Remembering Ayotzinapa

 

Just before 6 p.m. on September 26 a year ago, about a hundred first-year students of a rural college in Aytozinapa in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, set off on two coaches for nearby towns. Their mission was to commandeer buses to take them to Mexico City for the commemoration of the October 2, 1968, student massacre days before the Olympics games.

They did not know they were being tracked from the moment they left their campus or that they had been infiltrated by an active duty soldier. Neither were they aware that for many of them it would be the last day of their lives. Three of them would be killed that night and 43 others would disappear into the darkness.

The Ayotzinapa “normal rural” (rural teacher training college), part of a dwindling chain set up almost a century ago in the heat of the Mexican revolution, caters to young men from impoverished families in a territory criss-crossed by rival drug gangs. Nearby is the glittering tourist resort of Acapulco, famed for its cliff divers and hedonistic nightlife.

The rurales have never gone down well with the clergy and the government for their insistence on social justice and political activism. The one in Ayotzinapa is more troublesome than most and counts among its former students Lucio Cabañas, who led armed guerrillas in the mountains of Guerrero state and was killed by the army in 1974.

The students reached the centre of Iguala town a little after 9 p.m. on the hijacked buses when hooded armed men trapped their convoy in expert crossfire. Some scattered into the neighbouring streets and hid themselves on rooftops or behind bushes but 43 of them were picked up and loaded on to pickup vans, never to be seen again.

Another group of Ayotzinapa students reached Iguala around 11 p.m. to rescue their comrades. They called the local press to the site of the attack, where they were fired upon while speaking to the journalists. Two of them were left to bleed to death. The body of a third student was found in the morning with his eyes gouged out and without his facial skin. Another bus carrying the local football team was also mistakenly attacked that night with three more deaths.

The next morning, the ambitious local mayor, who had amassed an inexplicably large fortune, denied any knowledge of the night’s events, saying he was dancing at that time. His wife is from a notorious drug family and she wanted to replace him as the town’s mayor while he aimed for the state governor’s post.

The federal authorities at first blamed the students and tried to pass it off as one more crime in one of the country’s most violent states. With growing popular indignation and an international media scrum after locals began finding mass graves around Iguala in the search for the disappeared, the Mexican government scrambled for a more credible explanation.

The new official version was that the students had come to town to disrupt a function organised by the mayor’s wife. The mayor asked the local municipal police to do something. They then arrested the trainee teachers, took them to the police station and handed them over to the dreaded Guerreros Unidos (Guerreros United) drug gang, which executed them and burned their bodies to dispose off the evidence. At one time, it was suggested that wild animals might have eaten up the remains.

Twenty-two local policemen were arrested and the mayor and his wife, who had gone into hiding, were picked up in Mexico City as intellectual authors of the crime. Soon afterwards, four men admitted to the killings. The federal police and the army had played no part in the events, the government claimed.

Every single of these assertions has been proven to be demonstrably false. An investigation by the Mexican magazine Proceso, together with the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, revealed that the students had reached Iguala at least two hours after the mayor’s wife ended her programme. They were unarmed and in grainy videos on their mobile phones they kept asking the policemen why they were being shot at. They identified federal policemen among their attackers. The local police did not possess the weapons with which the students were fired upon.

A magistrate present at the police station that night, who has since fled to the United States fearing for his life, said the students were not brought there. The only ones in the cells were some drunks who were let off after paying a fine. Some of the policemen who admitted to having turned over the students had torture marks on them. The four killers turned out to be poor builders, again tortured to confess to the crime.

One of the disappeared students somehow sent a text message to his mother some time after midnight asking her to put some money into his account. The students were either held or driven somewhere for at least four hours before the decision was taken to eliminate them.

The army was aware from the start of the goings-on. There is a military base not far from where the students were killed. A local army officer came to the police station that night on the pretext of locating a stolen motorcycle and had a good look around. Soldiers questioned and photographed some of the injured students who had made their way to the local hospital and threatened to disappear them. The army formed part of the local C4 (Control, command, communication and computation) centre where the municipal, state, federal police and the military share intelligence and CCTV footage. The government and the army are not allowing the soldiers to speak to independent inquiry teams.

Argentinean forensic anthropologists brought in by the parents of the students and specialist investigators of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) say there was nomass incineration at a garbage dump in a wooded area as the government had claimed. More than 30,000 kg of wood or 13,300 tyres would have to be lit for 60 hours to dispose of the bodies. The plume of smoke would have risen to at least 300 metres, making it clearly visible from the nearby towns, and the flames would have been enough to set off a forest fire.

Almost no one other than the parents believes the students are alive. Five buses were involved in that night’s events but the official inquiry speaks of four coaches. The emerging unofficial consensus is that the fifth bus either had a large stash of money or drugs on board for which the students were killed. Locals fear that the bodies were incinerated at a crematorium that the local army base is rumoured to have.

No one knows for sure how high on the order came from, but the negligence of the official inquiry lends credence to the belief that the state either participated directly in the killings, or is protecting those who carried it out. It took President Peña Nieto ten days to order an inquiry. At his first meeting with the Ayotzinapa parents, he made sure he looked suitably contrite but has done little more since then. Ahead of the second meeting on September 24, a second “killer” has surfaced and the remains of a second student identified. The only certainty this adds is that the government knows far more than what it is letting out.

The parents of the Ayotzinapa students have kept up a dogged campaign for a year with the battle cry: “They took them alive, we want them back alive”. Their movement has radicalised Mexico but that does not mean the state will give in easily. At the meeting with the parents on September 24, President Peña Nieto promised a second inquiry. Mexicans will be sceptical of his intentions, believing so far that his administration has been prevaricating and stalling on the issue.

The students were on their way to the capital to remember the hundreds of victims of the 1968 massacre ordered by the then President and carried out by the police and the army. The Mexican state covered up that slaughter and will hope to do the same with this one. After all, thousands of civilians have disappeared on Peña Nieto’s watch without any significant threat to his rule.

A New Colombian President Hatches From Uribe’s ‘Little Eggs’

In the upside down world of Colombia, the more things remain the same, the more they change. Juan Manuel Santos has been elected President, approvingly described by the BBC and other western news media as a “safe pair of hands” to continue with the policies of the current regime of the notorious President Alvaro Uribe. Santos won almost 70% of the votes cast but it turns out that almost 60% of the Colombians did not vote and that many of them did not turn out, or cast almost half a million blank votes, as a form of protest. Coming in the week that Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist died, it was somewhat ironic since his novel ‘Seeing’ charts out how a well-set regime begins to tumble after citizens spontaneously put in blank votes.

The winning candidate is of impressive Colombian pedigree. Santos is part of a very wealthy and influential Bogotan family which owns, together with its Spanish partners, a lot of the national media. It also supplies top-range political figures from time to time. Uribe’s Vice-President is a Santos, a cousin to the incoming President, who also had a great-uncle as a President from 1938-1942. Juan Manuel took some unorthodox steps in the past to get this particular office. A former Colombian President, Ernesto Samper, accused him of trying to set up deals with drug lords and even reaching out to the Left-wing FARC guerrillas in order to organise a coup against him.

That he thought of doing simultaneous deals with drug lords and Left-wing rebels should mark him out as a pragmatist. There were more signs of pragmatism like being linked to the company that oversaw the elections. And somebody must have felt charitable about him winning to organise the widespread voting fraud, ranging from having the paramilitaries threaten voters to making voters understand they would lose welfare benefits if they did not attend Santos rallies or voted improperly. Then a citizens’ group found out from a random sampling that fraudulent ballot papers somehow mostly seemed to have gravitated towards Santos in the first round of polling.

But there are times when even Juan Manuel discards opportunism to stand up for beliefs – like letting the world know how proud he feels when his country is described as the Israel of Latin America. Or may be it is still pragmatism, for Colombia buys a lot of Israeli weapons, its paramilitaries received (it would still be ongoing, wouldn’t it) a lot of training from Israeli officers and Colombia, like Tel-Aviv, has developed security expertise field testing its military tactics and weaponry on a hapless population.

