Report, a 120-page report titled “The ‘Sixth Division’: Military-Paramilitary Ties and US Policy in Colombia,” Colombian armed forces and police continue to work closely with right-wing paramilitary groups. The government of President Pastrana and the US administration have played down evidence of this cooperation. Jim Lobe says that Human Rights Watch holds the Pastrana administration responsible for the current, violent situation because of its dramatic and costly failure to take prompt, effective control of security forces, break their persistent ties to paramilitary groups, and ensure respect for human rights.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair contend that the war in Colombia isn’t about drugs. It’s about the annihilation of popular uprisings by Indian peasants fending off the ravages of oil companies, cattle barons and mining firms. It is a counter-insurgency war, designed to clear the way for American corporations to set up shop in Colombia.

Cockburn and St. Clair examined two Defense Department commissioned reports, the RAND Report and a paper written by Gabriel Marcella, titled “Plan Colombia: the Strategic and Operational Imperatives.” Both reports recommend that the US step up its military involvement in Colombia. In addition, the reports make several admissions about the paramilitaries and their links to the drug trade, regarding human rights abuses by the US-trained Colombian military, and about the irrationality of crop fumigation.

Throughout these past two years, Colombian citizens have been the victims of human rights atrocities committed by the US-trained Colombian military and linked paramilitaries. Trade unionists and human rights activists face murder, torture, and harassment. It is reported that Latin America remains the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists. Since 1986, some 4,000 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia. In 2000 alone, more trade unionists were killed in Colombia than in the whole world in 1999.

More:
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/3-united-states-policies-in-columbia-support-mass-murder/

[boppers]

3. Arming political groups, uniting them with ideologies, and weakening state power...

What could possibly go wrong?

[bemildred]

4. Indeed.

Especially the arms, you just can't have too many weapons floating around.

[boppers]

5. Even better: arm both (many!) sides, deny all culpability...

...and if messing up one nation isn't enough, start "helping" the neighbors, and arm/radicalize their disaffected, too!

[bemildred]

6. Pretty soon, you have a "failed state".

Or even an 'arc of instability" or something.

[boppers]

7. arc is such a messy word, though...

Could it sometimes be called a "cone", maybe with a regional modifier, such as "southern"?

[bemildred]

8. Yeah, you are right, arc is for Africa and Asia. Cone is for Latin America.

Sometimes I get careless. It's hard to keep up.
:spank:

[Judi Lynn]

9. Obama's Pact For Colombia Bases Termed "Dangerous"

February 4, 2010 at 09:18:29
Obama's Pact For Colombia Bases Termed "Dangerous"
By Sherwood Ross

The Obama administration's pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates "a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy," an article in The Nation magazine warns.

The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon's 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct "full spectrum operations throughout South America" and to "expand expeditionary warfare capability."

"With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region's military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems," writes historian Greg Grandin, a New York University professor.

Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the "anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement," Grandin writes, the Obama administration is "disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia." Grandin's article in The Nation's February 8th issue is titled, "Muscling Latin America."

The fountainhead of this effort is Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. aid package that over the past decade "has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States," Grandin says, noting that more Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998.

Underlying the anti-drug fight, however, is a counterinsurgency struggle for control of "ungoverned spaces" via a "clear, hold and build" sequence urged by the U.S. military to weaken Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces(FARC). The Bush White House condoned the right-wing paramilitaries who, along with their narcotraficante allies "now control about 10 million acres, roughly half of the country's most fertile land," Grandin reports. They also spread terror in the countryside and are responsible for many killings and for driving peasants from their land.

Grandin reports that the paras "have taken control of hundreds of municipal governments, establishing what Colombian social scientist Leon Valencia calls "true local dictatorships,' consolidating their property seizures and deepening their ties to narcos, landed elites and politicians."

What's more, "The country's sprawling intelligence apparatus is infiltrated by this death squad/narco combine, as is its judiciary and Congress, where more than forty deputies from the governing party are under investigation for ties to (the right-wing) AUC (United Self Defense Forces).

More:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Pact-For-Colombia-by-Sherwood-Ross-100203-535.html

[Judi Lynn]

10. Paramilitaries, successors still terrorizing Colombia

Posted on Thursday, 02.04.10
Paramilitaries, successors still terrorizing Colombia
A reemergence of the paramilitaries, and their successors, are terrorizing Colombia anew.

