Colombia's Big Lie: the fake paramilitary demobilization

by Adriaan Alsema July 30, 2020

The fake demobilization of paramilitary organization AUC has been one of the most successful hoaxes of master conman and Colombia’s former President, Alvaro Uribe.

The former Medellin Cartel associate claims he demobilized 31,671 paramilitaries between 2003 and 2006, but he did not.

Uribe “facilitated the doubling of the actual number of fighters” taking part in a demobilization process he almost completely screwed up, according to the National Center for Historical Memory.

The hoax of President Ivan Duque‘s boss has been confirmed by multiple former AUC commanders, convicted former Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt and former US Ambassador William Wood.

. . .

The fraud of the century

The demobilization processes resumed in June 2005 after Congress approved the so-called Justice and Peace law formalizing the AUC’s demobilization and Uribe’s interior minister successfully bribed Congress to change the constitution, allowing Uribe a bid for four more years in 2006.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-big-lie-the-fake-paramilitary-demobilization/

No one really "bought it." Human rights advocate groups like Amnesty International went public quickly, calling out the paramilitaries as having merely appearing to have disbanded, while regrouping, and taking new names, like the "Aguilas Negras" (the Black Eagles) and resumed their hearts' desires, terrorizing the poor and the powerless, not forgetting to continue their obsession with "social cleansing." (How low would you have to be to have gangs of murdererers, torturers, and thieves actually thinking they'd better kill you because you're a drunk, a gay, or a prostitute?

Their government needed them, as they have always handled their "wet work" with the actual Colombian military having joined with them in a massacre of a town's citizens.

Here's a very ugly example:

The Mapiripán Massacre was a massacre of civilians that took place in Mapiripán, Meta Department, Colombia. The massacre was carried out from July 15 to July 20, 1997, by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an outlawed right-wing paramilitary group.

On July 12, 1997, two planeloads of paramilitaries arrived at the airport of San José del Guaviare, which also served as a base for anti-narcotics police. The paramilitaries then traveled through territories where the Colombian National Army manned checkpoints.

On July 15, 1997, the paramilitaries arrived at Mapiripán. They used chainsaws and machetes to murder, behead, dismember, and disembowel a number of civilians. Because the bodies were thrown into a river, it is unknown exactly how many people died but the U.S. State Department claimed in 2003 that at least 30 civilians were killed.[3][4]

In proceedings before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the government of Colombia admitted that members of its military forces also played a role in the massacre, through omission.[5] General Jaime Uscátegui allegedly ordered local troops under his command to stay away from the area in which the murders were taking place until the paramilitaries finished the massacre and left. Retired General Uscátegui was later prosecuted, put on trial, and subsequently acquitted.[6][7

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapirip%C3%A1n_Massacre

Take a moment to scan the photographs at google images, some unbelievably graphic, of the Mapiripán aftermath:

https://tinyurl.com/y683f934



It may occur to you why Colombia's President Uribe and his protege, the current President Duque, and all their supporters in Washington, never felt any reason to condemn the massacres, even when Uribe has been directly connected, and always slips away in his Teflonishness. (One day it's not going to work for him.)