Juan Manuel would not have been President if his predecessor, Don Uribe, had had his way. Having tweaked the country’s Constitution once to allow for a second term, he was all set for another tweak when Colombia’s Supreme Court decided that the constitutional amendment campaign had taken money from dubious backers and overruled the President. However, Juan Manuel publicly remains loyal to his former boss and promises to carry forward his policies. This is what some of Uribe’s achievements, the little eggs, as Uribe put it, that Santos would like to guard well:

Almost half of Colombians are poor and seven million live in extreme poverty. Colombia has the largest number of internally displaced persons after Sudan, something approaching 10% of its population. Farmers are driven off their land by the paramilitaries, their land is then handed over to large agro-businesses and government funds meant for small farmers are diverted to these large corporations. Neat. Unemployment is something like 13% and in some cities it approaches 20%. Four out of five Colombians lucky to work are not lucky enough to earn the minimum wage. So some take to smuggling drugs. Something like eleven million Colombians or 58% of the workforce is in informal employment. The services sector accounts for a disproportionately large number of jobs. School dropout is endemic. The public health system recently came close to collapse and is still infirm. Of the 102-odd aboriginal groups, something like 32 of them are in the danger of disappearing. Forty trade unionists were killed last year; this year the figure has already reached 31. Nevertheless military spending will approach 5.6% of the GDP this year. Colombia is the second largest military spender in Latin America after Brazil. In the past four years, some 5,000 were killed in cold blood, the so-called false positives where unsuspecting civilians were lured with jobs, shot, dressed in guerrilla fatigues and passed off as enemy combatants to take advantage of the financial incentives for killing guerrillas. The country has Latin America’s biggest common grave and many more are still being found. Thousands have been “disappeared” during Uribe’s presidency. Meanwhile, paramilitary bosses say they enjoyed a cosy relationship with Uribe and the military all through and that they supported Uribe’s 2002 presidency. Juan Manuel was also Uribe’s Defence Minister and in 2009 was linked to a scandal in which he is said to have favoured a friend of his in defence purchases.

During the presidential campaign, one candidate went on fast saying the media were ignoring him. Another, Gustavo Petro of the Leftist alliance, said the Bogota establishment had manipulated opinion polls to show the Green candidate was running a close second to Juan to inject some legitimacy into an election many Colombians see as essentially fixed. Piedad Cordoba, Colombia’s doughty peacemaker first expressed that view and unsurprisingly in the actual elections Juan won by an enormous margin.

President Santos is a sinister shadow over Latin America. Nevertheless, he will find that Colombians are emerging from a long period of dissociation from political protest. Students, environmentalists, indigenous people, the victims of the civil war and state violence are all beginning to hit the streets again and the forced retirement of the nimble and utterly ruthless Uribe will be a loss for the Bogota establishment. The Colombian elite will have to sweat again.

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Uribe Spies With His Many Little Eyes

Colombian intelligence honchos, once all the rage for supposedly saving their country from Left-wing guerrillas, are gasping for breath in the harsh glare of the media expose of their vast wiretapping operations against judges, politicians, journalists and human rights activists, anyone deemed a threat to President Alvaro Uribe. In Colombia, officials are not punished for wrongdoing; they merely resign only to emerge later as diplomats or be rewarded with other such sinecure.

The dreaded Colombian security apparatus, DAS in its Spanish acronym, then passed on the information to sundry criminals, paramilitary bosses and even guerrillas for good money. A similar abuse came to light some time ago in Peru where too wiretapping information ended up in the open market and in both cases blame has been conveniently shifted on to the customary “bad apples” and rogue elements “out of control”.

Evidence points to the contrary. The Colombian spooks were not out of control; they were operating in a febrile atmosphere where the President kept saying that the judges were fabricating evidence against him, that human rights groups were guerrillas disguised as civilians and Opposition politicians were in the payroll of the insurgents. “How can we not control (Senator Gustavo) Petro, who is a former guerrilla and a member of the opposition? Or Piedad Córdoba (Liberal Party Senator), because of her links to Chávez and the guerrilla?” a DAS functionary told a Colombian newspaper.

A Supreme Court judge, Iván Velásquez, investigating links between politicians and paramilitary bosses, had more than 1,900 of his phone calls intercepted. Tabs were kept on journalists to “inform the government of what is being done in the media, in order to give the government some time to react when critical situations arise”.

The Colombian journalist, Claudia López, argues that DAS passed into paramilitary hands when Uribe appointed Jorge Noguera as the intelligence chief (the latter is now in prison). The agency was primarily staffed with men loyal to paramilitary sectors who supported Uribe in his 2002 elections, that of ‘Jorge 40’ and other mafia groups along the Atlantic coast. At a level below were those linked to the paramilitary bosses, the Castaño brothers and Salvatore Mancuso.

Illegal operations are a regular DAS practice. Another of its director, María del Pilar Hurtado, had to resign last year when Senator Petro accused the agency of trailing him. In 2005, a DAS official, Rafael García, admitted to working for the AUC paramilitary group and snitched on Noguera, the then director. Throughout, Uribe maintained he was unaware of the goings-on. This time, he says he could not have ordered the wire taps, as he is a “loyal man who is fair with his opponents and does not cheat on them”. In 2000, during the presidency of Andrés Pastrana, top intelligence officials had to resign on similar charges. Though the Supreme Court is furious, successful prosecution will be difficult as the Colombian media are reporting that much of the evidence was destroyed between January 16 and 19 at the DAS head office.

Colombians are drawing parallels with the now imprisoned Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres (his parents were ardent Communists) during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori who, like Uribe, accumulated vast powers after a dirty war against Leftist rebels and left his crony to do the dirty work. Montesinos had contributed to Fujimori’s election victory, kept the President’s enemies at bay using the secret service and bought off the media. The USA was aware that Montesinos was not squeaky clean just as one of it’s former ambassador recently said he was not satisfied with Uribe’s evasive answers when he confronted him about the latter’s part in the drug trade. A former Colombian President, César Gaviria, who says he knows first hand what happens when the intelligence service falls into the hands of criminals and becomes a political police, has been asking who is Uribe’s Montesinos.

An interesting sub-text to the crisis is the role of Uribe’s Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who has never made secret of his presidential ambitions. The scandal emerged in the newspapers in which the Santos clan is a major shareholder. Uribe’s re-election bid is causing controversy and his popularity is declining. Santos sees in this an opportunity to promote his candidacy. When Santos suggested a “Christian burial” for DAS, the presidential spokesman publicly rejected the advice.

This is more than a tussle between two ambitious Colombian politicians: the unity of the Colombian elite is disintegrating along with the President’s stature and the criminal penetration of the national institution is becoming impossible to hide, even by the “patriotic Press”. Events could take unexpected turns if bitter ex-spies begin to speak out unless, of course, bodies begin to turn up before that.

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Uribe Can't Halt Colombia's Peaceniks

"The snake lives," Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is reported to have said after meeting Alan Jara, a former state governor recently released by the FARC guerrillas. The Colombian media took their President's statement to mean the Leftist guerrillas but it could perhaps also have been Uribe's way of referring to himself.

For there is no doubt that the sly and ruthless overlord of Bogota is not at all happy that he cannot entirely control or manipulate events. Uribe pulled out all stops to ensure that the kidnap victims were not released. His military violated its promise of keeping away from the release sites and put the lives of the FARC prisoners at risk. He tried to bar Piedad Cordoba, Colombian Senator and peace-maker, and the Colombians for Peace group from being part of the process but had to relent once the Red Cross intervened on her behalf. He then tried to prevent journalists from covering the event and, when it failed, accused some of them of being in the pay of the guerrillas.

Jara and Sigifredo López, former lawmaker and the last to be freed, were evidence of why Uribe had such misgivings. They criticised him for doing nothing for them, Jara saying Uribe and FARC needed each other. He praised Senator Cordoba, whom Uribe seriously detests, and López compared her to the heroine in José Saramago's novel, Blindness, who retains her moral sense when others have lost theirs.

Their voices were heard through the self-censorship of the Colombian media. Both former prisoners put in articulate media performance and both are mainstream politicians, not fringe radicals. Jara was in the same party as Uribe. Even worse, Jara and López have promised to work for a humanitarian accord, the preferred slogan of the Colombian democratic opinion. Suddenly the peaceniks are bringing in the dividends, the civil war has become less appealing even to those Colombians sold on it and Uribe looks like an irascible bystander.

All this comes at a bad moment for Uribe as he bullies Congress to amend the Constitution that will make him eligible to run for a third term in office. It is now known that votes in the Congress allowing him to run for a second term were bought and many of his closest allies and others who voted for him are in prison for paramilitary links.

The tide began turning against the caudillo almost exactly a year ago after the trade unions and social organisations staged surprisingly large marches against paramilitary violence. Public sector workers went on a wave of strikes though 43 trade unionists paid with their lives in 2008. Indigenous Colombians, who are losing their land to large corporations and their lives to army and paramilitary violence, embarked on a ‘Minga', a peaceful uprising culminating in a march by thousands covering several hundred kilometres to Bogota.

Simultaneously, cane cutters working in near-slavery conditions went on strike, winning important concessions and lots of new members. Then the students began agitating against the government. After a series of hard knocks and the death of its fonder-leader, Manuel Marulanda, FARC seems to have stablised its forces.

