UN refugee agency condemns killing of Colombian refugee right leader

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Xinhua

UN refugee agency condemns killing of Colombian refugee right leader


www.chinaview.cn 2008-05-17 10:47:59

BOGOTA, May 16 (Xinhua) -- The United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Friday condemned the assassination of refugee right leader Julio Molina on Tuesday in southern Colombia.

Molina was killed in the Ansermanuevo municipality for denouncing abuse of lands given to refugees, said Gustavo Valdivieso, the UNHCR representative in Colombia.

"His death has to do with the investigations he did about the bad usage of lands that were given to displaced persons," Valdivieso said citing Molina's activities in defending the right of the victims of the paramilitary groups in Colombia.

The UNHCR and the Bureau of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia have demanded the authorities take measures to protect the displaced persons and non-governmental organizations in the country, Valdivieso said.

Molina was the president of the Association of Displaced People in Ansermanuevo and worked for the right of the victims of former rebel group the Self Defense Unit of Colombia (AUC).




Read more: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/17/content_8191070.htm

[Peace Patriot]

1. You don't mean "right leader." You mean "human rights leader." Right?

Confusing title. An "s" added to "right" would clear it up a bit. Full phrase "human rights" leader would be best.

I had to read the whole thing to sort out that you didn't mean "rightwing" leader. It's generally only leftwing leaders who get whacked in Colombia. And human rights leaders.

----

One again, a Chinese news source provides news of Bush's horrible allies in Colombia that we don't get from our corrupt corporate press. This is becoming very interesting. Accurate news is vital to good business decisions, as well as being the very foundation of democracy (along with transparent vote counting). This is why there was always such a strange discrepancy between the WSJ news pages and its editorial page. Business people simply wouldn't read the paper if its news articles were generally unreliable. But a new phenomenon has taken over our corporate news outlets: pure propaganda, big black holes in the news, outright lies, sloppy writing and thinking, lack of investigation, lack of inquisitiveness--as if the owners and fatcat CEOs were writing the news as wishful thinking. What this may mean is that American and U.S.-related global corporate predator business occurs at a far remove from on-the-ground reality--from product invention, manufacture and movement to markets. It is instead a global financial crap game with loaded dice--or ponzi scheme--in which they don't care, for instance, that Hugo Chavez really is honestly elected and hugely popular, or that Bush's pal Uribe in Colombia benefits from rightwing death squads and major drug trafficking. They are confident in their ability to smash Venezuelan democracy and keep Uribe in power (with $5.5 BILLION is U.S. military aid, through Bushite and a few Democratic Party fingers), so it doesn't matter to them what the truth is. They are thus free to use their news monopolies to propagandize the American people (whom they greatly fear as a potential progressive force in the world), and European and South American populations, to keep democratic peoples confused, off balance, defensive, divided and disempowered.

Chinese news, and Asian news in general, may be at an earlier stage of the evolution of journalism within liberal (or capitalistic) economies--the stage where business people require real news.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Yep, that headline puzzled me a moment, too. I think it's probably a matter of understanding what a

HUGE difference there actually is between a "right" leader and "rights" leader! Omigod! Of those two, only one could be believed to be "right," as in "righteous," and that one would be the one Uribe targets every waking moment, has slurred, and mocked, and attempted to identify with the "left" in Colombia, the "left" he hates.

Oddly enough, it's the "right" in Colombia which has been steering the activities, including chainsaw massacres of entire villages, and coercion of votes, and disappearances of political opponents, of the death squads.

It IS interesting to note how the Chinese source often is the only one at the time running information we don't see anywhere until much later. You have to take into account the occassional loon who will sign onto a thread to intone: "I refuse to read anything from one of those Chinese COMMUNIST newspapers."

Willfully ignorant. Just the way the right-wing wants them. They do most of the work themselves, by refusing to be aware of what's beyond the easily accessed bogus information.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Remember the "Unión Patriótica" party in Colombia? You don't? That may be because

the death squads killed them! I just found this article which reminded me I've heard of them before, and have forgotten to do some appropriate research on them. You may want to think about this, and Colombia's willingness to accept differences of opinion in politics:


Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia
Steven Dudley, Routledge, 2004, 253 pp.

The mid-1980s birth of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), a new political party in Colombia, brought a fresh wind of hope to the violence-battered country. In those days the largest guerrilla organization, the FARC, was in peace talks with the administration of President Belisario Betancur. It appeared that the insurgency might be persuaded to demobilize an the long stranglehold of the Conservative and Liberal parties might eventually be broken. In pueblos and in the cities, the yellow-and-green UP flag fluttered over exuberant rallies. “The UP caught on in a way that surprised everyone,” UP propaganda chief Álvaro Salazar later remembered, “including me.”

Then the killings began. UP militants were gunned down, slain in bombings. However, party members refused to give up. In 1986 congressional and local elections, UP candidates won 24 seats as provincial deputies and 275 as representatives to municipal councils—as well as three seats in the national senate and four as congressional representatives. In presidential elections that year, the UP’s candidate, Jaime Pardo Leal, received over 325,000 votes, more than any “progressive” had ever attained in Colombia.

But the killings continued. Right-wing paramilitaries, fueled by drug trafficking and in cooperation with Colombia’s security forces, assassinated some 500 UP members in the party’s first two years of existence. One of the newly elected UP senators, Pedro Nel Jiménez, was soon a victim. In October 1987 Jaime Pardo Leal was assassinated as he was taking his family on a vacation trip. The UP’s next presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, was killed a few months before the 1990 elections.

