'Chile all over again'

[Aidoneus]

Chile all over again
By branding its critics guerrilla sympathisers, the Colombian regime effectively issued a death threat, writes Jeremy Lennard
Thursday September 11, 2003

The branding by the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, of human rights groups opposed to his policies as "cowards" and "terrorist sympathisers" has a chilling resonance, coming as it does in the same week as the 30th anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Chile.

Less reported were the comments, the same day, of Colombia's armed forces chief, General Jorge Enrique Mora, who joined in the intimidation and accused the human rights groups of fabricating the extensively documented links between his troops and illegal paramilitary groups in order to justify their own existence.

These outbursts were, in essence, reaction to a report issued by a group of 80 human rights groups and other non-governmental organisations that concludes that Mr Uribe's "authoritarian" government has overseen a dramatic increase in extrajudicial killings, civilian massacres and other abuses.

--El Aro massacre details snipped..--

Were that Mr Uribe and Gen Mora's comments this week just simple denials like Gen Ospina's. In reality they are far more serious. To brand someone a "guerrillero" - in today's world, read "terrorist" - sympathiser is a brazen threat in Colombia. It is tantamount to a death threat. Just ask the country's union leaders. They have been regularly dubbed such by the likes of Mr Uribe and his generals over recent years. All of them civilian non-combatants, they have also been picked off in "targeted assassinations" by the paramilitaries to the tune of several hundred a year.

--snip--

Surely the international community is not so naive, which only leads to one rather uncomfortable conclusion. The carte blanche backing that Mr Uribe receives from Washington and London for his efforts to clamp down on the country's leftwing guerrillas has its roots in the same ethos that Henry Kissinger so bluntly expounded over Chile three decades ago: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."

The terminology may have changed over the years, but the thinking is the same. To the disgrace of the families of the tens of thousands who have died, the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced from their homes, and the millions of ordinary members of Colombia's shattered society who have been touched by the violence of the extreme right, that support would appear to be at any human cost.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/colombia/story/0,11502,1039449,00.html