With Obama rather than McCain replacing George Bush, Uribe has lost some of the supreme impunity. The economic downturn is hitting Colombia hard. Unemployment has crossed 10% and Bogota's dream of becoming the Saudi Arabia of ethanol production looks a non-starter. The military has been enmeshed in a series of unravelling scandals over "false positives", that is enticing poor young men with job offers, killing them in cold blood and then passing them off as dead guerrillas to claim financial rewards offered by the government.

The paramilitaries, supposedly "demobilised" after an agreement with the government, noticeably began reorganising in 2008. It is estimated by some that no more than a fifth of the 20,000-odd paramilitaries had actually demobilised and many of them returned to their old profession in the name of newer groups, now managing illicit businesses and extortion and kidnapping rackets.

Plan Colombia, the war on drugs with Washington's blessing, expertise and financing, has not had much to show for the billions spent over the years. Drug production and trade are high and the USA might not be as willing to splash out its dollars on this programme. Colombia's self-assigned role as the "Israel of Latin America", threatening its neighbours and attacking their territories, has had a short shelf life. Bogota has been contained by Ecuador taking a hard line and Hugo Chavez engaging rather than provoking Colombia. In these hard times, Bogota needs Venezuelan trade.

None of this means that the Colombian ruling elite has lost its famed and historic blood lust. Nor does it mean that Uribe will not bare his fangs or draw blood or that the USA will abandon him. However, fear is starting to dissolve; Uribe's armour no longer seems impenetrable and the Colombian people are shedding their passive acceptance of the doctrine of permanent war. For the first time in years, the voice of the democratic Left is out in the open; Uribe can no longer make himself look indispensable and Colombia has a choice.

Related Article: The Threat of Peace in Colombia

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Colombia, The Heart of Darkness: 7 Killed or Disappear Every Day of Uribe's Rule

This year was supposed to mark a decisive triumph for the Alvaro Uribe regime of Colombia , a country where about a fifth of the people have been internally or externally displaced, where hundreds of trade unionists and social activists are killed every year, where the native people are in a state of unprecedented mobilisation and where millions have been destituted by financial pyramid schemes.

Instead:
• At least seven people have been killed or disappeared every day of Uribe's rule since 2002, totalling 14,000 victims in his time, a large group of NGOs have told the United Nations.
• Counting together supposedly demobilised paramilitaries who have taken up arms once again, those who never surrendered and newly-emergent groups, there are 10,200 armed people distributed in 102 groups who use 21 different names and have a presence in 246 municipalities in Colombia.
• The dreaded paramilitary group Águilas Negras (Black Eagles) is threatening students at public universities who oppose the government.
• Fifty-nine members of Congress and 29 Senators have been on trial or found guilty of links with paramilitaries
• None of the main parties,Convergencia Ciudadana, Colombia Viva, Alas-Equipo Colombia, Colombia Democrática and Apertura Liberal, most or all of the members of which are linked to the paramilitaries have been dissolved
• In the last local elections, 29,000 members of these parties were put up as candidates and, though some of them were punished by the electorate, they maintained and extended their influence.
• At the start of the Alvaro Uribe regime, the Colombian Leftist guerrilla group, FARC, had 18.200 men and women distributed in 81 fronts. Now they have about 10,800 distributed in 64 fronts.
• Though FARC has taken hard knocks, it has reorganised into smaller, more mobile groups, uses land mines, mortars and snipers, has killed many soldiers and policemen in recent months and has struck up alliances with local armed groups. In Bajo Cauca, for example, it has recouped its strength from barely 100 to 600 recently.
• The other smaller guerrilla group ELN has broken off peace talks with the government, managed to keep its military command intact and has grown in strength in parts of the country, noticeably along the Venezuela border.
• The collapse of the pyramid scheme has hit the south of the country the hardest, where FARC is also strong, and popular support for Uribe is in marked decline there.
• The Colombian ambassador to South Africa, Carlos Moreno de Caro, was a signed-up member of the AUC, the leading paramilitary group, and received money from them for his 2006 electoral campaign, according to the testimony of a former paramilitary member. A former envoy to the Dominican Republic was outed some time ago.
• Documents made public recently clarify that the system of paying soldiers for killing guerrillas, far from being a temporary aberration, was a policy decision of the Uribe government which used international aid money for this purpose.
• Alvaro Uribe’s son Jerónimo admitted to a Colombian magazine over the phone that he had links with the collapsed pyramid scheme DMG but later moved to deny it.

Sources: Cambio, Semana, El Público, Cambio, La Jornada
Related Article: Colombia: The Cost of War

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Lucía Morett Returns To An Uncertain Future In Mexico

Lucía Morett, one of the only three to survive Colombia’s air and ground attack on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuadorian territory, returned to Mexico on December 3 amid fears the authorities will prosecute her at the behest of Right-wing Mexican groups. Morett was injured in the March 1 attack that killed Raúl Reyes, FARC’s deputy leader, and at least 21 others, among them five Mexican student researchers.

Lucía remains defiant, saying she will “quintuple” her efforts, one for each of her fallen compatriots, to ensure that the victims of the Colombian raid get justice and that the Colombian President and his officials are tried for the war crime. She says Álvaro Uribe has put a reward on her head, as she is a key witness not just to the air attacks but also to the cold-blooded executions of survivors by the Colombian military.

Having arrived at the camp the night before the attack and hoping to interview Reyes, she was awoken by the sound of the bombings that killed a young woman sleeping next to her under an awning in the jungle. Injured and too petrified to crawl away, she had to endure the second wave of bombings a little later, the sight of the trees burning, injured prisoners being shot dead in the back, the arrival of Colombian soldiers guns blazing and, after they had left, the heap of corpses rotting around her, ants crawling over her attracted by the blood and vultures circling over them the next morning.

The Colombian raiders who found her alive threatened to take her back with them. They interrogated her even as she lay injured and offered her the least possible medical assistance. Her interrogation was videoed, a tape that would later be given to the Mexican Right-wing groups to prove her “guilt” and that, as the Colombian Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, would later say, she was “no little angel”.

When Ecuadorian troops arrived after the Colombians had left with Reyes’ trophy cadaver, they tended to her and a young soldier stayed by her side talking of family, sports and anything else that would distract her from the terrible pain. The journey back from the forest to an Ecuadorian military hospital was long and painful and, as it turned out, not the end of her nightmare.

Even as she was being treated for the shrapnel wounds at an Ecuadorian military hospital, she found herself in a room with blinds drawn and two hostile interviewers. They were asking her the same questions as the Colombian troops – whether she was linked to FARC and if she was a guerrilla – and threatening to send her back to Colombia. They taped the interview and at point stripped her down to her underwear.

These two Ecuadorians are now the subject of judicial proceedings for their “cruel and inhuman” interrogation. It also bears out what Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, has said all along: that the Ecuadorian military top brass knew of the planned attack, kept it secret from him, and connived in it.

Ecuador was too close to Bogotá for Lucía’s comfort. The legendary Sandinista leader, Tomás Borges, now his country’s ambassador in Quito, arranged with President Daniel Ortega to take Lucía to safety in Nicaragua. She stayed in Managua for about eight months with Ortega’s son, Rafael, entrusted with her security. In all this time, Mexico did not condemn Colombia for killing its citizens and the country’s top prosecutor was not very keen on meeting her parents to assure them that their daughter would not be prosecuted if she returned home.

But why should the obvious victim of a murderous, illegal, cross-border raid have to fear prosecution, and for what crime? Even as reports filtered into Mexico of her survival, the Right-wing print and television media started putting out reports that she was part of a Mexican FARC cell rather than a researcher. In this, they were helped by briefings from the Colombian embassy in Mexico City and Colombian intelligence in Bogotá.

Neither did Mexico react to the fact that the Colombian embassy was engaged in spying on supposed FARC sympathisers in that country. Reyes’ purported laptop seized in the attack was used to incriminate a host of Left-wing Mexican politicians and academics, “proof” which was gleefully picked up President Caldron’s supporters to try and ensnare Lucía and to paint the philosophy department at UNAM, Mexico’s autonomous university, as a hotbed of Left-wing extremism. Now the Colombian police have told court that there were no records of emails in the laptop after all, just addresses conveniently stored in documents waiting to be discovered.

Mexican prosecutors say there is no formal complaint against Lucía but, significantly, they have refused to rule out prosecutions against her in future. The Mexican justice system is a vengeful beast and Lucía runs an equal risk that Colombia might kidnap her to Bogotá or eliminate her through its network of agents there and with the Mexican authorities looking the other way.

Lucía has vowed to fight on but the threat of an “accident” is something she will have to live with from now on, the price of staying alive and for daring to cross Uribe.

Related article: Mexico student survivor is Colombia’s latest public enemy

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Nieto Gil, The Black President Colombia Won’t Acknowledge

Alvaro Uribe is not the 84th president of Colombia but the 85th as, for circumstances that the historians attribute to racism, a black president that this country had had in the middle of the nineteenth century, Juan José Nieto Gil, was literally erased from history.

