The evil that humans perpetrate on their fellow humans boggles the mind.

Is US or drug cartels still running it, or have Colombians overcome these forces, or have the forces left to concentrate elsewhere?

doing the truly evil, wildly violent terror work, like public displays in villages of ripping apart campesinos in the midst of their neighbors in the small towns with chainsaws. They didn't particularly like chainsaws, as the flesh and bones often screwed up the chains and made it tough going. However, the imprint it left in the minds of the survivors who told everyone else about it, thereby spreading the stark terror of paramilitaries, and helping to paralyze the citizenry with fear, did the job of terrorizing the people enough that millions of them simply fled to other parts of Colombia, to Ecuador, and to Venezuela.

The Uribe administration went through the motions of pretending the paramilitary death squads, who were also the mega drugtraffickers, had all given up, and turned in their weapons. Not quite the truth. There were many simple citizens who cooperated, and stepped in, acting as paras, and went through the motions of claiming they were quiting and getting out of the death squad business with the AUC. There is testimony to that fact made in Colombian courts, after the Uribe administration FINALLY left office. Also, there are Uribe administration officials who have been found guilty of being involved in bogus displays of both the paras, (A.U.C.) and their representation of FARCS also disbanding, and surrendering. The FARCS never had given up.

When FARCs went through the process of trying to negotiate peace with former administrations, their representatives and political figures who hoped to participate in the political process were massacred relentlessly by both the military and the paramilitaries. THOUSANDS were murdered.

This is the longest running peace negotiation they've had, going on now with Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's President. The good people of Colombia must be praying it works, as it should have decades, and decades ago before the right-wing started murdering every leftist politician who gained recognition.

I can come back later and start adding articles by human rights groups which describe the fact the paras did the "lion's share" of all atrocities, barbaric as they were, and the fact that they worked WITH the Colombian army, and the fact that the secret spy agency in Colombia answering to Alvaro Uribe had directors who made lists of all Uribe's enemies in the population, union leaders, teachers, some defenders of the people among the clergy, indigenous Colombians, African Colombians, human rights workers, and simple suspected leftists of all stripe, as well as journalists, and these directors gave the lists to people who murdered the people on the lists for them.

Carlos Castano, one of some powerful landowners who ran death squads, narcotrafficking, connected to high government and military officials has admitted contracting assassins (sicarios) to murder Jaime Garzon, a national treasure, a COMEDIAN who put various government and military figures in the hot spot in his tv comedy routines. They just shot him to death in his car, after terrorizing him with death threats for a long time.

So at the moment, the AUC has rearranged itself, has created smaller groups with different names, and business continues as usual. One of the worst, most vicious groups is Aguilas Negras, or "Black Eagles." They constantly send death threats to journalists, activists, etc., and community leaders, indigenous, African Colombians still keep getting murdered.

Doing any search can lead to more and more information, since far more is available on this than ever before. It could keep anyone busy a very long time.

Here's an interesting article written during the _Bush administration, which describes how it was going and continued to go long after the article was written. By now, the "one billion" in U.S. aid to Colombia mentioned has become NINE billion, of course.

US Doesn't Mind Terrorists in Colombia

from AMERICAS.ORG

Resist newsletter, May 2002

There's a new group on the State Department's official list of terrorist organizations. But unlike the ones calling for an Islamic jihad against the United States, this group says it supports US goals. And it works closely with the government that is the Western Hemisphere's largest recipient of US military aid.

The rightwing paramilitary United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) also happens to be responsible for the bulk of massacres, assassinations and threats that have forced more than two million rural Colombians to flee their homes since the late 1980s. Secretary of State Colin Powell said September 10 that designating the AUC as terrorist should "leave no doubt that the United States considers terrorism to be unacceptable, regardless of the political or ideological purpose." Two leftwing guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), have been on the list since its 1997 creation.

US disapproval of rightwing terrorism may surprise AUC leaders, who say they're a crucial part of Plan Colombia, the antiguerrilla, antinarcotics military drive bankrolled by more than $ I billion from US taxpayers. In the southern province of Putumayo, where Plan Colombia is focused, an AUC chief known as "Commander Wilson" told reporters in April that the initiative "would be almost impossible" without paramilitary forces. Wilson, a former army soldier, told the San Francisco Chronicle that AUC leaders and military officials together mapped out Plan Colombia strategies and that he reports daily to the military about his units' movements.

The AUC's terrorist designation also will interest top Colombian military commanders, taught by US advisors over the years that paramilitary surrogates are highly effective against guerrillas. A 1996 report by Human Rights Watch described Colombia's military-paramilitary partnership as "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it."

The US role in that strategy dates back almost four decades. The Human Rights Watch report quotes a 1962 US Army Special Warfare School recommendation that Colombia "execute paramilitary, sabotage and or terrorist activities against known communist proponents" and that the partnership with paramilitary groups "be backed by the United States."

In the 1980s the paramilitary groups forged tight alliances with the heads of Colombia's burgeoning drug industry, who snapped up huge rural tracts and joined cattle ranchers and other rural entrepreneurs in Colombia's landholding elite. Leftwing guerrillas, especially the FARC, waged kidnaping and extortion campaigns in the same areas. Responding to this harassment, drug traffickers such as Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha showered funds on paramilitary networks. To enhance their firepower and skills, paramilitary chiefs recruited Israeli and British mercenaries.

In 1990 a team of representatives from the US Embassy's Military Group, the US Southern Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA helped reorganize Colombia's "intelligence" networks, according to the Human Rights Watch report. The DIA attaché in Bogota at the time admitted US officials knew from news accounts and military reports that Colombian military members "were still working with paramilitaries." Based on recommendations from the US team, according to Human Rights Watch, the Colombian military ordered commanders to set up 41 secret networks and avoid leaving any paper trail.

In the 11 years since, paramilitary groups have grown to an estimated 8,000 members from less than 1,000. They engage more directly in battle with guerrillas for control of territory and drug profits. They travel freely by helicopter and plane. They have organized openly into a national association, complete with a Web site, and are demanding the ability to run in local elections and participate in national peace talks. In parts of Colombia, they have built broad support for the antiguerrilla cause.

These paramilitary groups also routinely assassinate unionists, campesino leaders, human rights activists, judges, progressive politicians and journalists; attack residents of resource-rich or strategic rural areas; and slaughter and displace entire communities of unarmed civilians. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, paramilitaries obliterated the leftwing Patriotic Union party, systematically assassinating thousands of its candidates and members.

This year has been as bloody as ever. Paramilitary squads killed an average of 132 people per month between January and April, according to the Colombian government. Some of the worst violence came Easter week, when paramilitary attacks killed 128 people. In one of those attacks, government forces failed to stop 400 chain-saw-wielding paramilitary members from butchering 40 campesinos and indigenous people near the southwestern hamlet of Alto Naya. US and Colombian human rights groups have methodically documented the massacres, and Colombian judicial investigations have corroborated military complicity.

Yet US military aid to Colombia has ballooned from an average of $60 million a year between 1992 and 1995 to the $567 million President George W. Bush is requesting for 2002. That's on top of the $ I.3 billion for Plan Colombia that President Bill Clinton signed in 2000.

In other words, not out of woods yet.

He has powerful connections to the U.S., as well, sadly enough. He is at war with the elected President on a daily basis, has been since he left office. He'll never admit the country is a better place for the citizens after he left.

It's going to take a long time before that country is democratic.