Cousin of Colombian ex-President Uribe jailed

[Judi Lynn]

Source: BBC News

21 February 2011 Last updated at 20:30 ET
Cousin of Colombian ex-President Uribe jailed

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/media/images/51363000/jpg/_51363853_44591877.jpg

Mario Uribe is a close ally of
former President Alvaro Uribe

Mario Uribe, a cousin and close ally of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

A former senator, Mario Uribe was found guilty of having links to the country's paramilitary groups.

The right-wing militias were created by landowners and drug traffickers to combat left-wing rebels.

Mr Uribe is one of the most prominent figures jailed over paramilitary links.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12532826

[EFerrari]

1. Step by step, inch by inch.

Pleasant dreams, uribito.

[Peace Patriot]

2. One down! And, unfortunately, many to go, and not just in Colombia. nt

[Judi Lynn]

3. 'Uribe's brother led paramilitary death squad'

'Uribe's brother led paramilitary death squad'
Sunday, 23 May 2010 22:47 Adriaan Alsema

http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/2010/05/santiago_uribe.jpg

The younger brother of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe led a paramilitary death squad in the early 1990s, a former police major told U.S. newspaper the Washington Post.

According to former official Juan Carlos Meneses, Santiago Uribe led the local paramilitary group in Yarumal, where the Uribe family had a business. The group allegedly killed petty thieves, and suspected guerrillas and their sympathizers.

Meneses claims that the president's brother was the main fundraiser and strategist behind the "12 Apostles," a group of prominent citizens that led a number of hitmen. According to Meneses, he attended meetings with the group in which it was decided who was going to be killed. The former police commander's role was to make sure no authorities would be present at the time of the murder.

"First, it was drug addicts and small-time criminals winding up dead. Then, there were more and more and more dead," an anonymous former town official told the newspaper.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/9851-uribes-brother-lead-paramilitary-death-squad.html

[goforit]

4. Oh my, What will the Bush family do now?

[rabs]

5. The long arm of Salvatore Mancuso snares Mario Uribe

Back in 2002, Mario Uribe sought help to get elected senator from AUC chieftain Mancuso.

Then in May 2008, Mario Uribe's dear cousin, alvarito uribe, whisked Mancuso and 13 other AUC leaders to prisons in the United States, to keep them from implicating uribistas and their links to the murderous paramilitaries.

What alvarito and Mario did not take into account was that Mancuso was going to sing like a canary. And so off to prison goes Mario Uribe.

-----------------------

Speaking of alvarito uribe, don't know if it has been reported in English-language media but alvarito conveniently has been out of Colombia since the weekend.

alvarito has been reported to be in a posh Caribbean resort named Casa del Campo.

and meeting with:

George H.W. Bush
Dubya Bush
Brian Mulroney (ex PM, conservative, of Canada)
Jose Maria Aznar (falangista Francoista from Spain)


Kinda odd that the two bushies, Mulroney and Aznar would suddenly show up in the DR at the same time.

Not known whether anti-Chavez billionaire Gustavo Cisneros of Venezuela is there, but he has hosted George H.W. in the past at his mansion in Casa del Campo.

(Spanish)
http://www.listin.com.do/la-republica/2011/2/19/178165/Ex-presidentes-estan-en-complejo-Casa-de-Campo

[Judi Lynn]

7. The GANG'S all there in the D.R. All those torture-loving conservatives there together. Hiding?

Or plotting?

That's the same place where the Cuban "exile" sugar barons, Alfi and Pepe Fanjul own a resort, and a home, Casa Grande, at Casa de Campo, too. We all recall Monica Lewinski gibbered Bill Clinton received a call from one of them when she was "in his office." Wink. Nudge. Shudder.



From left: Pepe, wife, Emilia, Alfi, his guest



Outside Casa de Campo.
Sure hope Salvatore Mancuso doesn't stop talking. He was once extremely powerful. When he was in prison in Colombia right before he was catapulted outta there to the U.S., thereby avoiding local prosecution for so many, many murders, as well as being vulnerable to questioning which would implicate the Uribes, he had expensive toys, like his own laptop in his cell, his own tv, etc. (I've heard some of the big guys like Mancuso even had or have their own chefs, in a tv documentary.)



