https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/29/colombia-president-alvaro-uribe-brother-charged-death-squadBrother of Colombian ex-president arrested as alleged death squad leader. Santiago Uribe has been detained on charges that he created and led a death squad known as the Twelve Apostles in the 1990s
Note for some context:
"[The AUC] mutilated bodies with chainsaws. They chained people to burning vehicles. They decapitated and rolled heads like soccer balls. They killed dozens at one time, including women and children. They buried people alive or hung them on meat hooks, carving them ... the victims ... were civilians accused of supporting the guerrillas by supplying them with food, medical supplies, or transportation."
Robin Kirk,[93] Human Rights Watch investigator in Colombia
Then:
http://colombiareports.com/head-colombias-paramilitaries-former-auc-leader-ex-president-uribe/Former President Alvaro Uribe was the “head of Colombia’s paramilitary groups,” according to a former paramilitary commander and witness in the case against a presidential candidate loyal to the former head of state. The accusations were made by Pablo Hernan Sierra, alias “Alberto Guerrero”, former commander of the Cacique Pipinta bloc of the paramilitary group AUC, during an interview with Venezuelan network TeleSur. “He was our commander,” claimed Sierra. “He never fired a gun; but he led, he contributed, he was our man at the top.” “The massacres, the disappearances, the creation of an AUC group: he is responsible,” said Sierra. The ex-paramilitary is a key witness in an investigation into Uribe’s alleged ties with paramilitary groups, especially his role in the formation of an AUC bloc while governor of Antioquia department from 1995-97, and his use of the AUC to win votes in the 2002 Presidential election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/colombian-army-killed-civilians-to-fake-battlefield-success-rights-group-says/2015/06/23/5e83700e-191d-11e5-bed8-1093ee58dad0_story.html?utm_term=.2b23a62589f1In a twisted attempt to show battlefield success against FARC rebels, the Colombian military killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians between 2002 and 2008, falsely depicting them as slain combatants, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
The killings, known as “false positives,” were the source of a huge scandal in 2008, but the new report alleges that the practice was far more extensive and systematic than previously known. Many of Colombia's highest-ranking military officials either condoned the practice or did nothing to stop it, according to the rights group.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.htmlThe biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn’t notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave — a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.
According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia’s own Procuraduria General de la Nacion — a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption — approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave. The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially those of guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.
The Colombian government and military are scrambling to contain this most recent scandal, and possibly through violence. Thus, on March 15, 2010, Jhonny Hurtado, a former union leader and President of the Human Rights Committee of La Cantina, and an individual who was key in revealing the truth about this mass grave, was assassinated as soldiers from Colombia’s 7th Mobile Brigade patrolled the area. Just prior to his murder, Jhonny Hurtado told a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia that he believed the mass grave at La Macarena contained the bodies of innocent people who had been “disappeared.”
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-former-colombian-spy-chief-sentenced-to-25-years-2011sep14-story.htmlColombia's Supreme Court convicted on Wednesday a former director of the country's domestic intelligence agency for colluding with illegal far-right militias and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
The court found Jorge Noguera, 47, guilty of criminal conspiracy for providing right-wing death squads with lists of leftist activists and labor union leaders, some of whom were subsequently killed.
Noguera was chief of the Administrative Department of Security, known as the DAS, under then-President Alvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2005. He resigned amid reports, which later proved true, that the agency was infiltrated by the illegal militias, known as paramilitaries
Meanwhile, DAS also had written manuals on how to conduct death threats campaigns against journalists (who ask inconvenient questions about other journalists you murdered)
https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-claudia-julieta-duqueFront Line Defenders has received worrying reports of continued acts of intimidation and harassment against Ms Claudia Julieta Duque and her family, including the targeting of her daughter.
Over the period of the last two months Claudia Duque and her family have been subjected to a number of serious acts of intimidation and attempted attacks against them. This occurs in the context of the beginning of the trial against three former high-ranking officers of the now dismantled Colombia secret service (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad – DAS), accused of being the authors of the aggravated psychological torture that the journalist faced between 2001 and 2004, following her investigations into the killing of journalist and humourist Jaime Garzón.
Yeah, nice government you got there, where if you investigate someone else they killed, they kidnap you, and threaten to kill your family.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/death-and-drugs-colombia/In February 2003, the mayor of a small town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast stood up at a nationally televised meeting with then President Álvaro Uribe and announced his own murder. “Señor Presidente, I am the mayor of El Roble,” Tito Díaz said as he walked toward the stage where Uribe sat with several cabinet ministers and officials from the state of Sucre, where the meeting was held. Pacing back and forth before the President, Díaz delivered what was probably the first public denunciation of a web of violence and corruption involving politicians and paramilitary groups—what he called a “macabre alliance”—that would eventually become an explosive national scandal. Singling out several local officials, including the governor, Salvador Arana, seated at the President’s side, Díaz declared: “And now they’re going to kill me.”
