Re-posting of "Is the U.S. military involved in mass murder in Colombia?"--in GD

[Peace Patriot]

Here
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7623513

[Judi Lynn]

1. The original post has valuable information, worth keeping for future reference. Thank you. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

2. "Colombia: President Alvaro Uribe - so many skeletons in his closet, the door has now burst open"

Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Colombia: President Alvaro Uribe - so many skeletons in his closet, the door has now burst open

The dark history of President Alvaro Uribe (photo) is well known for its seedy connections to narco-traffickers, terrorists and murderers. When Mayor of the City of Medellin, narco-terrorist death squads sent thousands of civilians to the most horrific deaths. Now, mass graves with thousands of bodies have been uncovered.

Columbia is covered in a fine white powder. It is called cocaine. The leaves of the coca plant are crushed and pounded with a solvent. Wax is then removed from the solution and hydrochloric acid is added to the remainder to separate out the cocaine alkaloids. The crystals that are left are dissolved with methyl alcohol, are recrystallized and dissolved in sulphuric acid

Millions of doses worth billions of dollars flood the streets of the United States of America, and other countries, every year destroying families, sending crime rates soaring, tearing society apart. The USA backed Colombia’s Mayor of Medellin, the epicenter of the narcotics trade, Álvaro Uribe in his bid for the Presidency of Colombia, despite his alleged links to AUC, a paramilitary group classified by Washington as a terrorist organization.

As Mayor of Medellin, in the early 1980s, the city was referred to as “The Sanctuary” because the city administration afforded protection to drugs traffickers such as Pablo Escobar, whose projects Uribe (son of the known narco-trafficker Alberto Uribe Sierra) supported. His chief of staff was Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, who controlled not only the cocaine precursor chemical industry (producing substances needed for the production of cocaine) but also the paramilitaries under whose reign of terror in the Department of Antioquia thousands of people disappeared, mainly Uribe’s opponents. During the 1980s, Uribe’s CONVIVIR vigilantes massacred thousands of civilians, before merging with the terrorist organization AUC.

More:
http://ionglobaltrends.blogspot.com/2010/02/colombia-president-alvaro-uribe-so-many.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FzqKG+%28i+On+Global+Trends%29

[Judi Lynn]

3. Executing justice: Which side are we on?

Executing justice: Which side are we on?
An interview with Colombian human rights activist Padre Javier Giraldo, S.J.

by Ruth Goring

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The government of Colombia has long been engaged in a war with two Marxist insurgent groups, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Army of Liberation). The U.S. government currently bolsters the Colombian armed forces through Plan Colombia, but most Americans receive little news of the conflict and fail to realize that nearly all its casualties are civilians.

In 1988 Padre Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest, was instrumental in founding a human rights organization, originally Catholic and now ecumenical: the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz (Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace, generally shortened to Justicia y Paz). Over the years Padre Javier has helped compile Proyecto Nunca Más (the Never Again Project), a massive database of human rights violations in his country.

Last year 4,900 political homicides and 734 forced disappearances were recorded in Colombia, according to the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights of Colombia. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and United Nations reporting agencies state that 70-80 percent of political murders in that country are the work of right-wing paramilitary forces supported by major economic interests. The government claims to oppose the paramilitaries as well as the guerrillas, yet according to many eyewitness reports the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC) works hand in hand with the army. A key theme of Padre Javier's work has been impunity--the Colombian government's failure to punish, or even properly investigate, crimes committed by paramilitaries, army personnel, and officials of the state.

PRISM: Tell us about the work you have done to bring to light human rights abuses in Colombia.

JG: I worked for some years with CINEP, the Center for Investigation and Popular Education, founded by Jesuits in the late 1960s. Its purpose is to promote education and justice among Colombia's people. However, it became increasingly evident that Colombia needed a small church-based organization that would confront issues of human rights very directly. Most of the Catholic bishops were very tied to the government; they didn't denounce any abuses except those committed by guerrillas.

