~snip~
What the administration blithely ignored was that the “demobilization” didn’t signal the end of paramilitary power, far from it. The paramilitaries have continued to exert great influence over Colombian politics, with the AUC pre-determining the winners of many elections in the Caribbean departments. Thus, in Magdalena in 2003, Trino Luna Correa was elected to serve as governor following a one-man contest, his prospective opponents having wisely pulled out in the face of paramilitary threats. In 2007, however, Governor Luna was arrested on suspicion of working with the paramilitaries. Meanwhile, the congressional elections of March 2006, which were also notable for paramilitary intimidation, saw several unapologetically pro-AUC politicians enter the legislature. According to the International Crisis Group, between 10 and 20 percent of senators were assumed to have paramilitary connections.
That the paramilitaries retained significant power became inescapably clear in October 2006 when a laptop computer discovered by Colombian prosecutors revealed that notorious AUC commander Jorge 40 had ordered the murders of 558 Colombians in the Caribbean department of Atlántico while the paramilitary ceasefire was supposedly in effect. It also transpired that Jorge 40 had organized sham demobilizations, using peasants in the place of his fighters, had greased the palms of police to ensure they turned a blind eye to his continued drug trafficking and had worked with local politicians to advance their electoral prospects.
The ensuing scandal has proved exceptionally embarrassing for President Uribe.
In February 2007, Senator Álvaro Araújo, the brother of then Colombian foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araújo, was arrested, accused of conspiring with the AUC to kidnap a political rival before the 2002 election. The foreign minister promptly quit the government. And then, in October, the president’s cousin, Mario Uribe, resigned from the Senate when the Supreme Court began looking into allegations that he had had dealings with the paramilitaries. Senator Uribe was the leader of Colombia Democrática, the party he and President Uribe had co-founded some years before. Two other senators from Colombia Democrática, Álvaro García and Miguel de la Espriella, have also been arrested on suspicion of co-operating with the AUC. García was accused, sensationally, of having orchestrated a massacre in 2000 and of involvement in the murder of an electoral official in 1997.
The “para-politics” scandal has been truly explosive, revealing the existence of a sinister and anti-democratic partnership between a criminal mafia and Colombia’s elected representatives. In a bizarre twist, however, the Bush administration has tried to turn these incendiary revelations into a success story for the government of Álvaro Uribe. Testifying before Congress in April last year, State Department official Charles Shapiro argued that “the allegations that have surfaced … about government connections to paramilitary groups show both the progress Colombia has made in rooting out such people and the challenges that lie ahead.” Another overly optimistic official was Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte who, when asked about the scandal during a television interview in Colombia in May, declared,
“I basically see the situation with respect to the paramilitaries in a positive way.” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~This son of a bitch has always been partial to death squads, hasn't he? God love him.
Honduras
During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua.
When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Binns claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post.
In These Times writer, Terry Allen described Negroponte as a "zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador."
In a biographical profile Foreign Policy In Focus reported that "on Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was 'simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.' The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were 'no political prisoners in Honduras' and that the 'Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.'"
As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez MartÃnez in Honduras. Between 1980 and 1994 U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America. <1>
"The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras â?¦ So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground. The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency," Allen wrote. <2>
According to the New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.
Negroponte supervised the creation in 1984 of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. <3>
In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. <4>
Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.
More:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_D._Negroponte%27s_track_record_in_Central_America