President Uribe listened impassively for several minutes, then cut the mayor off midsentence: “Mr. Mayor, we have allowed this disorder because of the gravity of the matter, but we also ask that you be considerate of our time.” Uribe is a small, tidy man, with a bland face that is boyish yet stern. When he addresses the public, it is with the commanding tone of the wealthy cattle rancher and the intensity of a man on a mission. “With utmost pleasure,” Uribe then assured Díaz that he would order an investigation, “for transparency cannot have exceptions, and security is for all Colombians.”
Within weeks, the national police stripped Díaz of his bodyguards. On April 5, 2003, he disappeared. On April 10 his corpse appeared on the edge of Sucre’s main highway. He had been tortured, shot, and left in a crucifix position—feet crossed, arms extended, palms upturned—with his mayoral certification card perched on his forehead. A note, found later at his house, told his family he was setting out for a “dangerous meeting” with Arana. “If anything happens to me,” it said, they should flee.
Also, under Uribe there was widespread paramilitary infiltration of universities in Colombia, and this was publicly supported by Uribe:
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/14662University of Cordoba is a case in which, thanks to the testimony of paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, there is abundant evidence of how the modus operandi of the paramilitaries is being used against public universities. The truth, by the way, is only recently coming to light in an environment in which terror still reigns, where the paramilitary presence is strong and where the media still "justifies" the people associated with the paramilitaries because of their supposed "popularity", achieved through terror and because of the real or imagined actions of the insurgency. As one columnist says in the magazine Semana, "it is unacceptable to continue justifying the slaughter within this university with the false statement that it is a ‘nest of guerrillas’" [30].
In 1995 the assault began with a wave of paramilitary violence against the university community on a par with the stigmatisation of UNICOR as a "nest of guerrillas": that year, student Francisco Aguilar Madera was murdered and a year later, professor Alberto Alzate Patiño met with the same fate. In June 1996 an attempt was made on the life of college union leader René Cabrales, but instead of killing the leader, the paramilitaries killed her granddaughter of just 2 years of age. This occurred in a context of widespread violence and killings in Montería (capital of the Cordoba department) and the whole department, towards teachers.
Then in 1999 direct paramilitary intervention began, occurring in stages:
First, infiltration through the establishment of one of their contacts in the Student Council for tasks of intelligence and the creation of “university self defence“.
By means of threats (including the kidnapping of rector Eduardo Gonzalez and some students, and the subsequent murder of one of the candidates to become rector, Hugo Iguarán) they managed to install one of their own as rector in September 2000, Victor Hugo Hernandez [31]. When he fell from grace with the leaders of the AUC, he was simply replaced in 2002 by Claudio Sánchez Parra, who was to be the rector up to December 2008, when he was captured by police, a moment in which President Uribe publicly defended him, following his tradition of defending everything related to paramilitarism
Uribe actually ordered investigations after some death threats against college professors - investigations
of the professors, that is.
And we haven't even got onto Uribe's strange relationship with the FARC. Uribe ordered a bombing of a FARC camp in 2008. It just happened to be the peace negotiators, about 3 days after they'd secured the release of some prisoners held by other FARC cells as a good will gesture. The camp was in the jungle in a remote area of Ecuador. Uribe managed to spin the event into a threat to invade two of his neighboring nations - Ecuador and Venezuela, with Bush's support. It was only the intervention of Brazil which prevented the war.
There's also an odd occurance with Michelle Bachelet. She was kidnapped while running against Uribe for president, and held by rebels. When politically convenient a few years later, Uribe managed to rescue her in a daring raid. Except the "raid" seems to have been set up. It was a peaceful handover. They hand-waved this away as the government having 'infiltrators' in the rebels
who were able to give orders to the other rebels. I mean, given everything else we know about Uribe's connections, this seems might suspicious. Uribe gained huge powers by opposing the rebels, the rebels conveniently kidnap his opponent, and then it turns out Uribe has infiltrators senior enough to give
commands to the rebels when convenient. Had those infiltrators been in place for longer than 4 years? i.e. long enough to orchestrate the woman's kidnapping in the first place?
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Topic: Latin American Politics: Moralism (Read 95265 times)