By SIBYLLA BRODZINSKY
Special to The Miami Herald
BOGOTA -- For some human rights activists, the new face of violence in Colombia comes with a familiar mask.

While a female activist was providing assistance to a woman victim of the paramilitaries at the victim's home in Antioquia, five men wearing balaclavas broke into the house, raped both women and warned the rights defender to stop doing human rights work.

The men who attacked them -- the rights worker feared having her name used -- were members of what Human Rights Watch calls the ``successor groups'' to Colombia's long-feared right-wing paramilitary groups, most of which demobilized under a deal with the government of President Alvaro Uribe.

In a new report released here Wednesday, called Paramilitaries Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia, the U.S.-based NGO said the successor groups pose a growing threat to human rights and security in Colombia.

6 MAIN GROUPS

By the most conservative estimates, the new groups have at least 4,000 members who regularly commit massacres, killings, and forcibly displace individuals and entire communities. And as their ranks have swelled, the groups have consolidated into six main organizations and are present in 24 of Colombia's 32 provinces.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1461762.html

[Judi Lynn]

11. Colombia's new death squads exposed

Colombia's new death squads exposed
Thursday 04 February 2010by Tom Mellen

New death squads have arisen to replace Colombia's notorious right-wing paramilitary groups - and they are committing the same acts of terrorism against trade unionists as their predecessors, a prominent US-based rights organisation has warned.

Under pressure from human rights groups and Washington, Bogota has overseen the demobilisation of over 31,000 fighters from the so-called United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC, in recent years.

But dozens of groups have emerged as successors, engaging in activities ranging from mass murder to extortion, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The death squads were organised by rural landowners, ostensibly to counter leftwing guerilla groups. They soon became a powerful, lawless force in much of the country, with links to senior rightwing politicians and drugs cartels.

The US government has declared the AUC a terrorist organisation, and government pressure eventually forced the paramilitaries to disband between 2003 and 2006.

The 113-page Paramilitaries' Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia report, based on nearly two years of research, documents widespread and serious abuses by the new groups.

According to the report, the groups regularly commit massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, and "create a threatening atmosphere in the communities they control."

Often, they target trade unionists, human rights defenders, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice and community members who do not follow their orders.

More:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/86454

[Judi Lynn]

12. Colombian Trade Unionists Win SOLIDAR Award for Struggle for Human Rights

Colombian Trade Unionists Win SOLIDAR Award for Struggle for Human Rights
5/02/2010

Brussels, 2 February 2010 - In a ceremony at the European Parliament tomorrow evening, SOLIDAR will award three trade union federations of Colombia, the CUT, CGT and CTC, its annual Silver Rose Award for their ongoing struggle to improve workers rights in a country where 49 trade union activists were killed in 2008 and countless others intimidated and threatened.
Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist. In 2008, 49 trade unionists were murdered, a 25% increase from the year before. This escalation in violence directly contradicts the claims of the Uribe regime that the situation is improving.

One of the 49 trade unionists killed was a pregnant teacher by the name of Luz Mariela Diaz Lopez, a member of the Putumayo Educators Association, who was shot on 1 April 2008 in the Guamez valley, Putumayo. Another trade unionist, Emerson Ivan Herrera, was killed alongside her.

The litany of violence does not stop with the killings. Thousands of human rights lawyers, journalists, students, indigenous activists and members of the political opposition have been forcibly disappeared, with torture, death and imprisonment a daily occurrence. Today, 3.6 million Colombians are considered internally displaced people, making it the country with the second highest displaced population in the world.

“Impunity for such crimes is almost absolute and this issue remains at the core of the country's human rights crisis. Successive Colombian administrations have allowed the perpetrators of widespread and severe human rights violations to escape punishment and this lack of action by the State has given a virtual green light for the abuses to continue”, said Luis Miguel Morantes Alfonso, President of the CTC.

“Reports show that the situation in Colombia is just getting worse. By awarding the Colombian trade unions with this SOLIDAR Silver Rose Award, we hope to raise awareness of the severe situation and show solidarity with the Colombian trade unions that are carrying out important work to organise Colombian workers: workers who are working under bad conditions, in dangerous working environments, with low salaries, and with no or little social protection”, said Conny Reuter, Secretary General of SOLIDAR.

In addition to the abuse of human rights, Colombian workers suffer from a severe deficit of decent working conditions.

More:
http://www.solidar.org/Page_Generale.asp?DocID=13955&thebloc=23686