Mancuso


Here's an article which covers his trial in which he confessed, but, as the article said, he didn't name any living people, so it seems clear it's around this time it was decided the U.S. should haul his ass away to stand trial for all those terrifying DRUG charges. Yeah. Good thinking.

Colombian militia leader confesses to massacres

Sibylla Brodzinsky in Medellín
The Guardian, Thursday 18 January 2007

A senior commander of Colombia's rightwing militias has admitted taking part in some of the country's most grisly crimes in the first of what could become a flood of confessions from demobilised paramilitary leaders.
Salvatore Mancuso told a prosecutor in Medellín this week that he was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, murders and massacres during his 15-year career in the death squads that spread terror throughout Colombia in the name of fighting leftist rebels.

In two days of testimony, Mancuso admitted to directly participating in or ordering the murder of hundreds of people, among them mayors, union leaders and peasants. With presentations projected from his laptop computer, Mancuso listed in chronological order the massacres at El Aro, Mápiripan, El Salado and other towns, all of which he called "anti-subversive operations". He also named the victims.

Some relatives of the dead heard the confessions. When Miryam Areiza heard Mancuso read her father's name as he recounted the 1997 massacre at El Aro, where he and 14 others were tortured and killed, she said she felt ill. "Where does he get off saying my father was a guerrilla? My father was a peasant, tending to his farm. He was tortured and killed and Mancuso was responsible," she said outside the special room for victims and their families to watch the closed proceedings.

Ms Areiza said she saw little contrition. "He seemed proud of what they'd done, not remorseful," she said.

Mancuso recounted how, in each operation, the paramilitaries had direct or indirect collaboration with government forces. But he has implicated only military officers who are dead or already convicted for the crimes he described. He said he planned the El Aro massacre with General Alfonso Manosalva, commander of the army's 4th Brigade, who is now dead. In 2003, a Colombian court convicted Mancuso in absentia for the massacre.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/18/colombia.sibyllabrodzinsky

[Alexander]

6. Kind of sad that there's more justice in Colombia than there is here.

[Judi Lynn]

8. For those unaware of what paramlitaries do, this should shed light on the matter:

Colombia Searches for its Dead
Apr 29 2007
Luz María Sierra

One year since the country began to excavate common graves, chilling information has come to light: the “paras” (paramilitaries) gave courses on how to dismember a human body, the recently formed “Black Eagle” paramilitaries have been digging up graves and throwing the remains into the rivers and victims remain fearful.

~snip~
They Gave Quartering Classes

When we decided at El Tiempo to do a special report on the phenomenon of common graves a scene began to repeat itself in our newsroom: one by one, reporters coming back from the field, returned mortified.

Few discoveries have shaken us so deeply and few are as difficult to write about: from the scale of the horror, to the way they died, and by the insatiable pain of the families, as well as—perhaps most unsettling—realizing the magnitude of the work that remains to be done throughout the country. Will a significant number of the dead be unearthed and identified to alleviate their families? Will we be able to mourn, as we should, to prevent a third chapter of extreme violence from enrapturing Colombia?

Paramilitary testimonies and the results of forensic teams lead us to conclude that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary umbrella group, not only designed a method to quarter human beings, they also took the extra step of actually giving classes on the subject, using live people taken to their training camps.

Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary commander that directed the barbarism of the Aro massacre in the department (province) of Antioquia in which 15 people were tortured and butchered over five days, has revealed previously unknown details of those acts. “They were elderly people and were taken in trucks, alive, with their hands tied…. They were divvied up in groups of five … the instructions were to take off their arms, their heads … quartering them alive,” reads the testimony in his file.

The evidence collected from cadavers so far does not indicate the use of chainsaws. “Among other reasons, because it wasn’t practical. The chainsaws would get caught on people’s clothing, which is why they preferred to use machetes,” explains one of the prosecutors specializing in the exhumations. Seventy percent of those exhumed on the Caribbean coast were dismembered by machete and the majority of the 106 bodies found in the department of Putumayo—where paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño exported his killing machine from his headquarters in the departments of Urabá and Córdoba—had received a gunshot to the head and were subsequently torn apart at each prominent joint of their limbs.

More:
https://nacla.org/node/1467