WOLA Announces Second Death Threat From Colombian Paramilitaries For Working With Displaced Peoples

[Judi Lynn]

WOLA Announces Second Death Threat From Colombian Paramilitaries For Working With Displaced Peoples
Posted by Mike Samras on Jun 18th, 2010

WASHINGTON – The Latin America News Dispatch reported on Monday about the status of internally displaced persons in Colombia. Marco Romero, of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, spoke at the Washington Office on Latin America in Washington last Thursday to raise awareness of these people in Colombia and increase support for a Resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives expressing official support of Colombia’s Constitutional Court.

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) announced in a press release Tuesday that following Romero’s talk, their office received its second death threat since May. The threat is allegedly from the Colombian paramilitary group, “Black Eagles,” and was sent because of WOLA’s work with the internally displaced in Colombia.

In a report released in February, the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch identified the Black Eagles as one of several successor groups that have formed since the 2006 demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, in Spanish), once the country’s largest paramilitary group.

The email message named WOLA along with 70 Colombian organizations as “military targets” and threatened to “kill and disappear without a trace,” activists involved in the field.

“WOLA will continue to raise the critical plight of more than 4.5 million internally displaced Colombians,” said Gimena Sanchez, Senior Associate at WOLA.

http://latindispatch.com/2010/06/18/wola-announces-second-death-threat-from-colombian-paramilitary-group/

[Peace Patriot]

1. 4.5 MILLION displaced people, and more still who don't register as displaced for fear of

government reprisals, and now the advocates of these millions of displaced people are suffering death threats! It is absolutely ludicrous to say that Colombia just held an "election," and to treat that assertion and 'news' about it as if things were NORMAL in Colombia. The fascist 'candidate' for president who was IN CHARGE of the Colombian military WHILE this vast brutalization and displacement of mostly peasant farmers took place, and WHILE thousands of peasant farmers, union leaders, human rights workers and others were being MURDERED by the military that he was Defense Minister of--Manuel Santos--is alleged to have just "won" the Colombian election with over 60% of the vote. But 4.5 MILLION people, plus unregistered displaced people, plus about half a million who have fled to Venezuela and Ecuador for refuge--a total in the 5 to 6 MILLION range, out of a population of 42 million--had compromised voting rights or no voting rights, and certainly would hesitate to advocate for candidates of their choice--they might just get their heads shot off.

This is treated as NORMAL. A NORMAL democracy. An election. A vote. The people choosing a leader. And this is so absurd as to be beyond belief. The mass murders are sometimes mentioned by the corpo-fascist press, but they DON'T MENTION that the "new president" of Colombia was in charge of the Colombian military through much of this carnage, displacement and official terror!

The "Alice in Wonderlandishness" of this is just amazing to me. It shouldn't be--with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld still walking around free--but it is. Vast and horrendous crimes committed in our name, not to mention vast, unprecedented, unconscionable looting and the perps are "too big to prosecute" or even to investigate. I shouldn't be surprised that the same thing is occurring in a U.S. client state, but I am. I am. And thank God that I am still able to be amazed and outraged.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Not only do our media treat the election as normal, but exemplary, smooth as silk.

It simply takes your breath away.

There's no way they DON'T know about Colombian reality. It's a bold statement of just how far they will go once they have learned they can get away with it.

Serving the public good, performing a vital job for human beings just doesn't enter into their world. They are doing something completely different, and getting paid for it.

It's a far cry from the ideals most people used to associate with journalism.

Of the ones who are left to live on in their homes by the paramilitaries, military, we are well aware of the pressure they get from the presence of paras at voting centers, the outright intimidation, and we are also aware a very small percentage of the Colombian voters ventured out to vote in the last election.

What a ####ing travesty.

[Peace Patriot]

3. The 'news' media in this country is quite literally sickening.

But Venezuela provides us with an example of what the people can do IN SPITE OF THE MEDIA. There, they have corpo-fascist TV stations actively participating in coups to overthrow the elected government! Yet the people have thus far prevailed.

The difference is TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING. They have it. We very much don't. Here, the corpo-fascist 'news' monopolies play along with and confirm the 'results' of fraudulent elections, whether by the Supreme Court or by Diebold. There, all they can do is fulminate against the TRANSPARENT election results and collude with coupmongers. Here, ONE corporation--a corporation with hair-raising connections to the looniest of the far right--has gained an 80% monopoly over the privatized U.S. voting machine 'market,' and is 'counting' most of the votes in this country with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code--code that you and I have no right to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. The far right can thus play our system any way they want--say, (s)electing Obama, but shaving his mandate for reform and inflicting him with a Puke and "Blue Dog" infested Congress, with the media then setting him up for failure and maybe even paving the way for installation of Hitler II.

This cannot happen in Venezuela, no matter how much the corpo-fascist media want a fascist regime. The Venezuelans--and others in Latin America--have worked long and hard to establish honest, fair, transparent elections. Venezuela uses electronic voting, but THE PUBLIC OWNS THE CODE--it is open source code--and they conduct a whopping 55% audit--more than five times the audit size needed to detect electronic fraud. (Know how much of an audit we do here? Don't ask. The answer is simply mind-boggling!)*

TRANSPARENT vote counting is the key. And this is something we, the people, can still do something about. Control over voting systems still resides at the state/local level, where ordinary people still have some potential influence in the U.S. We need to throw ES&S (which just bought out Diebold) out of our communities NOW!

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*(Half the states in the U.S. do ZERO percent auditing. ZERO! No audit. The other half do a miserably inadequate 1% audit. We wonder WTF is wrong with this country? THAT is the NUMBER ONE problem!)