Nieto Gil also was the first novelist that Colombia had, with three forgotten works. He is just vaguely remembered as a prominent Liberal general who participated in the civil wars of the nineteenth century… Nieto Gil was rediscovered two decades ago during investigations by Orlando Fals Borda, a renowned historian and father of modern Colombian sociology

Fals Borda had already reconstructed the life of Nieto Gil when he discovered in the dungeons of the colonial palace of the Inquisition in Cartagena, an oil painting of Nieto Gil rotting among the rubble, useless papers and discarded furniture exposed to humidity.

The picture had been painted before Nieto Gil was president of Colombia between 25 January and 18 July 1861, during a vacuum of power between the only Conservative governor Mariano Ospina Rodríguez and the second of the four of Liberal general Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera.

The presidential band was painted on to the oil canvas when Nieto Gil assumed charge and after his death the portrait was sent to Paris “so that it could be touched up in the manner of a French head of state and the one that returned was put up at the history museum of Cartagena till being withdrawn in 1974 after a restoration which was not approved by the city’s academics,” Fals Borda said in the biography of the forgotten president.

In Paris, in reality, said the historian before his death, “what was done was to whiten Nieto”. With the restoration of 1974 the original black man reappeared… the image did not please academia or the Cartagena elite, traditionally white and of Spanish stock and nostalgic Spaniards and was sent to the dungeons.

Moisés Alvarez, current director of the history archives of Cartagena, says “Cartagena was very elitist and Nieto was not from here”. Nieto Gil’s name is never mentioned in the official history texts of Colombia. That he had governed for only six months does not appear to be sufficient to exclude him. In the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, presidents like Víctor Mosquera Cháux or Carlos Lemos Simonds figure in the official gallery despite the fact that none of them governed for more than a month and a half.

Nieto Gil was born on 24 June 1805 “at the foot of a tree”… was an autodidact, a Mason. In 1839, he was elected deputy to the provincial chamber of Cartagena, participated in the civil war, was taken prisoner and exiled for five years in Kingston, Jamaica. He was author of Calamar’s Daughter and The Moors, the texts of which seem to have been lost.

[Abridged]

Source: El Nuevo Herald

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'Uribe Ordered El Aro Massacre'

• A former paramilitary boss says the current Colombian President ordered a 1997 massacre
• Another says the army supplied the logistics

Francisco Enrique Villalba, a former paramilitary boss in Antioquia claimed before the Comisión de Acusaciones de la Cámara [a Colombian legislative commission] that it was the President of the Republic who had ordered the massacre of ‘El Aro’ in 1997. [More information on it at Wikipedia]

“The order was given for eight kidnap victims… he explained the kidnapping of Mario, Uribe’s cousin… the President personally gave me the order at that time in the year ’97 to commit that massacre,” claimed the now detained boss of the AUC [United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a Right-wing death squad now supposedly demobilised].

But Villalba Hernández said that the President decorated him, without providing details of how the award had been given.

The prisoner presented himself this Wednesday (12 November) before the Comisión to testify in the prosecution by this legislative body of the known massacre.

Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández is the only one detained for that violent episode, where he himself confessed to having been the head of a group of 22 armed robbers who perpetrated the massacre of El Aro and later that of La Balsita.

He first appeared on 15 February and maintained that he handed himself over to the CTI [an investigative agency] in February 1998 to inform of those planning the killings of Eduardo Umaña, Jesús María Valle [human rights defenders] and Jaime Garzón [journalist and political satirist].

He claimed that Santiago Uribe [the President’s brother] was known to the organisation because he supported an AUC bloc in Santa Rosa de Osos at a time when his brother [the current President] was governor of Antioquia. In his declaration he provided details about the supposed plan to assassinate Jesús María Valle.

He returned on 15 May to broaden his declaration and gave details about the massacre of El Aro, speaking of the supposed meetings between Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso [AUC bosses] and the Uribe brothers.

The last time he made it [a declaration] was on 12 June and maintained that there were recordings and photographs of the meetings among the AUC, government functionaries, soldiers and policemen.

Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández is condemned to 33 years and four months in prison for the El Aro massacres and 37 for the massacre of La Balsita.

Update: Mancuso said from a U.S. prison that Castaño had told him that “the logistics” for the El Aro massacre was supplied by the then commander of the Fourth Army Brigade, General Ospina… now in retirement. He said his organisation “worked in tandem” with the police and the army… if 10,000 bullets were reported used against the guerrillas, it was because only a thousand were used and 9,000 given to the paramilitaries.

Mancuso said he met the former secretary of the Antioquia government, Pedro Juan Moreno, several times between 1995 and 1997 when [President] Uribe was governor. Moreno died in an air accident in February 2006.


[Abridged]
Source: El Espectador
The Agencia Prensa Rural of Colombia has also reported this.

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Uribe's Colombia And The Real One

The protests and rejection of the policies imposed by the current government brings into question that 84% of Colombians who, according to surveys by the media, back President Uribe

Of course the wealthy and the transnational corporations have more than enough reasons to support him and want to perpetuate his rule

Uribe led the burial of the working rights achieved by workers in more than 80 years of trade union struggle, reduction of income and destruction of the most spirited unions. He privatised strategic sectors of the economy, finished off the unions, imposed fixed contracts and labour mediation.

He freed the capitalists and the state from the responsibility of social security, converting health into a commodity within the reach of only the wealthy and moved social benefits to funds created with contribution deducted from workers’ salaries.

He handed over the most profitable state institutions to private investors, sold at low prices, favouring international corporations and large economic groups of the country.

He offered all kinds of legal guarantees and financial relief to foreign investors and subsidies to powerful export cartels.

He militarised life in the country and penalised popular protests. Four hundred trade unionists have been assassinated in the six years of Uribe’s government. With a labour force of 17 million, 3,000 weakened unions survive which bring together 831,000 workers terrorised by the threat of the bosses and state terrorism.

He deepened the narco-paramilitary agrarian counter-reform, favouring the displacement of indigenous farmers and Afro-descendants through terror generated by massacres, selective assassinations and death threats.

The Colombia of the oligarchs benefiting from the very generous contribution and security offered by Uribe, which enriched them and concentrated ownership among a few, is the reason they are satisfied and want to perpetuate his rule. This is the elite which manipulates the surveys that show 84% support for the President.

The other Colombia, oppressed, exploited and excluded, which is the majority, awakes from the terror of the dirty war. Reflected in its protests and actions is the true dimension of the humanitarian crisis, the social injustice and the poverty in which more than 30 million of the countrymen live.

Though intimidated by state terrorism, this Colombia is taking to protest marches in the streets and highways. Now heading for strike demanding rights snatched away by the bosses, it takes to highways to reclaim its ancestral rights and demanding respect and recognition of its millennial culture.

It stands up, protests and marches without taking notice of the threats by the government, especially of Defence Minister Santos.

What is being revived are important steps in solidarity with the marches of more than 500,000 workers and shanty town residents, in support of the struggles of the sugarcane workers, of state workers in conflict and the socially excluded indigenous people.

This social mobilisation brings closer the moment in which the voice of this Colombia has to be heard and taken into account in defining the direction of the country. The small dominant elite, which makes outrageous postures in its own favour in the name of all people, is on the slope of decline.

[Abridged from a communiqué by ELN (the National Liberation Army), a smaller Colombian guerrilla group.]

Source: Argenpress

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Colombia's Young Men End Up As War Trophies

It is eleven in the morning but seems like night. Huge leaden, funereal gray clouds have settled on Soacha, giving a tone to the urban landscape in keeping with the sentiment of its inhabitants: sadness and fear.

Soacha, indigenous name in the Chibcha culture for son of the Sun, has almost 400,000 inhabitants and a long history of tragedies. Biblical floods, landslips that bury entire neighbourhoods, corrupt mayors who rob scarce resources and violence, lots of violence.

But these days its dead youth are crying: lads who started disappearing from the start of this year and whose bodies have been surfacing after being interred in common graves in remote places. Their story promises to be one of the most macabre events in the violence that has clobbered Colombia for decades.

In the first week of September, the morgue in the city of Ocaña, 610 km north-east of Bogota, could not stock the corpses of unidentified young men mounting up in its vaults. This drew the attention of some local journalists and rang the alarm in the government department dedicated to establishing the whereabouts of the disappeared.

After confirming the identity of Elkin Verano, Joaquín Castro and Julián Oviedo, all less than 20 years, their families reported they had left their homes months ago attracted by the promise of good work “on the coast”, adding that the corpses of their loved ones bore the impact of high-calibre bullets, repeating before the media what they had heard while recovering the bodies, that the bullets had been fired by soldiers.