Among progressive religious orders we began exploring how we might protect the human rights of victims of the Colombian state. The bishops were not interested in helping, but in early 1988 the superiors of 25 orders (which we call congregations) came together to found the Comisión de Justicia y Paz. Its goal was to provide humanitarian and legal support, especially in areas of intense conflict--Santander, Valle del Cauca, Magdalena Medio, Putumayo, and Urabá. We would gather facts about human rights abuses in a databank and would publicize situations of crisis. Some cases we would take to the courts. Our staff developed close relationships with some impoverished communities that were suffering in the midst of the armed conflict and that gained courage to declare themselves peace communities.

I served as the general secretary of Justicia y Paz until the end of 1998 and was often the spokesperson for victims in cases brought before Colombia's courts. In those eleven years I did not witness a single act of justice. Not one government or military official who committed crimes was sanctioned.

PRISM: How would you summarize your analysis of Colombia's crisis?

JG: In the late 1990s I wrote an article, "Lo que en Colombia se llama justicia" (What Is Called Justice in Colombia), published in our Justicia y Paz journal. It recounts 10 exemplary cases that reveal the mechanisms of impunity in our country--how testimony is manipulated, victims or their families are threatened and silenced, false testimony is presented, essential documents are "misplaced." Then I pose a global question. We turn to the state to sanction human rights violations, assign reparations, bring about justice--but the state itself has committed the crimes and is the criminal. How can we turn to the victimizer for justice? It's a terrible contradiction.

My conclusion was that the Colombian state is contradictory. It tries to fulfill two functions. On the one hand it's a violent, discriminatory institution that must favor a small wealthy minority. Even basic necessities are denied to the great majority of its people. By its very nature, at its core, it is not democratic. On the other hand, in public discourse it presents itself as a state based on law, one that respects and implements justice, human rights norms, democratic laws.

How do government functionaries manage this contradiction? They maintain a duality: the parastate, a structure that is illegal and clandestine, increasingly takes over the dirty work, the repression. It doesn't appear to be part of the state. For many years now Colombia's government has been creating and maintaining these structures. The legal, constitutional structure exists parallel to structures of a parastate and paramilitary.

More:
http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/colombia/doc/giraldo1.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. 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

[cqo_000]

5. Updates on the La Macarena gravesite

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1325

We have communicated with governmental, non-governmental and journalistic sources. Without violating these communications’ confidentiality, what we’ve heard can be summarized as follows.

Sources agree that the site in question is an official cemetery in the La Macarena town center, not a clandestine area where bodies were dumped.

The cemetery includes a large number of “NN” (name unknown) gravesites. The military recognizes burying unidentified individuals killed in the very frequent combat that has taken place between the armed forces and the FARC. The Army says that all of its burials have been duly registered with the Technical Investigations Unit (CTI) of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía).

Estimating the number of dead at these gravesites is not possible at this time. Official sources doubt that the number is anywhere near as high as 2,000, and it is unclear how the media reports derived that estimate. If even a fraction of that total were “NN” cadavers, however, it would still be unusually large, as the town center of La Macarena municipality is home to only about 4,000 people.

The mayor of La Macarena, quoted in one of last week’s articles as saying “we became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” now insists that the cemetery is not a mass grave site. He says that the cemetery contains 1,000 human remains, many from nearby combat incidents, and that 346 are unidentified combat dead buried since 2004. The mayor’s remarks came yesterday at a press conference for reporters brought to La Macarena by Colombia’s minister of defense.

There is no clarity about the timeframe of the burials. Some sources contend that most of the bodies were buried before 2005, when the FARC had nearly uncontested dominion over La Macarena, which between 1999 and 2002 was part of the demilitarized zone where FARC-government peace talks took place. Bodies buried before 2005 would be considered more likely to have been buried by the FARC. The news reports, however, claim that most bodies are from the post-2005 period.


http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1325