By now some 4,000 UP leaders and members have been assassinated in what the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has appropriately called a political genocide.
(snip)

Right-wing forces still use the “guerrilla” label as a justification for their assassinations. A UP leader, Carlos Bernal, was murdered with his protective escort in Cúcuta as recently as April 1, 2004.
(snip)

It’s a sobering tale, one that needs to be told and puzzled over. The UP is actually only one of several alternative parties that have emerged in Colombia since the mid-twentieth century, and in each case their leaders have been slain or silenced. Why?

More:
http://www.chicagoans.net/node/39

[Judi Lynn]

4. Colombia: refugee leader murdered

Colombia: refugee leader murdered
Submitted by WW4 Report on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 02:24.

On May 13 unknown persons riding a motorcycle shot and killed Julio Cesar Molina, a leader of refugees from Colombia's internal conflicts who were displaced to the rural zone of Ansermanueva in the southwestern department of Valle del Cauca. On May 16 the Bogotá office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights condemned Molina's murder and expressed concern for other refugee leaders in the area. The agencies indicated that Molina's killing was "connected to his reports on the misuse of lands taken from narco traffickers and turned over to displaced persons. It is also feared that there was a connection with his work training victims about their right to reparations."

Molina, a director of the New Dawn Humanitarian Foundation, was shot near the Germania estate, where he and his family had been living with 11 other refugee families since January 2007. Five years earlier the family fled from right-wing paramilitaries in Vista Hermosa in Meta department and sought land to farm in Valle del Cauca. At a ceremony on Dec. 20, 2004, right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez officially presented 20 families, including Molina's, with three estates seized from the extradited landowner Alberto Monsalve. But the families weren't able to use the land until legal issues were settled. They received threats after moving to the Germania estate, and Molina tried unsuccessfully from January of this year to get the local government to provide protection.

At his funeral in the town of Cartago on May 14, Molina was praised for his hard work for the refugees. "My daddy was all skinny when he died," one of Molina's five children said, "from suffering so much for us." That evening the families in Germania were again threatened with death if they didn't leave the region, and on May 16 men on motorcycles left death "sentences" for other refugee leaders, saying they would die if they talked. (Terra, Spain, May 16 from EFE; El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 17)

http://ww4report.com/node/5525

[Judi Lynn]

5. Also, today, another Colombian human rights leader threatened:

Colombia: rights activist threatened
Submitted by WW4 Report on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 02:40.

On May 15 the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders—a program sponsored jointly by the World Organization Against Torture and the International Federation of Human Rights—issued an urgent call for the Colombian government to ensure the safety of Colombian human rights activist Ivan Cepeda Castro, his family and other members of the National Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE).

The Observatory is asking for letters to President Alvaro Uribe Velez ([email protected]), Vice President Francisco Santos ([email protected]), the vice president's human rights office ([email protected]) and other officials.

Uribe's government has been verbally attacking Cepeda because of a March 6 demonstration he helped organize for the victims of paramilitary violence and an April 15 appearance before members of the US Congress. Uribe and US president George W. Bush are currently lobbying Congress to ratify a Colombia-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA, or TLC in Spanish) and are trying to downplay complaints about Colombia's human rights record. On May 6 Uribe called Cepeda a "human rights faker" and complained about those in the international community who sympathize with "the crocodile tears of these human rights fakers."

Cepeda dedicated himself to human rights work after the 1994 assassination of his father, Manuel Cepeda Vargas, a senator for the leftist Patriotic Union (UP). Ivan Cepeda himself has received death threats several times. (Observatorio para la Protección de los Defensores de Derechos Humanos urgent action, May 15; dhColombia, May 11 from El Espectador, May 10)

http://ww4report.com/node/5526

[Judi Lynn]

6. "Don't back trade with rights-abusing Colombia"

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Rebuttal
Don't back trade with rights-abusing Colombia

If The Detroit News is going to endorse the pending trade deal with Colombia, the paper should at least be candid about the political climate in that country ("End the drift toward closing door on trade," April 29).

Second to Mexico (America's other major ally in the region), Colombia is the largest exporter of cocaine to the United States. Despite billions of dollars in American aid to combat the flow of drugs, cocaine is readily available in the United States, and the Colombian government remains no less corruptible. In fact, the integration of organized crime and state is Bogotá's worst kept secret.

For instance, in 2005 the head of Colombia's secret police resigned over revelations he passed intelligence on to narco-trafficking paramilitary groups. Also, note that on May 22, 2006, gunmen belonging to Colombia's 23rd Mountain Brigade gunned down 10 members of an anti-drug unit in broad daylight. The military claimed it was an incident of "friendly fire," but the attorney general suspected it was a drug hit. Investigators have also documented a relationship in the 1980s between the Colombian president's brother Santiago Uribe and the Ochoa brothers drug cartel.

Colombia's human rights record is also deplorable. Labor groups consider Colombia the most dangerous nation in the Western Hemisphere to organize workers' rights. Interestingly, American media regularly demonize Venezuela and Hugo Chavez but are conspicuously silent about the murdered labor organizers and peasant political activists in Colombia.

Finally, proponents of a trade deal with Colombia are the same people who promised the North American Free Trade Agreement would result in more jobs, fewer illegal immigrants, a more stable Mexico and a decline in drug trafficking. How is that working out?

James A. Buccellato

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080520/OPINION01/805200312/1007/rss07

Executive Committee Member