The bodies kept appearing all through September and with them the complaints of the families wanting to know the whereabouts of their disappeared sons. In Soacha alone, 12 young men turned up dead but the number of complaints rose rapidly to 50.

On September 24, the police claimed that a group of recruiters belonging to paramilitary forces had toured the pauperised areas of the principal cities of the country, offering juicy contracts to the unemployed young wandering the streets and parks.

At the start of October, in the midst of the growing scandal of the appearance of a number of bodies, which the army made out to be combat deaths, the Defence Minister announced an investigation by the Attorney-General. A few days later, on October 7, President Alvaro Uribe, after describing the young men as criminals “who weren’t picking coffee at a ranch”, tried to put an end to the controversy, saying they were combat deaths.

What Uribe had not counted on was that on the same day itself, the Attorney- General would refute him, saying his office did not have evidence of how the young men had died.

Such interest by the army and President Uribe to close the case rang alarms among the many human rights NGOs and youth organisations who smelt a sinister scandal behind the official version.

According to press versions, the death of the young men would be associated with the grim business in which the recruiters would take the young men to war zones, provide them with small arms and later give the army the geographical coordinates of their location so that the troops could attack the place and exhibit them as “war trophies”.

The macabre operation, according the NGOs, worked thanks to the military’s policy of rewarding the soldiers and officials who show results in their operations.

While the Attorney-General investigates, darkness rules in Soacha. Few think there’s going to be justice. “I told my mother I would keep looking for the truth but she answered that I have already lost a son and don’t want to see the death of the others who remain,” said the brother of one of the victims who did not want his name to be made public.

[Abridged and slightly altered in translation]
Source: La Jornada, Mexico

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'Colombia Lives In A Spiral Of Silence'

[Hernando Calvo Ospina, Colombian journalist living in France, contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and author of the definitive book, ‘Colombia, Laboratory of Evil Spells’, interviewed before Betancourt’s release.]

You describe Colombia as a contradictory country. You say in your book it is not a de facto dictatorship and neither is it a formal democracy. What is the reality?

It is marvellous. I don’t say this because I am Colombian but because of it great natural riches, huge natural energy resources. But it is a led by a highly terrorist state. And when I say terrorist, I refer to its design as a structure destined to keep a large part of the population in hunger and terrorised.

How was such a network of power constructed?

First, on the part of the army and, when its international prestige was damaged, it went on to set up highly perfected paramilitary groups. Colombia is a state which serves a sector of the population that has almost everything and it serves the interests of the USA.

But it can’t be spoken of as a dictatorship as the government was elected.

No, it is not a dictatorship but if the numbers of deaths caused by political powers-to-be since 1980 are observed, it will be seen that there have been more assassinations and disappearances than all the dictatorships of Latin America since 1970.

The studies that the Uribe government circulate point to Colombia growing economically at a rate superior to its neighbours. The key, they say, is the achievements of the President’s democratic security plan.

One question is the GDP and the per capita income and another is the distribution of wealth among the population as a whole. A high percentage of Colombians live on less than a dollar and a very small percentage stockpile enormous wealth. We import coffee, potatoes and rice because it is more economic to bring these from outside.

And what has happened with those who cultivate them, with the Colombian farmers?

They cultivate coca leaves.

What is at the centre of conflict in Colombia?

Land. What is tragic is that this problem has, for many Colombians, come to be a question of confrontation between the state and the guerrillas because the government has finished with all types of civil resistance. This year, almost 20 trade union leaders have died. Farmers’ organisations have been liquidated. The Colombian oligarchy has enriched itself through the army with violent robbing of the most fertile lands. Others have enriched themselves through drug trafficking but that is kept very quiet. The guerrilla war was initiated by the Liberals of the Right after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán.

And FARC?

The majority of the 50 guerrillas who created it were farmers of the Liberal Party.

Is there a military end to this conflict?

While the oligarchy and their political wing do not understand that they should sit down to negotiate the end of violence and debate reforms to alleviate very high poverty, the situation in Colombia will remain a quagmire.

FARC also lives off coca.

It is curious that before September 11, FARC was never branded as narco-guerrillas. It is clear they have committed crimes against humanity, against the Geneva Convention. In many areas under their control, the farmers cultivate coca to live, but it is also clear that they process coca leaf. The drug traffickers come from outside, buy the leaves and pay a tax to the guerrillas. If this is narco-terrorism, will then they are.

Is there no solution for Colombia?

Alvaro Uribe’s greatest fear is of no longer being useful to the USA. For example, if they saw that his plans to destabilise Ecuador were useless or if his discourse became a little nationalist. At once they will stop the help, take out the drug trafficking dossier that has his name and send him to prison

Is this not living in a state of permanent stress?

Uribe is the great social polariser in Colombia. His motto is: you are with me or against me. Even worse: if you are not with me, you are with FARC. And clearly, to whom this is said in Colombia is like putting a revolver to his head. It is Uribe who divides the country. There is a non-military opposition in Colombia but it is decapitated. We live in a spiral of silence.

Source: El Público

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Blackwater Eyes Colombia, Mexico

Jeremy Scahill, U.S author of Blackwater The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, says the company is eyeing Colombia and Mexico as future markets to increase its profit margins. The Pentagon has asked the company headed by Erik Prince, a former soldier from a very rich and conservative family (and major Bush donor) to develop an anti-drug plan for these two countries with an estimated budget of $15 billion.

Washington wants to guarantee its presence in the region through such private businesses “without leaving a military mark”, says Scahill, who says the billions of U.S. dollars invested in the past 15 years in the fight against drugs in the region has really been for counter-insurgency

Colombia is an ideal case, says Scahill, as it already receives millions annually in the drugs war, of which Bogota assigns a good part to pay business like Blackwater such as DynCorp. He predicts, “In future, small paramilitary teams working for these companies will do the training and preparing of Latin American militaries.”

We will see an increasing presence of these businesses in the region, predicts Scahill, and that the logic of business and free market is what led Blackwater and other companies that hire mercenaries focus on the cheap workforce offered by countries like Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru and Bolivia.

Contrasting with the $10,000 a month that a U.S. mercenary or one of any other developed country can cost for their services in Iraq, the Latin Americans accept the same risk, offer the same skills for a tenth of the salary. The majority of these personnel were raised in the Eighties and Nineties during the dirty wars instigated by Washington and they have experience in counter-insurgency, sharpshooting, as commandos as well as military espionage and interrogation tactics.

Scahill says in his book that one of the largest contingents of non-U.S. soldiers imported by Blackwater for Iraq was composed of former Chilean commandos, some of whom had been trained or had served during the brutal Pinochet dictatorship.

About a thousand Chileans were sent to Iraq with the help of José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, whom the author describes as a staunch supporter of Pinochet and who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military before becoming a link for more than ten Latin American government and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Scahill says the Iraqis and the Latin Americans do the most dangerous work in Iraq, protecting buildings or private contractors and businessmen. The Peruvians are the most sought after and are considered cheap and tough fighters.

Source: El Espectador

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Mexican Student Survivor Is Colombia’s Latest Public Enemy

For Lucia Morett, who survived of Colombia’s March 1 attack on a guerrilla encampment in Ecuador, the journey back home is fraught with dangers and will have to be staged through a period of exile in Nicaragua, closer to her native Mexico but further from Colombia and, perhaps, a little safer. President Daniel Ortega has offered her exile, protection and citizenship in Nicaragua while she weighs up if and when she can return to Mexico.

Lucia had every reason to fear for her life in Quito. As Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa found out, the Colombians and the gringos have so thoroughly infiltrated his country’s police and military intelligence services that these no longer answer to his government in any real sense. It would not have been past Colombia to kidnap Lucia through its proxies in Ecuador and throw her in prison for decades or simply eliminate her.

Fears for her safety have grown since the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe’s intemperate language against Lucia and four of her compatriots who died in the camp. In his recent visit to Cancun as part of the World Economic Forum’s Latin America summit, Uribe provoked a storm by denouncing the dead Mexican students as terrorists, guerrilla accomplices, criminals and drug dealers and refusing compensation for their deaths. Uribe’s outburst managed to alienate even those Mexicans who were not too happy about Lucia and her dead compatriots’ presence in the FARC camp, even if they were there as social researchers.

For a country four of whose nationals were killed in violation of international law, the official Mexican response has been tepid at best. Complicity with Colombia is perhaps a better description of President Felipe Calderon’s approach, helped by the support of the mainstream media. He grudgingly expresses sorrow for the deaths but refuses to blame his “good friend” Uribe while his equally supine foreign secretary thanks the Colombian leader for “understanding” Calderon’s compulsions of having to make sympathetic noises.

