seems to be vulnerable to outside prosecution.
What is unbearably awful about this is the fact that the paramilitaries have been connected closely not only with the ruling political party in Colombia, but the lines go all the way to the President's office. He has had numerous members of his officials caught with DIRECT ties to the death squads, including his head of the DAS, his FBI/CIA/secret police, Jorge Noguero who was found by the prosecuting attorney to have over time created LISTS of union leaders, politically disliked people, human rights workers, etc. and to have given these lists to the death squad paras to MURDER.
Once the news was out about Noguero, he fled the country, and hid far away until INTERPOL located him.
Uribe has had other high-ranking people close to him discovered to be similarly connected, including his OWN COUSIN, with whom he created their political party which he heads now. His cousin was learned to have benefited wildly from the sale of land the paras extorted from campesinos, driving them off their own farms, and his cousin was also known, through testimony by witnesses, to have participated in planning of massacres. There are people who also contend they are witnesses to President Álvaro Uribe's presence at a meeting to plan a massacre at Aro.
All this has been known for ages. The U.S. Defense Department had it on record in the 1990's that Uribe himself was, along with his father, connected to the narcotraffickers. There's a document available showing their report online.
May 24, 2004
President Uribe’s Hidden Past
by Tom Feiling
~snip~
In 1995, Uribe became governor of the Antioquia department, of which Medellín is the capital. The region became the testing ground for the institutionalization of paramilitary forces that he has now made a key plank of his presidency. Government-sponsored peasant associations called Convivir’s were “special private security and vigilance services, designed to group the civilian population alongside the Armed Forces.”
Security forces and paramilitary groups enjoyed immunity from prosecution under Governor Uribe, and they used this immunity to launch a campaign of terror in Antioquia. Thousands of people were murdered, “disappeared,” detained and driven out of the region. In the town of San Jose de Apartadó for example, three of the Convivir leaders were well-known paramilitaries and had been trained by the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade. In 1998, representatives of more than 200 Convivir associations announced that they would unite with the paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), under its murderous leader Carlos Castaño.
When Uribe launched his campaign for president, the candidate’s paramilitary connections appeared to deter many journalists from examining the ties between drug gangs and the Uribe family. An exception was Noticias Uno, a current affairs program on the TV station Canal Uno. In April 2002, the program ran a series on alleged links between Uribe and the Medellín drug cartel. After the reports aired, unidentified men began calling the news station, threatening to kill the show’s producer Ignacio Gómez, director Daniel Coronell, and Coronell’s 3-year-old daughter, who was flown out of the country soon thereafter. Gómez was also forced to flee Colombia and is currently living in exile.
Noticias Uno told the story of how in 1997, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized 50,000 kilos of potassium permanganate from a ship docked in San Francisco. Potassium permanganate is a chemical used in the production of cocaine. The cargo was on its way to Colombia to be delivered to a company called GMP Chemical Products. The owner of GMP was Pedro Moreno Villa GMP, Uribe’s presidential campaign manager. The chemicals seized were sufficient to produce $15 billion worth of cocaine. The DEA confirmed that GMP was Colombia’s biggest importer of potassium permanganate between 1994 and 1998, when Uribe was governor of Medellin and Moreno Villa was his chief of staff.
As the Presidential race intensified, journalists became increasingly concerned that media bosses were threatening their editorial independence. Two powerful business groups with ties to the political establishment own RCN and Caracol, the biggest television and radio networks in Colombia. Journalists’ concerns were further heightened when Uribe picked a member of the Santos family, which owns the country’s most influential daily newspaper, to be his vice-president.
Despite his links to paramilitaries and drug cartels, Uribe won the presidency. But to call Uribe’s victory a landslide—as many in and outside Colombia did—is a gross distortion of the facts. Uribe received 53 percent of the official vote, but only 25 percent of the electorate voted. Many urban and middle class Colombians, who have been largely sheltered from the civil war, were thoroughly disillusioned by the peace process of outgoing-President Andrés Pastrana, and backed hardliner Uribe. But the election was hardly a fair one.
Mapiripán is the site of one of the worst paramilitary massacres to date, yet many of the town’s residents voted for the “paramilitary” candidate, Uribe. Father Javier Giraldo of the Colombian human rights group Justicia y Paz was in Mapiripán on election day: “There was a great deal of fraud. There were paramilitaries in the voting booths. They destroyed a lot of ballots. This was denounced to the Ombudsman, but nothing happened.” Electoral fraud, widespread paramilitary threats—denounced by virtually all the other candidates during the election campaign—and the almost total decimation of the electoral left in the preceding decade all contributed to Uribe’s election victory.
Though Uribe has vowed that his “democratic security” platform will bring peace and security to all Colombians, statistics from the Trade Union School in Medellín show continued threats to trade unionists and human rights activists. The number of trade unionists killed in 2003 declined to a “mere” 90, suggesting that the paramilitaries were being reigned in a little. But the number of death threats issued were 20 percent higher, and death threats to trade unionists’ families were up by 30 percent. Police raids, mass detentions and forced “disappearances” are also all higher than the previous year.
More:
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia185.htmThis country really hasn't "blinded" itself. It has cleanly buried the evidence, and as a result, American taxpayers have had to give billions of their hard-earned tax dollars to Colombia as the world's 3rd largest foreign aid recipient, and at the same time reward an administration of a country with the world's second worse humanitarian homeless crisis of people driven off their own lands, second only to Sudan. You might recognize we NEVER hear one sweet word about any of this. They also have the world's WORST percentage of union leaders' murders, and are very close to the record for journalists, as well.
We are financially underwriting this vast scale criminality.
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