Neither has the Mexican establishment ruled out charging Lucia with terrorism if she returns to Mexico and the ambiguity is perhaps their way of keeping her in exile. Not that she will be free from danger in Mexico. Colombian intelligence and its drug-dealing, paramilitary assets have a presence in the country and Bogota has admitted to spying on presumed Colombian guerrilla sympathisers in the past without informing the hosts, for which again Calderon’s government never rebuked the Uribe regime. Protests in Mexico against Uribe’s propaganda exercise have come from the UNAM national university, students and legislators of the Opposition PRD who demanded that the Colombian President be declared persona non grata.

Colombia is desperate to get its hand on Lucia, both to silence her as a potential witness and to set an example of what happens to anyone who crosses the Uribe regime, whatever their nationality. By evading Uribe’s head-hunters, the young Mexican students keeps alive the memory of what really happened during the attack and the prospect of being a potential witness if things turn sour for Colombia’s hard man.

Lucia is immensely lucky to have survived the raid when, by her own account, wounded guerrillas and others who surrendered were executed in cold blood. Perhaps even the hardened Colombian soldiers could not bring themselves to kill a wounded young woman though they made lewd comments and threatened to take her back as their sex slave. Or perhaps someone thought keeping her alive would help spread the word about Colombia’s terrifying killing machine. Could that someone have been Uribe himself, as he is known to have been at the situation room all through the raid and in direct contact with the leaders of the raiding party?

Either way, her account will be pivotal in documenting the details of Colombia’s pre-emptive raid. The parents of other Mexican students killed in the attack have spoken of their determination to fight for justice, even if their country’s President does not want to have anything to do with them. Lucia has shown remarkable poise through her ordeal and promised to keep fighting for the truth about the killings. In trying to hunt down this petite Mexican student, the Uribe regime has lived up to its reputation as the Israel of Latin America: as vengeful, as insatiably bloodthirsty and as contemptuous of human life.

Colombia has unwittingly passed on the torch of courage under fire and struggle against state violence to a new female icon in a macho continent. Alongside the ageing Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza in Argentina, the doughty middle-aged Colombian Senator and peace-maker, Piedad Cordoba, and the human rights crusader, Lydia Cacho, who exposed a child abuse ring in her Mexico involving the politically powerful, Lucia Morrett takes her place as an emblem of resistance to a rampant, murderous criminal state.

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Israel in Colombia: Death Do We Impart

By José Steinsleger

Military links between Israel and Colombia date back to the first five years of 1980, when a contingent of the Colombia battalion “… one of the worst violators of human rights in the western hemisphere, received training in the Sinai desert from some of the worst violators of human rights in Middle East,” according to the U.S. investigator Jeremy Bigwood (who) observed that the training of young Colombian paramilitaries could not have been done without the express permission of the highest authorities of the Israeli defence forces.

In those years, landowners and ranchers of the Caribbean region of Uraba and Magdalena Medio (among them Uribe) were not satisfied with the “inefficiency” of the army in its fight against the guerrillas of FARC and ELN for which, in 1983, a group of “young idealists” went to Israel, not exactly to study “agrarian socialism” of the chosen people.

Of land-owning family, Carlos Castaño was then 18. Six months later, filled with “patriotic fervour”, he returned to Colombia and tried to apply blindly what he had learnt in Course 562 imparted by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). He went back to the Bombona battalion but, disillusioned, concluded that the army was not killing “seriously”.

Together with his elder brother Fidel, Carlos organised the death squad Los Tangueros, a name taken from his ranch, Las Tangas. In My Confession he declared: “In fact, I copied the concept of armed ‘self-defence’ from the Israelis”. In his interviews (to Spanish journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina), Castaño emphasised the relations he cultivated in Course 562 with an Army Colonel, Aflonso Martínez Poveda, and “other men of the Colombia Battalion”.

The serial killer comments abundantly about the “firmness of Zionism… that has always been … defeating terrorism… from there I was convinced that it is possible to defeat the guerrillas in Colombia”. Castaño died in 2004 and recent history remembers him like how he was: one of most bloodthirsty Colombian paramilitaries.

Not only was Castaño trained in Israel, but also Salvatore Mancuso, the other “historic leader” of the (paramilitary) AUC currently in prison. From about the Nineties, Mancuso organised the paramilitaries of Convivir, financed by Alvaro Uribe, then governor of Antioquia (and now the President). In an interview with Margarita Martínez of Associated Press (13/02/02), the paramilitary boss bragged of “… not executing more than three persons at the same time”.
The ‘security’ company Spearhead, headed by the retired Israeli Colonel Yair Klein, started to train paramilitaries in Puerto Boyacá after the ceasefire of May 1984 signed by President Betancur (1982-86) and the secretary of FARC.

At that time of global rightist gains, the ranchers of Magdalena Medio belonging to ACDEGAM (pressure group) were not interested in peace. It bought arms manufactured by Industrias Militares (Indumil) and Army officials such as Lt.-Col. Luis Bohórques (Brigade 14, Bárbula Battalion) handed them over to the paramilitaries. Everything legal, everything in order.

Klein's paramilitary model turned out to be a ‘success’. Beyond the brilliant massacres of poor urban and rural people, four presidential candidates were assassinated. Enthused with the results, Klein filmed the training. The broadcast of the film by ABC News led to a global scandal. More than the Israeli professionals, the film showed known Australian mercenaries and British ones of the Special Air Service. The errant operative was getting in the way of the growing importance of the Colombian-Israeli economic relations like the purchase of 14 Kfir combat aircraft in April 1988. In February 1989 the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot recognised the “possible participation” of Israelis in drug trafficking.

A case that resonated in 2001 was the sale of 3,000 AK-47 rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition, a deal agreed in Guatemala by Oris Zoller, director of GIRSA, a subsidiary of the Israeli war industry. It was said the Nicaraguan police had bought the arms. The Colombian ex-President, César Gaviria, blamed the Nicaraguans in a report. Wes Carrington, State Department spokesman, was more imaginative, saying the automatic rifles were destined for “arms collectors in the United States”. Finally, the nimble Israeli trafficker Simon Yelinek, resident in Panama, made sure the lethal cargo reached the clients: the AUC of Colombia.

The official presence in Colombia of Israel Ziv, retired IDF general, represents a qualitative leap in the war plans of Uribe and his Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos. Engaged for the moderate sum of $10 million, Ziv could well have collaborated in the attack against FARC in Ecuadorian territory. His experience gives him away: in October 2002, as head of the Givati Brigade, Ziv invaded the refugee camp of Al Amal (Gaza). Infantry troops, tanks and armoured vehicles caused a massacre in which the old, the disabled, women, children and babies died.

General Ziv is on the payroll of Counterterrorism International and is member of the Task Force on Future Terrorism (FOTFF), created in June 2005 by the Office of Homeland Security of —Israel? No, of the USA.FOTFF operates under the orders of Secretary Michael Chertoff and Lee Hamilton, director of the ultra-conservative Woodrow Wilson Centre, nest of academics, psychologists, businessmen and ‘intelligence’ experts.

In Colombia, Ziv’s operations base is in Tolemaida. He meddles at the highest level. The Defence Vice Minister Sergio Jaramillo described as “precious” the Israeli help. “They are like psychoanalysts to us: they raise issues we had not thought about.”
What will they be?

Abridged from the sources:
La Jornada March 12 2008 http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/03/12/index.php?section=opinion&article=020a2pol
La Jornada March 19 2008
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/03/19/index.php?section=opinion&article=022a2pol

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Paramilitaries Threaten Bogota's Peripheries

The Colombian paramilitary group, Águilas Negras (Black Eagles), has established more than a foothold in the shanty towns on the edges of capital Bogota, threatening to kill those who participated in the March 6 rally against paramilitaries and state-sponsored violence.

Ciudad Bolivar is where approximately 800,000 poor Colombians, displaced by paramilitaries or the army in their war against Left-wing guerrillas of the Farc, have come to eke out a living in miserable conditions. The paramilitaries were supposed to have been disbanded after President Uribe, himself accused by a range of credible sources of being a former drug lord and paramilitary patron, signed a very generous deal with them forgiving their past crimes for light and comfortable prison terms and confessions.

It has been common knowledge that the paramilitary groups merely reorganised more covertly and carried on with their predatory activities in the rural areas. They drive peasants off the land that is then occupied by agro businesses. The peasants end up mostly in Ciudad Bolivar, often living in close proximity to those who hounded them. The paramilitaries are then absorbed by these businesses.

The paramilitaries control informal businesses in the slums, taking cuts from vendors and others in their areas of influence and killing or driving away those who stand in their way. Control over the hills surrounding Bogota also gives them control over the roads leading out of the city and opportunities for kidnapping wealthier victims.

The Black Eagles have sent out threatening flyers and email messages to human rights activists, NGOs and social organisations working with popular issues. A former councillor has received these threatening mail, as have Colombia’s main trade union. There is an unofficial curfew from 10 at night in these areas and people have to patrol the streets to keep the paramilitaries at bay.

The situation is developing along similar lines in other cities like Medellín, Barranquilla and Cartagena. There were 286 killings in 2005 and 162 in 2006 but the numbers are growing once again. The Colombian Army has been accused of collaborating with the paramilitaries in Medellin and a large section of the police force have links with the drug trade. The brother of the current police chief of Colombia is in prison in Europe on drug trade charges.

The Black Eagles have specifically targeted those who mobilised for the March 6 rally. Four people have already been killed for this ‘crime’ elsewhere in Colombia. Given that the mobilisation in Bogota was the largest in the country and way above what the state had anticipated, it is no surprise the threat has reached the city.

One of the President’s advisers calumnied the March 6 rally as a pro-Farc programme, and this in Colombia is tantamount to a death sentence. Uribe himself has termed human rights activists as guerrillas in civilian clothing. It would not be surprising if at some point in the future it were revealed that the Colombian establishment, right from the President’s office, had something to do with this emerging threat.

More information at El Espectador

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CIA & Colombian Paras: Best of Buddies

The Colombian journal Semana has published articles linking the CIA with the Colombian paramilitaries, drawing on information gathered by the non-profit National Security Archive from official U.S. documents, and how the drug lords now look to being repatriated to the USA to escape international justice.

'Don Berna' is a man of few words and thousands of secrets, one of the main protagonists in Colombia’s violent history of three decades. A loyal, discreet and efficient gunman of the Castaño family, he was witness to the creation of Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), a coalition of the underworld, the only purpose of which was to hunt down, dead or alive, the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

It was not just the gunmen of the underworld who were after Escobar’s footprints. The authorities simultaneously were looking for him. The President of the republic, César Gaviria Trujillo, kept Escobar in his sights. Not only did he have a constitutional responsibility but he had made the promise on the grave of Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, his leader assassinated by the mafia. Gaviria thought of the Bloque de Búsqueda (BB), an elite group of the armed forces, for this mission.

His initiative found immediate support from the government of the United States. The then ambassador in Bogota, Morris Busby, promised in public that sooner rather than later, the drug lord would fall. It was common to see the arrival at the airports of Bogota and Medellin men of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who joined the BB.

In parallel, in their ranches, the then members of the Castaño family sought help to face their rival. Fidel and Vicente were the leaders of that cause which was joined by their elder brother, Carlos, and the other powerful clan of that time, the brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, who led the Cali cartel. There was speculation for years about the links the CIA established with Los Pepes to take out Escobar.

Michael Evans of the non-profit National Security Archive told Semana that recently declassified documents in the USA made clear the American security support “to a terrorist paramilitary organisation of Colombia”. According to Evans, it is clear that the BB was supported by the USA to “locate the fugitive narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar; it shared intelligence with Fidel Castaño”. If this were not enough, the USA monitored with great care meetings between the Colombian President and his senior security officials. That is, at the same time that it was helping President Gaviria, it was spying on all his movements.

A diplomatic cable of 1993 reveals that U.S. agent “kept an eye on the intimate circle of the Colombian President”. The cable describes that “in a meeting… the director of the Colombian Police said he ‘had ordered a high official to maintain contacts with Fidel Castaño, leader of Los Pepes, to compile intelligence”. A few days later (according to the cable), President Gaviria ordered an end to the intelligence cooperation with Los Pepes and ordered the police intelligence chief to 'pass the word' that the Pepes must be dissolved immediately”.

After Escobar’s death, the underworld that fought him reorganised and strengthened their military muscle as with, for example, the Castaño brothers. In May 1994, the State Department’s intelligence wing called Fidel Castaño a “super drug-thug and one of the most ruthless criminals in all of Colombia” who “could become a new Escobar.

Little by little, all the protagonists disappeared in a tale of endless violence. Fidel was assassinated. Carlos was killed by order of his own brother, Vincent, of whom there is no trace. One of the few survivors is ‘Don Berna’, the silent paramilitary chief. He certainly knows how the degree to which the USA incentivised them in forming the most powerful killing machine of recent history.” Don Berna might be guarding hi silence or he might be saving it to negotiate in the USA, to which he is at the point of being extradited.

Oh for a Visa: Current and former Colombian paramilitary bosses are negotiating with U.S. Justice Department so that they can be extradited to that country, Semana reveals in another report. Rather than staying in Colombia where they run the risk of being killed by their enemies or emerging drug barons, they are willing to serve time in U.S. prisons, where they expect to get prison term reductions of up to 70% and later the right to remain there. After serving some four or five years in prison, they can then pursue their own American dream.

The paramilitaries fear that the International Criminal Court might seek to try them and handing themselves over to the U.S. system would spare them the fate as the USA does not recognise the court. It is said they will have to pay a considerable amount to the USA and reveal the drug and arms links as well as pay their victims. The paramilitary bosses are said to have been influenced by the stories of some of their former compatriots who now own stud farms in Florida. Semana asks who stands to gain more from the extradition, the paramilitaries or the country.

Originally published in Semana Article l and Article ll
Unraveling the Pepes Tangled Web at The National Security Archive

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Colombian Displaced People Create Their Own Humanitarian Zones

Forcibly displaced people have established “humanitarian zones” (HZ) in the north-western department of Chocó (a Colombian state), near the frontier with Panama with the intent of clinging on to their land and their way of life. . In the words of one of the leaders of the internally displaced persons (IDP), “it is better to die by bullet at home than of hunger and desperation in a municipal centre”.

These zones are occupied by groups that have united to remain in the surroundings from which they were expelled in the wake of an important campaign undertaken by the Colombian army and paramilitary forces in 1996 against guerrilla groups of the Left. Though the security situation improved between 1999 and 2000, many of those displaced by the conflict could not return to their land.

The HZ are delimited areas where members deny access to armed groups and insist on neutrality, refusing to provide information to armed groups or offering logistical help. Many have established warning systems in case of threats or abuses against their members. In November 2006, there were five HZ in Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, housing approximately 400 of the 2,125 people who lived in these settlements before the start of the counter-insurgency operations in 1996. In 2005, there were more than 50 HZ or similar initiatives in Colombia.

Soon after the inhabitants were displaced, private companies, cultivator of African palm in the production of biocombustibles, started establishing plantations in Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, two communities in the department of Chocó. The Colombian government has provided political and financial support to the development of plantations of African palm as part of the effort to eradicate illicit cultivation, promote regional development and, from what has come to be known, to offer economic incentive to the paramilitaries to hand over their arms in keeping with the government programme of the law of “Justice and Peace”.

A HZ was established in Chocó in April 2006 within a palm plantation, on land awarded to a settler in the Eighties by a rural development agency. The landowner, who in turn was displaced by the paramilitaries, in place of yielding before the threats of the African palm companies, helped other displaced families to establish the zone on his land. The establishment of the zone entailed felling palms, a huge risk for the inhabitants.

From September 2006, the seven occupying families had to cross barbed wire fences installed by the African palm company to arrive at the zone. The conditions of living were precarious, as they could not clear enough land to cultivate for their own needs and all they needed, foodstuff and otherwise, had to be brought from the closest town and the paramilitaries and the companies controlled the routes. Members of a recently-established HZ were living under plastic sheets, without electricity, with access only to surface water and with schools for the children. Members of the most developed HZ have erected wooden houses, organised educational services and have harvested part of the land they were forced to abandon.

The African palm companies, with the apparent support of the local paramilitary forces, have pressured the displaced so they sell up or otherwise hand over their land. The members of the HZ have been exposed to persistent threats and pressured to abandon their intent to recover their land. The nature of the pressure has changed with time, from open military and paramilitary violence, including assassinations, torture, forced sales and death threats to offers of food and medical service distributed by the military.

While the communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó have rejected these offers, members of a HZ in an area very close to the border with Panama have accepted them. The result was a rise in social tension, as much as among members of the community who accepted the offer as with neighbouring communities who rejected it.

The IDPs of Chocó have complained of more than 100 crimes committed by the paramilitary groups acting in collusion or with material support of the army from the start of the counter-insurgency in 1996. In 2007, two leaders of the displaced were shot and seriously injured in a paramilitary-style attack. In February 2007, the Procurator-General opened formal investigation against military personnel accused of having killed eight members of an IDP community in the area. Still the majority of attacks against the civil population has not been investigated.

Link: http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/7E236B356E816D93C125738A002EE88A/$file/Colombia_SCR_Nov07_Spanish.pdf
The original report was published by:
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Norwegian Refugee Council
Chemin de Balexert 7-9
CH-1219 Châtelaine (Geneva),
Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 799 0700, Fax: +41 22 799 0701

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Colombia: The Cost Of War

Jose Delgado and Diógenes Campos

If FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) did not exist, they would have to be invented. They are the principal excuse for the overwhelming military spending and to justify indefinite re-election.

It is envisaged that for 2008 81.2% of the posts linked to the federal budget will be occupied by public servants assigned the work of defence, security and policing. Of the total wages and salaries to be paid in 2008 for posts linked to the federal budget, 58.4% has been assigned to the Ministry of Defence.

The spending on defence is equal to that of health, education and environmental cleaning-up; 65% of the total national investment proposed by the government is destined for military equipment.

In 2002, for each peso of military spending more than 40 centavos had to be transferred to pay for pensions. Now it is 47 centavos.

Defence spending in 2007 in billions of pesos

17.87	Includes the decentralised sector and Defence Ministry businesses
+4.34	Estimated increase of the pension liability
22.21

GDP in 2007: 351.2 billion pesos.
Percentage spending on defence as part of GDP: 6.32%.

The military spending in the United States, including the annual spending in Iraq, represents 4.4% of the GDP. In European countries belonging to NATO, it is around 2%.

In 1934, during the conflict with Peru, military spending rose to 3% of the GDP, less than half of that of 2007. During the military dictatorship of 1954-57, military spending fell from 2.2% of the GDP to 1.5%. In the period 1926-98, the average was 1.8% of the GDP.

For each 1,000 inhabitants the level of militarisation today is double that during the military coup.

Increase in Military Presence

Year	Number of Soldiers	Soldiers/1,000 inhabitants
1948	10,000	0.9
1957	40,359	2.5
1974	50,675	2.2
1986	85,911	2.2
1994	120,650	3.4
2002	160,000	3.8
2006	196,492	4.9
2007	209,741	5.0

In the period 2002-2007, 160,000 soldiers fought 16,900 guerrillas of FARC,
3,700 of the ELN and 12,175 of the AUC for a total of 32,775 illegal combatants. This equates to 4.9 soldiers for each irregular combatant. For 2007 the AUC, supposedly in confrontation with the government, demobilised. The government estimated at 11,000 and 2,500 the strength of FARC and ELN respectively, which shows 15.5 soldiers for each guerrilla and the figure is set to rise.

Guerrilla Numbers Aug ’02 – July ‘07

Year	FARC+ELN
2002	20,600
2003	19,387
2004	17,003
2005	14,841
2006	13.799
2007	12,499

In this period the guerrillas showed a marked decline in numbers of combatants but at the same time a capacity to recover.

Guerrilla losses in the period Aug ’02 – July’07

Number captured	27,290
Number killed	9,841
Number demobilised	13,333
Total	50,464

Includes small irregular groups separate from FARC and ELN


The total reduction was 8,101. A simple calculation shows that for every 100 insurgents put out of action, the guerrillas in the period 2002-2007 managed 84 new recruits, which raises doubts about the efficiency of the fight.

The simple equation:
Guerrillas 2007 = Guerrillas 2002 – (killed + captured + demobilised + recruits)
shows that the guerrillas recruited 42,363 new combatants, more than double the initial strength.

The casualty figures presented by the armed forces have a high probability of including extra-judicial executions and false positives. The report of the International Observation Mission on Extra-Judicial Executions and Impunity in Colombia, presented on October 10, 2007, which had the support of the Office of the High Commission of the United Nations in Colombia, referred among others to the following facts:

According to the Ministry of Defence data, there were 8,104 combat deaths of “presumed” guerrillas between August 2002 and September 2006. The latest report said 2,072 members of illegal armed group were killed between July 2006 and June 2007.

At least 955 cases of extra-judicial killings were attributed to the public forces as also 235 cases of forced disappearances. Information provided by the military does not discriminate between dead guerrillas, those executed outside of combat, extra-judicial executions and false positives.

The politics of defeating the guerrillas prioritising military activity is costly and could lead to inappropriate results. The indicators do not improve if the period August ’02 –July ’07 is analysed… maintaining the very conservative hypothesis that only 30% of the military spending is directed to counter-insurgency, and that the figures of the “effectiveness” of combat published by the government correspond to guerrilla fatalities and not to extra-judicial executions.

Consider the year 2006:
The numbers of those captured + killed + demobilised = 9,565
30% of the budget of the armed forces = 1.9% of the GDP = $5.9 billion*
“Unit cost” of capture, killing, demobilisation of a guerrilla = $616 million
In the period 1995-2003, the figure is calculated at $ 629 million.
In the years 2002-2003, the figure goes down to $293 million.

The increase in spending does not seem to increase the efficiency in the years 2004-06.The result is more disconcerting if one takes into consideration that of each 100 guerrillas taken out, 84 others are recruited, which implies that to achieve each “effective” withdrawal in a period of four years, the economic cost exceeds $1,000 - $1,500 million.

Comparing the year 2006 with 2005, it can be observed that for the 9,565 guerrillas retired from conflict, the subversives could recruit 8,523; the effective reduction was 1,042. That is to say, to achieve each “effective” withdrawal, and with the hypothesis that only 30% is assigned to counter-insurgency, the figure is a mind-blowing $5,662 million for each effective reduction.
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*Presumably Colombian dollar as the Colombian peso is also informally known.
http://www.dhcolombia.info/IMG/pdf_ConflictoColombiano.pdf

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Piedad Cordóba, Colombian Peacemaker

Piedad Cordóba is a rising star of the Latin American Left, propelled to attention for her uncompromising role alongside Hugo Chávez in trying to secure the release of hostages and taking on the bully of a President of her country, Colombia. For this, she says, her assassination has been ordered by a high functionary of the Colombian state. Piedad advocates the cause of the African descendants in Colombia and gays and lesbians. Even mainstream Colombian newspapers have had to nominate her as woman of the year or personality of the year.

El Espectador: All her political capital is at play including, it could be said, her own life. She has been brave, irreverent and stubborn. She spoke to President Uribe and he asked her to be facilitator for a humanitarian accord. She went to Chávez and convinced him to manage it. She went into the mountain to speak with Raúl Reyes, spokesman of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). She felt fear, grief, happiness and felt like crying. And though many would say she failed in her intent, thanks to her the theme of the kidnapped revived in the national and international scenario…

She committed errors. There are those who don’t pardon her the kiss of greeting with Reyes and much less posing with the guerrilla beret on her head and receiving flowers from the other subversive chief, Iván Márquez. Her extreme friendship and closeness with the Bolivarian cause… also was annoying. But Piedad Córdoba made the humanitarian accord her cause. One of the many that she has assumed along her journey as a social and political activist, in which at some moments destiny put her confronting her kidnap as well. It was in May 1999, when Carlos Castaño, then chief of the AUC (a right-wing death squad with close ties to the current establishment, including reportedly the President) kidnapped her in Medellín. During the days of captivity she felt the chill of death. Castaño accused her of belonging to the ELN (a left-wing guerrilla group) but never calculated that the country and the world would mobilise for her. He had to set her free and her position against the AUC has become more radical.

She has been threatened with death: she was in exile with her four children, Juan Luis, Natalia Maria, Camilo Andrés and César Augusto, she suffered attacks. And though many times she has felt discouraged, her fighting spirit has always inspired respect.

Piedad, the elder of nine siblings, always wanted to follow in the steps of her father, Sabulón Córdoba, a sociologist who was Dean of the faculty of sociology at the Bolivarian University of Medellín, and of her uncle, Diego Luis Córdoba, founder of the Chocó (department) and one of the great orators of the Liberal Party in the Senate towards the end of the Forties. At eight years of age, she was already marching together with civic organisations and of African descendants. She studied law and since then she forged fame as a rebel and nonconformist. Her first political steps brought her together with the disappeared Liberal activist, William Jaramillo Gómez. She was his general secretary in the municipality, sub-controller in Medellín, councillor, Deputy, representative in Chamber and Senator in 1996.

In political questions, there does not seem to be intermediate points with her. She is loved or loathed. And she is called La Negra, out of love or rancour. The humanitarian accord is her cause now.”

El Nuevo Siglo: Nobody can intimidate her, nobody can terrorise her. Kidnapped by the paramilitaries, persecuted by the extreme Right, hated by the elites who accuse her of being a guerrilla, lesbian and stateless (unpatriotic), Piedad has more than enough of courage and intelligence to confront and survive all these threats.

Piedad never gives up because people like her, born in the depths of the black communities, a natural leader, tempered in difficulties and made by the fights with no quarters given against inequality, nothing appears too big, nothing scares her, nothing defeats her.

Sources:
El Espectador, December 14, 2007 Link:
http://www.elespectador.com/elespectador/Secciones/Detalles.aspx?idNoticia=19310&idSeccion=113
El Nuevo Siglo, (problematic) Link:
http://www.elnuevosiglo.com.co/noticia_busq.php

Piedad Website (in Spanish)
Piedad photographs at Flickr

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